西蒙·欧迪斯诗7首
西蒙·欧迪斯，1941年出生，美国原住民诗人。欧迪斯出版的诗集包括《为雨而行》（1976）、《一次愉快的旅行》（1977）、《反击：为了人民和土地》（1980）、《沙溪事件》（1981）、《闪电前后》（1994），短篇小说集有《欢迎印第安人》（1978）、《月亮上的男人》（1999）等。欧迪斯喜欢用日常语言入诗，喜欢讲故事，风格朴素，他十分熟悉英美现代诗歌，如艾略特和庞德等人的诗歌，跟同时期的诗人如斯奈德和金斯伯格都有交往。欧迪斯也像他的朋友金斯伯格一样，对美国社会存在的不公正现象，决不妥协，对印第安人的处境，尤其深表同情，从他的抗议之声中可以听出金斯伯格的回声。无论怎么说，欧迪斯都是独一无二的诗人，他的诗歌成就将进一步为诗歌爱好者所认识，并在世界上产生影响。
我父亲的歌
想说些什么事，
今夜我想起我父亲。
他的嗓音，那微微的哽噎，
那深沉的声音，发自他单薄的胸腔，
那情绪的颤动，
是因为刚对他儿子
说到的事情，他的歌：
一年春天我们在阿科种下玉米——
我们播了几次种
但是这一次很特别，
我还记得我手中握着的一把
又潮又软的沙土。
我父亲在劳动中停下来，
指给我看一条翻开的土沟，
犁铧掀翻了
湿润的沙土中
一个地鼠的洞穴。
轻轻地，他捧起粉红色的小动物，
放在手掌中，
叫我用手摸摸它们。
然后我们把它们拿到地边，
把它们放在一块湿润的
沙土块的背阴处。
至今我还记得
那温凉沙土的柔软，
和那些活生生的小地鼠和我说着话的父亲。
梦想的影子
风的梦想很诚实。
雄鹰展翅飞入
心灵
陡峭的山峰。
心灵充满
太阳祷告
和孩子的笑声。
山峦梦到
松树兄弟和朋友，
那岩石的神秘之地，
庇护着兔子，松鼠和鹪鹩。
他们相信力，
也相信
鹰会猝然死亡。
雄鹰回旋
于风之力中，
他因为风之力
看得见百万里之外。
所有人都相信
起源和孤寂的事儿。
但是刚刚这些梦想
怎么啦？
（我从怀俄明听见
有关硫酸铊的奇怪的新闻，
农场主们在直升机上带着枪。）
我听到奇怪的颤抖声。
呼吸变得微弱，断断续续，
我听到奇怪的死亡的疥癣
掉落下来的声音。
蛇急急忙忙穿过草丛。
土狼被他自己的诡计搞蒙了头。
大熊呜咽着把痛苦送入风中。
有毒的烟雾遮蔽我们的神路。
风静止了下来。
哦蓝天，哦山岗，哦精灵，哦
什么让你们止步？
雄鹰无声地跌进阴影中
随着一声闷响他已被吞噬。
鼠尾草不能呼吸。
雄鹰去了，
野兔很孤独。
很痛苦，哎呀，没有梦想
去安慰干涸的呜咽
或修复雄鹰的飞翔，我们自家弟兄。
没有你
没有你了该怎么办？
这是夜的疯狂。
有一次你打电话来，
“我正在过街，
突然间我周围
什么都没有了。”
你周围什么都没有。
你是一座孤岛。
大洋已涨满。
有时候太晚了
去想别的事。
你说：
“我要赶回家，
但周围都是车。”
“好吧，”我说，
我等你回来，
最后看见
你幽暗的身子
向家的方向游来。
昨夜
纽约市差点没把我吞没
昨夜在肯尼迪机场。
稀里糊涂，
给四处打电话，
我自己都记不清的地方。只是紧紧地抓住
我的那袋子诗歌，我的生命，
跟睡眠打仗，
那时刻会马上把你吞没
但你还不知道
你消失去了何处。终于，上了出租车，
终于，到了朋友的家，
给你打个电话，
躺在地毯上，
吃几个大苹果，
喝一杯葡萄酒，
已经是清晨。
但是，终于，我跟你说话。
很好，那一段，
我在地板上睡去，
旁边是电话和两个苹果核。
碎片
在我去市法院
又一次接受审判时，
我捡起一块小石头。
那是三月，
转眼就将是复活节。
我把石头放进衣袋：
因为我感觉我需要
超度，或许
如果我这样做。
我满手是汗；
我热烈却无望的希望
是我没有
那第一次
坐牢。
我把石头放在另一只手里，
用指尖把它亲吻。
我发觉它是潮湿的，
意识到它是一块碎片
来自地球中心
我明白
它会把我拯救。
圣地亚哥以东
我告诉客车司机
但是他不听，
“沿着山开
尽可能
避开美国。
我是个逃犯
从南加州
坏透的无未来的噩梦中逃跑的。”
疼痛
有时候有种来得很慢
很慢的多余的疼痛。
它吞噬着我可怜的身躯；
我的身体正在散架。
剧痛从下面向上袭来，
撕扯着赐给我的神圣的肉体，
不给新生留下一粒种子。
我应该听从她的忠告。
“跟你说，你应该在这儿住下，
在这大海边住几年，
静心坐下来用耳听。”
A leading figure in the Native American literary renaissance that emerged in the 1960s, Simon J. Ortiz has published many books of poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction. In general, his writing is concerned with modern man’s alienation from others, from himself, and from his environment—urging humanity to reconnect the wisdom of ancestral spirits and with Mother Earth. His poetry collections include Going for the Rain (1976), A Good Journey (1977), From Sand Creek (1982), Woven Stone (1992), After and Before the Lightning (1994), and Out There Somewhere (2002).
