Grandmother Corntassel
from the rolling Cherokee woods
had known seventeen summers
when she married John Bradley,
grandson of an immigrant
from Yorkshire to Virginia.
When I was young I thought
all ancestors lost,*
shadows on a dusty cart-path
that decades effaced
and centuries built over.
But are they not here, encircling us
like we are the spirits they summoned,
and is this not their dust on our soles?
Ancestors may even be tricksters, laughing
at our fresh feet in the corpse-soil,
our fresh eyes on the old stars,
our fresh fears in the anxious
human-harassed world
where they fucked and sang their way through
things beyond their control
just like we do.
I know I come from the birth-patch
that she wove forward holding a basket of
umbilical vines from flowering mothers
through Sarah her daughter,
my sixth great-grandmother,
who was only thirteen when
Grandmother Corntassel died.
None of my family had any memory
of Diane Moytoy Corntassel.
Loves and brief lives, much like genes,
get blended and shuffled and forgotten about,
bits not passed due to simple mathematics
or completely obscured by vain
fictions, prejudices, conveniences.
But even in this oblivescent future
if we call out to ancestors —
not just those of blood and birth, but also
of place, of spirit, of thought, of invention,
of forgotten aspiration and early departure,
will they not answer?
Will I not answer those who come after,
who wake up from their moments of giddiness
long enough to ask what I knew
and what work I left undone?
We are more entangled
than anyone seems to realize
and we can feel those fibers knitted around us
up until that moment
when we are ripped part.
The husk is off the warm corn
and I hold it, feeling its
absurd abundance.
Eat patiently. Remember.