Letter to Lawson

Painting by Joe Holiday

Letter to Lawson

I have lived 19,404 midnights, some of them in the quaver of
fish dreams and some without any memory at all,
just the flash of the jump from a night rainbow,
to an island of fire and flowers--such a holy
Leap between forgetting and jazz. How long has it been since
I called you back? After Albuquerque with my baby in diapers
on my hip ; it was a difficult birth
I was just past girlhood slammed into motherhood.
What a bear.

Beyond the door of my tongue is a rail and I’m leaning over
to watch bears catch salmon with their teeth. That realm isn’t
anywhere near Los Angeles. If I dream it all back then
I reconstruct that song buried in the muscle of urgency.
I’m bereft in the lost nation of debtors.
Wey yo hey, wey yo hey yah hey. Pepper jumped
And some of us went with him to the stomp. All night,
beyond midnight, back up into the sky, holy.

It was a holy mess, wholly of our folly, drawn of ashes
around the hole of our undoing. Back there the ceremonial
fire was disassembled, broken and bare
Like chordal breaks forgetting to blossom. Around midnight,
I turn my back and watch prayers take root beneath the moon.
Not that dreams have anything to do with it exactly.
I get jumpy in the aftermath of a disturbed music.
I carried that baby up the river, gave birth

To nothing but the blues in buckskin and silk. Get back,
I said, and what bird have you chosen to follow in your final
years of solitude? Go ahead, jump holy
Said the bear prophet. Wey ya hah. Wey ya hah.
All the way down to the jamming flowers and potholes.
There has to be a saxophone in there somewhere, some notes
bear little resemblance to the grown child.
Now I’ve got to be dreaming
Take me back

Or don’t take me back to Tulsa. I can only marry the music;
the outlook’s bleak without it. I mean it. And then I don’t.
Too many questions mar the answer. Breath is the one And two
And. Dream sweet prophet of sound, dream
Mvskoke acrobat of disruption. It’s nearing midnight
and something holy is always coming around. Take love for
instance, and the bare perfect neck of a woman who’s given
up everything for the forbidden leap

To your arms as you lean over the railing to hear the music
hopping at the jump pull of the line. She will never be here
again in the break of the phrase back before this maverick music
was invented. It’s the midnight hour and sweet dark love bares
It all. I can hear it again: the blue moon caving in to tears
of muscle and blood. Birth of the new day begins less than one
second after. It’s that exact , this science of the holy.
So that’s where it is, this incubation of broken dreams.

It took forever for that bear of a horn player to negotiate
the impossible jump.
Weh yo hey Weh yo hah, those water spirits will carry
that girl all the way back
To the stomp grounds where jazz was born.
It’s midnight. How holy.

c Joy Harjo LA, CA February 28, 2005