Slowdown Throwdown Revisted

 In Response to: I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move

Sometimes when our youth comes to an end, it feels as though we are watching a natural disaster unfold in front of us. Growing out of my childhood, I felt as though my golden thread was slowly being cut, fiber-by-fiber. Each tear was a rip in my heart. I watched as time drowned the roots of my younger years, loosening its grip, and its place in this world. The first root that let go was when my grandma moved back to the Philippines. She is everything I know, her hands taught me nourishment, her lips taught me silence, and her legs taught me strength. When she left, that was all reduced to memories, ignited by smelling the dusters she left behind. The lingering, but fading, scent of garlic, soil, and laundry detergent were dormant memories of life-long lessons. 

The second root was my dad moving. My father had a job opportunity in California that he desperately needed, and the price was living alone with my sister. Being solitary in your youth is a lot different than when you’re an adult. Abruptly, I had to learn how to survive. My sister was just a nursing student, and I was trying to make my way through high school. At the same time, our dog who we have had since my parents got divorced, had a metastasized tumor, was emaciated, and on death’s door. My sister would sneak medical supplies from her clinical rotations, so we could patch up our dogs' necrotizing flesh. Through heart, our dog lived comfortably for another 6 months, until she died peacefully in her sleep. When she left, she took away the toothless wide grin of a little girl too. 

Despite the heartbreaking reality of letting go of our childhood, Louise Erdrich’s poem, “I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move”, reminds me of seeing the ghosts of our past lives. She talks of how we see destruction take place, and destroy the world around it, so ruthlessly. When it is all over, we see the aftermath of what took place. To me, it’s like seeing the lessons and values you have learned in your youth reflected in adulthood. Certain sensory stimuli tease the phantoms of loving memories. Erdrich is talking of how colonialism has destroyed her land, and how she can only reminisce and dream. 

I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move

BY LOUISE ERDRICH

We watched from the house

as the river grew, helpless

and terrible in its unfamiliar body.   

Wrestling everything into it,

the water wrapped around trees

until their life-hold was broken.

They went down, one by one,

and the river dragged off their covering.

Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,   

snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:   

a whole forest pulled through the teeth   

of the spillway. Trees surfacing

singly, where the river poured off

into arteries for fields below the reservation.

When at last it was over, the long removal,   

they had all become the same dry wood.   

We walked among them, the branches   

whitening in the raw sun.

Above us drifted herons,

alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,

settling their beaks among the hollows.

Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people   

moving among us, unable to take their rest.

Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.   

Their long wings are bending the air   

into circles through which they fall.   

They rise again in shifting wheels.   

How long must we live in the broken figures   

their necks make, narrowing the sky.

Louise Erdrich, “I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move” from Original Fire: Selected and New Poems. Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Source: Original Fire: Selected and New Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2003)