From somewhere over the bluff the radio signal comes and goes; just what I was hoping for, being an ambassador of sorts at this wheel. See? They’re there. East on Highway 98, north on Interstate 160; everywhere has been the Navajo Nation for several hours and will continue to be so well into tomorrow. From my home abroad, I glance at website after website of tribal tension, aware that the verb glance is a gross simplification, as if opening Windows might freshen the memory of an ignored heritage which, by extension, is part of my body, a country I’m barely aware of. Words add up and zooming out on the map, I come to the conclusion that size matters. From somewhere over this bluff to our right, between dips that stretch and allow the Hopi signal to get out of the miniscule reservation engulfed by the Navajo’s, there’s a faint drumming on hide, a breathy-heaving of elderly men, channeled through this 4-door, horse-powered Ouija board. They’re there; their rough chorus filling the interior of the car with onomatopoeia for gods in Hopi the length of a curvature in this landscape; this land I come back to and will forever try to own despite the shit, my origin for it’s where I too came into being, descendant of an extra-terrestrial invasion before spaceships were ever invented, but long after the hierarchy of civilizations laid down the blueprint for housing tracts; who gets the dream home, who gets to dream about home. With settlements spelled out in Roman alphabet, American flags pop up on this infinite maze of Maples and Mains, asphalt on earth, but the steep-faced bluff rises up and I’ll be damned, it’s "Free Bird" on a stronger frequency. The weaker station gets lost and I find refuge in a memory: a slow dance at a middle school make-out party with a girl, Lynrd Skynrd and bubble-gum perfume: If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? though my chakras were somewhere between the feathered one and the heavy-hammered construction worker of the Village People Merv Griffin gifted me with at the dinner table. And despite us not slowing down, cruising over the speed limit ‘cos I’m as free as a bird now, this landscape yields a yawn, and is gone. A Hopi woman is speaking now, that we’ve been listening to an old recording of a chant an anthropologist made in 1925, with a probable agenda of academic racism, a bent on Linneus’ binomial nomenclature, but she doesn’t get into that now, interspersing Hopi phrases when English fails. Interstate 160, meseta of sage; this gaping mouth in the landscape opens something in me, to bring my own mother back from the dead in surprising clarity. The radio woman is going on about the importance of Kachina for their people, and the Kachina dolls my mother had her kids make, back east, at a Quaker school, stand on the dash next to the windshield of time; faint drumming on hide, a breathy-heaving imploring rain, the anthropologist explains, in 1925. In the future, on the other side of the world, I find some of their stories online: “How the Deer Got Their Red Eyes”, “How the Twin War Gods Stole the Thunder-Stone”, “How Bees Learned to Fly and How Peaches Became Sweeter” among others; but if I may, the driver of this car, simply say Kachinas do what dolls should do: steer us towards Compassion, towards Magic, towards building a home on the corner of both a lifelong challenge. That day when I visited my mother’s school, I didn’t feel the sadness, the pain, but the teepee had room for two small people. Detergent bottles, toilet paper tubes, fleshed with papier-mâché, dressed in bright tempera, Halloween orange, Thanksgiving yellow, a parade of totems, each being able to stand on its own two legs, silently passing down tales of the cosmos around a bonfire of oblivion somewhere out west, free as a bird now.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
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