12 The Year of the Goldfinches
14 Sundown & All the Damage Done
18 Full Gallop
21 Cargo
22 The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual
23 It’s Harder
2 Instructions on Not Giving Up
4 Maybe I’ll Be Another Kind of Mother
5 Carrying
9 Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance
10 Sway
12 Sometimes I Think My Body Leaves a Shape in the Air
14 Wife
15 From the Ash inside the Bone
18 Losing
She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.
These were the same horses.
JOY HARJO
1
A NAME
When Eve walked among
the animals and named them—
nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer—
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, name me.
ANCESTORS
I’ve come here from the rocks, the bone-like chert,
obsidian, lava rock. I’ve come here from the trees—
chestnut, bay laurel, toyon, acacia, redwood, cedar,
one thousand oaks
that bend with moss and old-man’s beard.
I was born on a green couch on Carriger Road between
the vineyards and the horse pasture.
I don’t remember what I first saw, the brick of light
that unhinged me from the beginning. I don’t remember
my brother’s face, my mother, my father.
Later, I remember leaves, through car windows,
through bedroom windows, through the classroom window,
the way they shaded and patterned the ground, all that
power from roots. Imagine you must survive
without running? I’ve come from the lacing patterns of leaves,
I do not know where else I belong.
HOW MOST OF THE DREAMS GO
First, it’s a fawn dog, and then
it’s a baby. I’m helping him
to swim in a thermal pool,
the water is black as coffee,
the cement edges