This is What I Mean

inspired by poem of same title by Simon Ortiz

As full as the clouds over Inscription House
As much as they seem dispersed and scattered – floating above the radio waves of KUYI
The warm smile of smooth highway roads –beloved, glistening, glittering, glossy
The wideness of our memory
A permeating diaspora seeps into the cavernous English letters
Then the Flattening, of uniform accordance
The hollow curves of letters
The concave Vessel
With voices filling the bottom half of my alphabet
With voices holding the Indian-speak deep and wide in vast pockets
With voices stuttering fractured Diné bizaad
With voices carrying surgically removed pollen, exposed lacerations checkerboarding the Land
With cell phone voices piercing Dzilth-na-o-dilth-hle, a new treaty language bleeds out
With inaudible voices, a fracked up earth, Babylon-inspired diacritics inflame
The new Indian-speak is deconsecrated, an oil-slicked water hole – smooth and smoothly and soothing
A never near peaceable stillness
Again, the ink in letters are replenished
Again, a darker pigment, a deeper deprivation, depletion

And this is what I mean
I mean
What I mean is – when I first read about ___________
Reading about _______________ placed me on the map
And this may not sound like a big deal but this is what I mean –
That I didn’t talk much until I started to write
Until Saint Louis Bearheart showed me how to reverse the institutional dialysis
Until Saint Louis Bearheart showed me how to unlock the file cabinet of the BIA superintendent
Exposing the praying Indians, bended knees and clasped fingers – this is what I mean
That my writing is like the praying Indians on bended knee, petitioning a savior to
Relocate me back to the inkwell that holds the letters, my alphabet cleaving to the page
Being absorbed into the orchestra of the flooding dark ink
Writing this theatre piece of myself as a linguistic formula
Urban + Indian = the lost sheep, with no clear markings
Only a slaughter, exposed neck, blood drained, the recorder hums between the drips, the hum
Recorded as breathing, the collected sounds catalogued and shelved

As full as the clouds over Inscription House
As much as they seem dispersed and scattered – floating above the radio waves of KUYI
The warm smile of smooth highway roads –beloved, glistening, glittering, glossy
The wideness of our memory
A breathing diaspora – a collection of ancestral winds – the form reforming
In uniform accordance – no longer a flattening surface
No hollow curves, no fallen syllables
Today, I stop conversing, start converting
Into the fullness of clouds
The inscriptions on my house