Pictograph: Poems

By Melissa Kwasny

The prize-winning poet evokes the spirit of nature in this collection inspired by the sacred sites around her rural Montana home.

“If you would learn the earth as it really is,” N. Scott Momaday writes, “learn it through its sacred places.” With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites across Montana.

In Pictograph, she captures the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight through the trees become a reminder of the impermanence of life, the controlled burn of a forest a sign of the changes associated with aging.

Unlike traditional nature poets, however, Kwasny acknowledges the active spirit of each place, agreeing that “we make a sign and we receive.” Not only do we give meaning to nature, Kwasny suggests, but nature gives meaning to us. As the collection closes, the poems begin to coalesce into a singular pictograph, creating “a fading language that might be a bridge to our existence here.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781571319081

Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph, and The Nine Senses, which contains a set of poems that won the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 Cecil Hemly Award. A portion of Pictograph received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, judged by Ed Roberson. Kwasny is also the author of Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision, and has edited multiple anthologies, including Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800–1950 and, with M.L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Widely published in journals and anthologies, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. She lives outside of Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains.

Book preview

I.

Prior to writing as a form of possession what lights and shadows swept the walls.

SARAH GRIDLEY

OUTSIDE THE LITTLE CAVE SPOT

The opening to the world is lopsided, irregular, dipping down like a lock of hair over someone’s eye. Outside the cave: liquid gold, silver. Inside: as if flesh had been scraped off. Of the many ancient virtues, hope is the one you almost forgot. Limestone so dry and jagged, so pockmarked, it could cut your skin. It stops you. Like a clock stops: you are here. From inside, you see that you are often unkind to others. You shake hands without taking off your gloves. There is a motor of living water outside your ear. Little socket, the earth is frozen, cold and skinny and breaking down. You could lean out and lend your warmth to it. You sit here and the cries are muffled. You worry how, in the matter of a single letter reversed, a bit of food during a fast, a shade too dark for the sky-paint, sacred can turn scared and cause harm. This is how large you are. A thumbprint in a cliff. How much you are asked to keep in mind.

PICTOGRAPH: AVALANCHE MOUTH

We didn’t know what we were seeing, and so, saw less. Red lightly painted over the surface. They showed themselves like the animals do, only in certain light. It was an empty place we visited, and then they filled it. The coaxing of figures, as if out of a dream, from the corners of dream into the open: handprints, finger-lines, a turtle. Meander outside the area of recent spalls. Dark and cold this time of year, in the canyon, and we were sullen, increasing the severity of where we are. A crazy mean lost culture, blue going in the wrong direction. Always interfering with something sacred still going on. Deer-sex in the interior: one must move by touch. The walk-through pictograph in the making. Ever since we were born, we could imagine these still and silent fields. Deer positioned on top of hay mounds in the safe zones.

PICTOGRAPH: THE RED DEER PLACE

Close to the river, rain-clear near its shore: seven doe, rose-orange. A mother with a fawn. One starburst. A hundred tally marks. A kind of feather. Clear water, red lacquer of the bare dogwood branches, the shale muted, mixed, spirit tempered with blood. Rock-blood, which is a flower shade, more silent, safer. Your mother is entering a timelessness on the edge of death. A light source so distant we feel auxiliary. Yet a loud thrumming of our ears against the gates. Why do whitetail deer have a white tail that could so easily betray them? Does it bind them like knots in a rope at night or in the confusion of flight from harm? The white is not so bright in the broken tines of hoarfrost, the penciled-in trunks of aspen that fall in lines like faults or fences, yet these look like deer bodies, too. It is perhaps the heathering, the empty space between the colors. A fading language that might be bridge to our existence