Poem published in The Salt Chuck City Review

On Becoming A River

Just days ago

I drove through Squamish Mountains

with a Haida boy and a young Cree girl,

the young travelers and me

bound for ceremony in Stat-lee-um woods

glancing at the young ones

I was for a moment fearful of what lay before them,

not the ceremony but the hostile world, the merciless world

of course, only people are foolish enough to concern themselves with things yet to be

I am still learning

think like a river, I said out loud to them

the words once given to me by an old Ojibway woman,

when I was younger

think like a river and it may be so, she said

her words lingered in the air and my mind drifted into holy memory

my own place of sacred things

here, I return again and again

to a tranquil spot at a slight curve on the South Thompson,

amid the lush breast of *Secwepemc Territory

and long amber rays of warm and dusky sunlight in the early October evening –

it is the Moon of Falling Leaves

managing to find myself alone

I sit among the sandy banks in silence,

in clear view of the gravel shallows near me where the river is but a trickle –

Here, can be heard the din of insects, all winged and buzzing things

flitting and darting above the abundant deposits of fresh bear scat,

The cackle of distracted crows and their lunatic agenda

A pair of eagles, one disheveled if not slightly ragged,

the other regal, its feathers smooth and nearly black with age,

clearly a couple, they feast undisturbed on carrion the far side of the bend

Dispersed everywhere in places farther and closer to me

are the sacrificial smelt and decaying forms of spent salmon

the sentient beings somehow still dignified, still important

as evidenced by the whole host of life teeming at their scattered and bountiful remains

their eroding but nutrient bodies feeding and caring for all who live here

There is nothing worldly here, just peace and murmuring stillness

Serenity lulls me into warm thoughts of drifting away, perhaps forever

with the soothing currents in the middle deeper waters

I breathe in the same particles of air that rushed through throats and filled the lungs

of tribespeople in my grandmother's grandmother's age,

air that has passed continuously through life on earth, endlessly, infinitely...

The calm shattered by a flash

I am startled by the sun-splashed, quicksilver burst

of an immaculate fish lifting itself into the air, into a somersault -

upside down and backwards

as if desperate to cry out: I am here!

Its thrash - a glorious display, definitive and remarkable

then a spattering commotion and downward return to life below the surface with the rest

The split-second event a defiant response to forces

that would deter the relentless quest for home

The reserves of stamina remaining steadfast 

in the mission, the quest, maybe even the pilgrimage –

perhaps the very reason for being

Not predators, currents or the fearsome march of time

will keep them from going home

In that instant I was touched...changed

became connected to ones vying for that place just a little further on

our kinship rooted in our obedience to a great if not solitary pursuit,

we are orphans of a type,

coming into the world seemingly at the expense of our parent's lives,

like the young smolt and fry, my folks gave their lives to bring me here

and I have made this entire journey without them

a drama composed for me by unknown hands

I cannot speak for the salmon

but mine has always been a longing to be defined by something other than absence

so, I exalt in remembering that ordinary day emptying into twilight,

sitting there thinking wild thoughts before joining the night and stars

Since then,

I remain susceptible to those wild thoughts

and to thinking of myself as that river

meandering

raging

rolling

treacherous

formidable

coursing

swirling

dark, deep and sometimes shallow

but with clear origins at the feet of venerable mountains,

like the bloodlines to ancestors,

this may well be where I emerged out of spirit into being...

forever enchanted by you and a moment in time,

actually, changed in that moment

now always the memory of that moment

and this, my own momentous cry that I was here

Sometimes the reasons for things in life cannot be named

Where once I was a boy with the worship solely of buffalo in my blood

now, these many miles and years later I come endowed

with reverence for salmon and for the lifelong voyage home in my wandering soul

It is a blessing to be Indian, more so to be Cree

but I am more like the salmon these days

more a creature at once resilient and fragile,

manipulated and wild,

at times I think it sinful of me to envy the majestic and unassuming salmon

or to wish to unlock the secrets of the great ocean pasture that only they know

observing their stark refusal to be anything but what they are

their graceful singularity of purpose to be undaunted

I am contented in believing the songs of these places

do not end at the banks and tree-lines of territories

but are alive and sung in the hearts of those who love these things

I am no elder

but I know that people protect what they love –

I know this much

So, for now I remain willingly chained to my life as a freedom fighter in the false-hearted city

witnessing and sometimes helping establish small freedoms,

occasional escapes by those Indians with some place to go

I hurl myself ever upstream through the urban wilderness,

inventing ceremony and ways of manifesting cracks

because like Uncle Leonard said, THAT's how the light gets in

still navigating the roiling waters, where I have been shown by salmon

that even without mom and dad to help them along

even the tiny roe, on their own,

still manage to find fire for life in the cold stone of a river bed

It seems to me now that I may have been called to the edge of that water

a response to my yearning to be kept in the heart of things

if not in the ones that I love

as when salmon quit the sea and the river calls them home,

upstream to the birthplace

to fertilize the alpine womb

But I am fed, warmed and infused with the spirit and memory of that place

There are many ways to salvation and one of them is a river

so, I am thinking like a river

because inside me is a nameless salmon

a salmon leaping - leaping for life - into the eternal and transcendent moment

where all beings merge into one

Hearing an ancient song only the heart understands –

the sound and vision clutched and held onto by one dazed and love-sick Cree

all dissolving into distance and oblivion

*(Secwepemc: Shuswap)