IMPULSE TO LOVE

We keep the strong Black Medicine, coffee./
We shed the fat of the soldier food./
We are shirt wearers. We are big-hearted./
We have been sHADOWmARKED./
From defeat we have achieved a new fierceness,/
a new kind of recklessness./

from Mari Sandoz Crazy Horse Camp

North Dakota, Chile, Viet Nam. Extreme places. Isolated places. A seizure calls to poetry from these places. And in each instance it is in these worlds that poems find themselves at home. At home with voices, these poems explore making home among extremes. Everyone is a veteran of these wars.

The middle way also makes a prophetic path. Less explored than other celebrated extremes, the border worlds—beginning with the family living room in North Dakota—are the worlds given for exploration in these poems. The borderland worlds can be seen not as marginal, but as heartlands.

Returning once more to North Dakota, the birth land, and the land of exile and the mother, these poems get as close to the mother’s voice as possible, this time beginning her body itself. In Chile, surrounded by Mapuche Indians and the birth land of Neruda, guided by the shaman Don Eduardo, the machi, poems encounter Pinochet and his machine guns in a small bookstore containing Neruda and poetry after 20 years of censorship. Viet Nam opens up in the wild ways of the garden. The poems suggest that the war fought in the living room is the same war fought in Viet Nam. These poems map these wild ways, impulses to love.

After 22 Years, Two Empenadas For The Chilean Returning Home On His Bd
After The Healing
Alone With The Trombones
Among The Politicos In Valparaiso
And Voices Always Come Into The World In Time To Sing
Another War Story
Becoming 'lector Chileno': Reading 'las Alturas De Macchu Picchu' In C
A Beginning In Silk
The Birds
Blackberry Syrup
Bowbells, North Dakota: Getting There
Canyonlands And All Soul's Day
The Caretaker From North Dakota
Cleaning Up The Yard
Disappearing Into Blossoms
Driving To Isla Negra
Ear Ache
Festivals Of Light
Filling Up At The Mapuche Table
For The Woman Who Wanted More But Would Not Love Us
History
In The Womb
Jeremiah's Voice
Letter To Rexroth From Williams River
Letters From Vietnam
Literary Feminist Readings Of Biblical Narratives
Literature In The World
The Man And The Boy
The Man And The Boy On The Last Day Of The Year
The Marine On The Freeway
A New Deal For Masks
October Praise For My Friend Who Writes
One Answer To A Question About Music
The Preacher In His Living Room
Reading Neruda's Memoirs Over Texas
Sentries
Sixteen Fulbright Fellows Helping Out In Chile
The Song Is A Twenty Year Chain
The Song Of Juan Lagos The Street Singer
To My Children: A War Story
Water, Paint, Leaves
The Woman Discovers America
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®