Swallowed Light
“Through his poems, Wasson has unearthed the buried bones of generations and brought their lives into the daylight. This is the work of a poet, and the importance of such work can never be underestimated.”
In America today, it may feel like there exists a vast churning causing a swell that separates the fields of our own making. No longer buried within the dirt of those fields emerges a life encompassed within the collection of poems, Swallowed Light, from Nez Perce poet Michael Wasson. From “Portrait with Smeared Centuries”:
“I begin the day like any other
day: a decade staring back
in the rearview mirror
of the wrecked pickup truck: you
standing so tall you’re already
headless: until I turn around
the cornfield blurs into the torn
edges of an atlas: pull your hands
out from under me to anoint
this god-gifted country of yours:
mottled bones singing
the anthem of a star-
spangled nation:
this land granted enough
time to list its own
possibilities: atrocities
a blade of dusk resting
on my throat, I bruise: by standing”
As one delves into this collection, it becomes apparent that Wasson takes the essence of the words he uses and squeezes them. The life found within emerges like another world—a lost world trampled in the name of Manifest Destiny and a culture too willing to plow into shallow graves everything that lies outside its tunneled vision. Through these words, that which had been lost has emerged with a strong voice, as revealed in Wasson’s poem, “Self-Portrait As Collected Bones [Rejoice Rejoice]”:
“after Paris auction indigenous human remains & objects
For there’s a polished-bright medal
of honor hanging in my chest like another
man’s stilled heart: for I lie here
waiting for you in fields
broken by hands the same shapes as
howitzer blasts: for I am
learning to stand up again
with only cleaned bones: singing rejoice
rejoice are the quieted rib cages of our beloved
nation: for the massacre is only
a series of colorless photographs, archives
of snow & nothing else: Mother, tell me
what you remember of another man’s hand
reaching into your throat
like a night-frozen glove: how warm
was it? Was it him with the words
of a god beaded over his lips like sweat? For
the wounded is someone touched
& entered with the weapon we shape
into fingerprints: no matter how wrecked
or soft: we return to the field
wrapped in this one name
under god: rejoice rejoice, say the hand-
bones that want the heft of memory:
for I am a decade: a century
of openmouthed thirst
even as the snow keeps falling—
& falling through:”
It would be difficult to pin a tag on the pull of words strong enough to lift a spade to unearth
the bones of ancestors, deft enough to gently brush the caked mud from them and possessing sufficient magic to make them raise from the dead and walk again without ligaments, but Wasson has managed all of that and more within this collection. From “The Bones of Us”:
“I could mistake a life for
too many dusks darkening
along the spine. Somebody was saying
the skeleton of our faith, the skeleton of our faith
but whose? There are two-
hundred & six bones that hold
the human body like this: ninety-four
bones have disappeared from you: So forgive me—
no. they are always still
there inside you. Rejoicing how they
merged into this you. Rejoicing
like a day’s worth of light hitting your body
fleshed with only its rib cage. A mother was said
to shoot back at the cavalry—for crushing
her baby’s head. It was dawn. So many of us, so
why remember it now?”
There is a truth to the landscape that Wasson has unearthed, a truth circumscribed by bones:
bleached, splintered, missing, trying to regain their form through the benefit of the ligaments
the poet has created. It is the power of the poems gathered in this collection that allow the bones within to rise into a form, gathering momentum from their incised memory, as Wasson writes in his poem, “Ezekiel 37:3”: “puddles found / around the bodies of our nation. How they won’t / stop boring into me. Like / this,” or in his poem, “Swallowed Prayers As Creation”:
“Let me tell you a story: for ages, I have been holding on to our silence,
a child learning to move his forsaken hands, to palm
the walls of this godless place. I am
your animal, a heart thrashing the air everywhere”
With this release, Copper Canyon Press has raised further into the light these remarkable poems by Michael Wasson. The earth has never been still. It has reverberated with the losses it has absorbed. Through his poems, Wasson has unearthed the buried bones of generations and brought their lives into the daylight. This is the work of a poet, and the importance of such work can never be underestimated.