The Blood Sonnets

Painting by Ralph GM



The Blood Sonnets


1.

When my father left me (and my mother
and siblings), to binge-drink for days
and weeks, I always wept myself into
nosebleeds. And sure, you might think
this is another

Poem about a wounded father and son,
but honestly, the only blood was mine,
and it flowed from absence, not from a
punch or kick. My father,
drunk or not, was kind

And passive, and never lifted a fist
to strike. Drunk daddy only hit
the road, and I'd become the rez Hamlet
who missed his father so much
he bled red ghosts.

Years later, in Seattle, my nose bled
when my mom called and said,
"Your father is dead."

2.

Ellen, amused, out of breath, informs me
that women know how to turn their bodies
and secretly reach into their dark pants
to check for blood. It is a menstrual
Eve-dance,

Earthy and erotic. My wife tells me
that every woman owns a blood story:
The first-date flood
or short white skirt earthquake.
Ellen was teaching art once when her
dam broke.

Unprepared, wearing bloody jeans, she rode
her bike home, bathed, and changed.
Ellen knows how to laugh hard, so I
laugh, separated by my gender, but
also created

By my mother's blood; so I am, by birth,
a part of all women's blood and mirth.


3.

In the crawlspace, gray feathers in the dirt
equal dead bird. But no: when I lean close,
I see those feathers are really the fur
of a dead mother rat. If rats have ghosts

Then I shall be haunted by the small bones
of the rats who died in their mother's womb,
and the one who was birthed and died alone
in the crawlspace dark.
The blood in this tomb

Dried and mixed with the dirt weeks or
months back, but I feel bloody when I
shovel the rat corpses into a plastic sack,
and bury them beneath mud and gravel.

Why do I mourn these rats? Why do I care?
Because even the vermin need our prayers.

4.

Farm town virgins, my first love and I
parked behind the Spring Creek Grange.
The wheat fields were snowfields in the
December dark, and I dumbly pushed until
her yields became acceptance

Became damp embrace. Too stupid and quick
for condoms, I came and knew that my
sperm was racing toward her egg. She
pushed me away with her hands and legs,

Baskeball-muscled, then climbed out the
door, and jumped up and down in the muddy
snow in a Chaplinesque attempt to abort
what we had not conceived.
I drove her home,

And we watched LA LAW with her parents,
who ignored the bloodstains on her
gray pants.

5.

With six shovels, my six cousins bury
my father's coffin in gravel and mud,
then hug my grief-smacked mother
(now married to dirt) and leave
her coat covered with blood

From their blistered hands. This is
grief, obscene and maldorous, sticky
to the touch. This is grief, the city
where the blowflies feast and lay eggs.
This is grief, one shovel punch

To my teeth, one punch to my mother's neck,
one punch each to my brother's sparrow
chests, the fifth and sixth to snap my
sister's backs. Grief, you killer,
riddler, giver of tests,

If we lie with our father in the mud,
will you make us a gift
out of his blood?


Sherman Alexie

from his book FACE.