Ortiz, who is an Acoma Pueblo Indian, was born and raised near Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up speaking the Acoma tongue. “This early language from birth to six years of age in the Acoma family and community,” he has written, “was the basis and source for all I would do later;” ironically, he was punished for speaking it at school. Nicknamed “the reporter” by his father for the absorbed attention he paid as a child to tribal elders’ stories, he has continued to base his creative work on his people’s powerful oral tradition.
After attending Fort Lewis College and the University of New Mexico, Ortiz earned an MFA from the University of Iowa. During the 1960s he also served in the Army, where he suffered discrimination, and worked in a uranium mining industry whose profit-driven desecration of the land he would later movingly protest. In the early 1970s he began to write in earnest while teaching at various colleges, and in 1982 won a Pushcart Prize and a wide audience with From Sand Creek. Perhaps his most important book is 1992’s Woven Stone—a blend of the poetry and prose of three earlier volumes that is a spiritual autobiography.
Simple in its diction and rhythms, Ortiz’s poetry can express great reverence for beloved landscapes as well as intense rage against the de-humanizing forces of excessive development and mechanization. Apart from his own heritage, he has been influenced by Walt Whitman and the writers of the Beat movement, and he shares themes and stylistic features with fellow Native Americans Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday along with such environmentally engaged poets such as Gary Snyder. Ortiz currently teaches at Arizona State University, where he founded and coordinates the Indigenous Speakers Series.
Blind Curse
BY SIMON J. ORTIZ
You could drive blind
for those two seconds
and they would be forever.
I think that as a diesel truck
passes us eight miles east of Mission.
Churning through the storm, heedless
of the hill sliding away.
There isn’t much use to curse but I do.
Words fly away, tumbling invisibly
toward the unseen point where
the prairie and sky meet.
The road is like that in those seconds,
nothing but the blind white side
of creation.
You’re there somewhere,
a tiny struggling cell.
You just might be significant
but you might not be anything.
Forever is a space of split time
from which to recover after the mass passes.
My curse flies out there somewhere,
and then I send my prayer into the wake
of the diesel truck headed for Sioux Falls
one hundred and eighty miles through the storm.
Time as Memory as Story
BY SIMON J. ORTIZ
Let’s say it’s half a century later.
Let’s say it’s never too late.
Let’s say Skull Valley.
Let’s say.
Let’s say it’s half a century later.
Let’s say it’s never too late.
Let’s say Skull Valley.
Let’s say.
Time has no mercy. It’s there. It stays still or it moves.
And you’re there with it. Staying still or moving with it.
I think it moves. And we move with it. And keep moving.
Eleven years old and soon to be in fifth grade. That’s time.
Boys’ time. Who knows what time it is but them. Eternally.
No one knows time better than they. Always and forever.
Our family. Mama, me, Angie, Gilbert, Earl, Louise.
Kids. Daddy working in Skull Valley for the AT&SF RY.
Mama just packed us up in New Mexico and moved us.
Suddenly. A surprise. To me anyway. To join Daddy.
Who was away most of the time. Arizona. California.
Sometimes Colorado. Sometimes Texas. Always away.
Railroad work, labor, heavy machinery. Rails and sun.
Trains always moving. I remember the war. The 1940s.
Soldiers. Tanks. Cannons with huge guns and wheels.
Time does have mercy. But it doesn’t enumerate or wait.
It moves. And we move with it. Though for boys, maybe?
I wanted to wait. So things could happen more gently.
A boy misses his father. A boy watches younger sisters.
And younger brothers. All growing. And he’s growing.
And he misses the times his mother is happy, laughing.
Who knows time as well as boys and their young worries?
I was a boy growing within a family, community. And dreams.
And girls. Girl teenagers. I adored them, their pretty ways.
In the fourth grade at McCartys. Made a bookshelf in shop.
Proudly. Sanded. Varnished. Shiny. For my Mama.
With love. I wanted to be a good carpenter like my Dad.
Dad drank though. Dark moods. Dark scary times. Danger.
And words hurtful, abrasive, accusing. Anger, pain, scorn.
A boy wonders. About time. About forever. When it ends.
I loved my Dad. Wonderful. Skilled man. Artist, singer.
Precious and assuring. Yet. Yet. Unpredictable moments.
You can never tell about time either. Like that, it is. It is.
We farmed. Corn, melons, chili, beets, carrots, cilantro.
Onions. Even potatoes in little mounds but they died.
