And I forgot I was supposed to read one of my own,
so I'll read a short one.
I was thinking so--
thank you so much, LeAnne Howe, for allowing
me to be published in The Georgia Review
last spring with a special Southeastern issue.
And they accepted this poem, which
is really about in seeing and looking
at the maps of the Southeast and not seeing our Muskogee
homelands there, but through a different kind of visibility,
a different kind of insight.
So this is from The Georgia Review.
And it's from a long collection.
It's just a section.
I find you nowhere that is here or there.
Below the sunken Uchee path, iron ore.
The ridge-dividing water veined with it.
Pea vine wiregrass, short leaf hickory,
old fields' flood plains, indigo dyed.
When the woods were still dense, saw palmetto,
grapes of the hills destroyed by fire, and the haw chestnut
by the hatchet.
If it were easy to leave our bodies in the fork of Red
River, two mounds of Earth.
If it were easy to leave you behind in a stream
clear with flowering stones, to find you in the language
where I lost you as if you were a sentence in this poem,
and this poem an archive of the forest.
But I've burned the remaining pine.
On the bluffs, strawberries thinly scattered.
And in the old beaver ponds, briar root,
a bread made of it for times of famine.
Thank you all so much.