Archive of New Mexico Poetry – Rebecca Seiferle

Aztec Ruins

Standing here at the beginning of the ruins, we inhabit
a sky full of cries too numerous and varied to be identified. And what would we
call them?

The bird that cries like a man…

the bird that buzzes
with the locust pinched in the thumbs of a branch, the bird
with the voice of a broken whistle,

one last breath…just before
it breaks, the bird whose periodic
cry is a bright thread through the bullrushes…

These warbles, clicks, cries of surprise throng us with a language
we do not understand

our own voice, the lost voice
of our fathers meeting our mothers so long ago, the voice of whatever calls
us into being…

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As he aged into impassive calm,
strangers thought my father was a Navajo, but, as a child, I knew he
was a buffalo. That beast with its puzzled stare, bred back from the
edge of extinction, ruminating
among the repetitive flowers, his shoulders beginning to slump from emphysema,
like, and unlike, a calf’s emerging hump.

“The Great Circle,” my picture book
called it: on one side of the page, an Indian, black braids flying behind him,
bow and arrow in hand, urged his pinto on; on the other, a single
buffalo, the muscles beneath his thick hide rippling
in a stampede of alarm. Cracking
the book’s spine as he flattened the pages, my father drew a grid

over the Indian and the buffalo,
then enlarged each section onto whitewashed masonite. Painting for
the first time,
he was an ancient cartographer
who, mapping a round earth on a flat surface, blurs the outlines of
separate things:
the man’s face smudged into sky,
the curly hump extending too far
down the buffalo’s right foreleg,
dissolving into grass.

What he caught exactly
was the wound. The blood seeping
around the arrow in the bison’s flank, as vivid and as distant as the scar
on my father’s back: long before my birth, someone tried to rob him;
he walked home with a knife in his torso but only knew it when he
glimpsed the shaft, embedded,
in the mirror. What did I know
of my father? His pain lived
at such a distance, it was an imaginary line

that, circling the globe, dissected the earth into halves. While he
brooded at the window, his black mood, an injured bull
haunting the edge of his herd, I circled the house with war cries. Pretending
to be an Indian, I thought we were opposed. But now, only this
painting remains of my father, I see in the great circle of the
Indian and the buffalo, the way in which my father and I
were divided, and are one.

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“Great Circle” was published in The Music We Dance To, (Sheep Meadow Press 1999).

Rebecca Seiferle is the author of the poetry collections, The Music We Dance To (Sheep Meadow Press, 1999) and The Ripped-Out Seam, and of a translation of Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce. Poems from The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Writers’ Exchange Award, the National Writers’ Union Prize, and the volume was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her translation of Trilce was a finalist for the PenWest Translation Award and on the shortlist for the Columbia Translation Award. Poems from The Music We Dance To were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 1997, 1998, and 1999 and won the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has been a regular reviewer for Calyx and The Harvard Review. Seiferle is listed with Tumblewords, the New Mexico Arts Program, and has taught at San Juan College since 1990, and is the editor of the new online literary magazine, “The Drunken Boat.” It should be added that Rebecca Seiferle’s on-line chapbook, “The Sacrifice Tree” may be found at Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, and that The Music We Dance To was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A selection from this book will appear in The Best American Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove. For more information about Rebecca Seiferle, and some poems, visit her website: http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/seiferle.htm

Aztec Ruins
Great Circle