This poem by Louise Erdrich is an interesting poem. It is a Native American Story, which Erdrich made up. I chose this poem because it is interesting to transform a story into a poem.
I Was Sleeping Where The Black Oaks Move
By Louise Erdrich
We watched form 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 the 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 branched
Whitening in the raw sun.
Above us drifted heron.
Alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,
Settling their beaks among the hallows.
Grandpa said, these are the ghosts of the tree people, moving above us, unable to take their rest.
Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.
Their long wings are bending in the air
Into circled through which they fall.
They rise again in shifting wheels.
How long must we live in the broken fingers
Their necks make, narrowing the sky.
The poem “ The Butcher’s Wife” is about Louie Erdrich’s long braids. Erdrich is very descriptive about the braids as well. A man comes into the poem, becomes sort of like a tall tale character. This is an interesting poem, it is like a tall tale.
The Butcher’s Wife
By Louise Erdrich
Once my braids swung heavy as ropes.
Men feared them like gallows.
Night fell
When I combed them out
No one could see me in the dark
Then I stood still
Too long and the braids took root
I wept, so helpless.
The braids tapped deep and flourished
A man came by with an ox on his shoulders.
He yoked it to my apron
And pulled me from the ground
From that time on I wound the braids around my head
So that my arms would be free to tend him.
He could lift a grown man by the belt with his teeth.
In a contest, he’s press a whole hog, side of bee.
He loved his highballs, his herring and the attentions of women.
He died pounding his chest with no last words for anyone.
The gin vessels in his face broke and darkened. I traced them
Far from that room into Bremen on the Sea.
The narrow streets twisted don to the piers,
And far off in the black, rocking water, the lights of trawlers
Beckoned, like the heart’s uncertain signals,
Faint, and Final.
