This is another piece where I examine--
there's a quote, a direct quote, again,
in this piece from the Apology.
By the way, if you're interested in looking at the Apology,
it's online, I think, at--
shoot, what is it, congress.gov?
Yeah, you can find the Apology to Native People, so--
and you can see some of this text that I'm quoting.
"Whereas I query my uneasiness with the statement,
quote, 'Native peoples are endowed by their creator
with certain unalienable rights.
And among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness', end quote.
I shift in my seat, a needle in my back.
Though 'unalienable', they're rights I cannot legally claim
if placed within a whereas statement,
meaning whatever comes after the word 'whereas' and before
the semicolon in a Congressional document falls short of legal
grounds, is never cause to sue the government,
the government's courts say.
Whereas I remember that abstractions such as life,
liberty, and happiness rarely serve a poem,
so I have learned it best not to engage those terms anyway.
Yet I smash head-on into this specific differentiation,
the creator versus their creator.
Whereas this alters my concern entirely.
How do I language a collision arrived at through separation?
When in doubt, I'm told, write what I know.
So I peel my eye to the moment, my love of it.
I wake from a dream about running I interpret
as the desire to get there.
Pulling back my bedsheets, I teeter down the hall
to the face of a new clock in the bathroom mirror.
I say, you're old enough"--
excuse me-- "you're old enough now
to look at yourself full-on.
Whereas I set aside interrogation to see.
I cannot syntax or poem the creator,
nor differentiate one creator from another creator,
much less, that is, mine from theirs, theirs from ours,
or why a creator split.
At the mirror, who can?"