Copyright © 2000 Daniel Lewis Winters.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8040-1023-4
Chapter One
The Indians in the Woods
Ah, the woods, the woods
Where small things
Are distinct and visible,
The berry plant,
The berry leaf, remembered
Line for line.
There are three figures
Walking in the woods
Whose feet press down
Needle and leaf and vine.
The Wife of Manibozho Sings
He comes and goes;
There is no rest
While he is here
Or gone.
I cannot say
That his feet have pressed
The leaves
He was standing on.
He comes and goes
And the maple leaves
Lie still
Under the sun.
The Grandmother Remembers
Ah, the cold, cold days
When we lived
On wintergreen berries and nuts,
On caraway seeds.
The deer went over the grass
With wet hooves
To the river to drink.
Their shadows passed
Our tent.
Nightfall among Poplars
As light grew horizontal,
I, among bracken,
Felt the cold ripples
Among bracken stems.
The quick dry spider
Ran across my hand.
Manibush and the Grandmother
With keen ankles
Dividing weed and weed
He shakes the dry seed
From the grass.
Fox feet, and five
Bare leather paws
And small sharp claws
Accompany him.
From the blue spruce
Tree where the wind blows
I watch the flashing
In the grass.
He Goes Away Again
In thorny juniper
The wind is cold,
In thorny juniper.
Shadows
Of stones grow white with evening.
The deer, the deer
Among the withered asters.
The spider,
Making tight her web.
Like Summer Hay
Like summer hay it falls
Over the marshes, over
The cranberry flats,
Places where
the wild deer lay.
Now the deer leave tracks
Down the pine hollow; petals
Laid two by two, brown
Against the snow.
Anishinabeg in the Cranberry Swamp
Autumn bows
The headed grass
With frost
And narrowed stem. Hoarfrost
Has rutted the swamp.
Their baskets fill
With berries green as water,
Their fingers cut
With searching the hard grass.
Boats gather
At the point of land,
Deep hulls
Beneath the swing
Of wide red sails.
They beg old quilts
And blankets,
Wake at morning
Frost from hip to shoulder
Like morning mist.
Ojibway Village
Among gray cones
Odor of sweet grass
And warm bodies;
Burnt fish, about
The lukewarm stones,
And ash.
And the night, like ice,
Cuts color and odor
Like flowers under a sickle.
These bodies, so still
In the deluge
Of fine air.
The Rocky Islands
There are wolves
Cracking dry bones
On ledges
Among sweet gale bushes.
And at night
I climb to meet them
Over the light
Still flakes of rock.
The Threshing Wind
Cold and clear weather,
And the wind harries us
With a continual
Beating of the grass
For some fine seed.
The wild rice
Draws out its pointed leaves
With a perpetual flickering
As of wings
Or minnows turning.
These hold
The hard brown husk
That Manibush beat out,
Drawing the sharp green leaves
Against his shoulder.
October Morning
The pump froze, the trees
Were hoar with mist.
In the plumed branch
Of white pine
Near the woodshed door
Were dozens of honey bees.
Fossil, 1919
I found a little ancient fern
Closed in a reddish shale concretion,
As neatly and as charmingly set in
As my grandmother's face
In a round apricot velvet case.
(Continues...)