5.
Dear Mother, at your funeral, Your grandson said, “I didn’t know her
Very well. And I think I missed out On good things, didn’t I?”
I said to him, “Kid, you didn’t learn About some magic. That’s true.
But we have also kept you Two hundred and ninety-two miles
Removed from the tragic.
I mean—you have never seen
Another Indian even take a sip of booze.
That’s the best kind of indigenous news.”
A few weeks later, back in Seattle, My son imitated me at the supermarket.
He hunched over the cart, puffed out His belly, and said in his best rez accent,
“Ah, shit, I hate that tofu disguised as meat.
It’s phony. Now go find me some turkey baloney.”
Ah, I love that my sons trust me enough To mock me to my face.
That’s the best kind
Of familial grace.
6.
I once saw the moon fully Reflected in a mirrored skyscraper
Then fracture into one hundred moons As I drove under and beyond.
There are a million freeway exits And I’ve taken maybe 99 of them.
There’s a dude who sells hot dogs Half price if you prove you’re half in love.
Everything, everything, everything Can be installation art.
7.
Mother, I know
I was a sad little fucker.
I cried all the time.
It wasn’t pretty.
But I wasn’t always
Crying because of you.
I was crying because
I was born to live in the city.
And now I do.
Thank God, I do.
155.
Tattoo
WHEN THEY WERE very young and dating, my mother and father, Lillian and Sherman, got tattoos of each other’s names on their left wrists.
It was my mother’s first and only tattoo. My father would eventually get forty-two tattoos, but most of them were of the ink-pen-and-lighter variety. He received none of them while sober. And he got at least a dozen of them while in jail.
But my parents were sober and inexperienced when they got those first tattoos. They couldn’t take the pain.
So my father stopped his tattoo at “Lil,” short for Lillian, though nobody ever called my mother Lil.
And my mother stopped her tattoo at “Sh.”
156.
Scrabble
IN THE LAST hours of writing the last draft of this book, I realized that memoir is a partial anagram for mom noir.
157.
Public Art
At an open mike, I heard a poet proclaim
That her sadness was a beached whale on the shore,
And I complimented her on that metaphor.
But the poem that she had performed was not the same
As the poem that I’d heard. That poet seemed peeved By my misinterpretation and turned away.
But I remain positive that her poem contained Whales and sadness. And I happen to believe
That my sadness does beach me like a confused whale, While my mania turns me into the love child
Of a rescued whale and hummingbird, too wild To remain in the sea and too overscaled
For flight. But, wait, sometimes, my mania lets me Become the great blue whale hovering over
A single orchid. Sometimes, being bipolar
Lets me ignore physics. Ha! Who needs gravity?
Look at me! Look at me! I am antimatter!
I am mammal and the opposite of mammal.
My wings are carved from glass. My flukes are enamel.
Watch me fly. Watch me fall. Applaud when I shatter.
158.
What I Have Learned
THE SPOKANE INDIAN word for salmon is pronounced shim-schleets.
The Spokane Indian word for a male’s mother is pronounced skoo-ee.
These are approximate pronunciations. This is phonetics. I can’t say the words very well. I have not learned how to hear the words, either. But I am practicing.
I will never be fluent in my tribal language, but I believe these are the two most important words for me to know.
My mother.
Skoo-ee.
My salmon.
Shim-schleets.
My wild salmon.
My wild mother.
Skoo-ee.
Shim-schleets.
Skoo-ee.
My mother as salmon.
My mother as salmon.
Skoo-ee.
Shim-schleets.
159.
Like a Bird
ON A SATURDAY morning in a hotel room in Bellingham—in an Oxford Suites that had three-dimensional art in the bathroom that spelled WASH in huge wooden capital letters—I confessed to my wife of twenty-four years that I had always been deeply ashamed of my acne-scarred back.
“Yes,” she said.
During the course of our long relationship, I’d admitted to a certain percentage of my various shames, like our marriage was a recipe and I needed to add a small, precise amount of vulnerability—but not a teaspoon more—in order for everything to turn out well.
“I have never told you the full extent of my embarrassment,” I said. “I need to tell you now. So, okay, I have always moved and dodged and hid my back under sheets and pillows. I have used angles of light and shadows to avoid you being able to fully see my back. Even when we bathed or showered together. Even during sex. I’ve operated like an escape artist for two decades.”
She didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I tend to fall in love with the unnamable. Then she spoke.
“I’ve seen your back,” she said.
“I want you to see it better,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. She looked amused, irritated, slightly baffled. She knew that she was again part of two narratives, one that was happening in real time and another that I was revising and editing even as the first was taking place.
That two-simultaneous-narratives shit must be equally aggravating and attractive to the nonwriter lovers of ever-distracted writers.
“This freaks me out,” I said. “But I am going to get naked and lie facedown on the bed. And I want you to look at my back. I want you to study my back. I want you to study my scars. I want you to tell me what they look like. I want you to touch the scars. I want you to trace their outlines with your fingertips. I want to feel you feeling my scars.”
I felt an odd combination of fear, pride, and idiocy, like I was about to jump out of a plane into deep woods where I would hunt a brown bear with a pocketknife. And so I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.
Before I met my wife, a Hidatsa/Ho-Chunk/Potawatomi Indian, I had never, as an adult, been romantically loved by any other Native woman. But don’t feel too bad for me. Growing up on the rez, as a preteen, I kissed four girls.