Corn fields at night. Irrigating. June nights. I loved forever.
My grandpa I loved very much. Time was soothing then.
We didn’t really need time when days and nights were safe.
And with him they were. A healer and respected kiva elder.
Herded his sheep. Along with my uncle Estevan. And Roy.
Roy was a strange one. Chinese manner. So people said.
From Chinatown in California. He had a gentle soft smile.
And a storyteller he was. Yes. About his horse. Lightning.
Fast and nimble and quick. Lightning, his horse. He’d ride.
Yes, ride to see his girl to call her outside. Estella! Estella!
Stories. I’d listen. The boy I was. Seeing my uncle riding.
Riding his fast and nimble horse. I’d listen and he’d smile.
Memory and time. It doesn’t count all the time. Listening.
And because mothers are always loving. Alert. Ever caring.
Mama decided we must go to Skull Valley where Dad was.
Up to Grants, the depot there, we got on the westbound train.
Sacks and boxes, a trunk, suitcase or two. Clothes, things.
What did we have? I don’t remember. Not much though.
We never had much. Poor. And lonely for Dad always away.
I wonder. I wonder. Too often that’s been the Indian story.
Father gone. Mother and kids left behind. Is it like that?
Yes, too much. Dad didn’t like working for the hard railroad.
He’d complain and rant about the crude and mean whites.
The slave rules. The company. Trains powerful, unending.
Time I thought was in the trains. Fast, loud, dangerous.
I was afraid of the powerful trains. Like I said I’d see them.
Soldiers, army troop trains, going east and going west.
Unending. I wondered where they were all going. Where?
Lightning and thunder trapped in the train power and steel.
Yet I yearned for blue song. Hollow and lonely long tone.
Coming round the bend, and something beyond the horizon.
Far away maybe. Travel. Some other dream. Youth. Yes.
I liked songs. Music I heard on the radio. Hank Williams.
And stories that rang through the air. Talk and listening.
It was the first time ever we were leaving the reservation.
Only one world till then it seemed. Acoma community. Ours.
On the edge of another world though, something strange.
And fearful too. The dark moments. Like when Daddy drank.
When there was fire from another world. An unknown.
Yet fascinating somehow, oddly, something on the far horizon.
I didn’t remember riding the train before. Ever! Until then.
Like riding thunder. The horse, Lightning, Roy talked about.
Riding off somewhere into the dark night. Fast, fast. Fast.
Riding toward night. We watched the land speeding away.
Far across the land, along the edge of it was a highway.
With cars and trucks. Moving, moving. Only slower.
Time speeds, like you speed. Only not an awareness.
Or any way to tell what is taking place. When young.
And you’re trying to furnish your own answers, solutions.
To mysteries you’re anxious about. When all’s uncertain.
Youth is not the time when time is apparent. Too slow.
Or too fast. And you don’t really have clear reasons. Yet.
At Ashfork we got off the train onto the depot platform.
I sensed being lost. Lost mother and lost children. Dusk.
Where was this world? Where did home go? Children?
Lost at the edge of a strange world with a gray green depot.
Large letters painted. Little sister is hungry. She whimpers.
Mama says, “Hold my hand.” We walk, up street, walk, walk.
It could be Indians. A family, mother and children. Lost?
Where are they going? Up the street I think. Looking.
For something to eat. My mother held only a little money.
Hamburgers we split. Water and water. Self-conscious.
Moment is time. I looked out and saw a train passing.
Our train! I thought it was our train. But it wasn’t, just fear!
Wait. Then a train down Chino Valley. Long-distance night.
Stars vanished in too much night. Long day into night.
Where does time go? Does it go nowhere but into night?
Then at the sudden edge. The horizon. A vast bowl of light.
And only at the far end, trees. And still far ahead of us.
The train engine light. Always a light showing the way.
My brother and I excited. A deer stunned by train light.
Stilled. Stark. A cut stone. The dazzling moment held us.
Youth and time. Nothing like it. Thrilled. Never until then.
Years later I tried to tell about that moment to a love.
But love is time too. So. Can’t do anything but live time.
The horizon and beyond. Full of stars. Even unseen.
Always belief is firmer than faith. With and without dreams.
We arrived in Skull Valley early in the morning. Three-thirty?
Where were we? On the other side of the moon from Acoma.
A mother and her children and assorted bags and boxes.
Dreams. Time. Horizon. Farther from home than belief.
It felt like that. Within moment when you can’t turn away.
A train depot on the other side of the moon. Deserted.
After the train pulled away. Only the rails and starshine.
What’s a boy say to his mother? Earlier than anything.
A man whose picture I’d seen. White man. With a cap.
With a visor. Sitting at a tall wooden desk with shelves.
And a metal puzzle thing making clicking-clacking noises.
Who spoke with Mama. Who smiled. Who wondered at us.
An Indian woman with Indian children. Who were strangers.
Like we just came from the planet Acoma. The other side.
Of day. Of the present early morning night in that moment.
The telegrapher with the visor said. I think. I think he did.
He knew my father. Knew where he lived. Two miles away.
So we took a road. Early, early morning night trek. Time.
Shimmers in an odd amazing way. Within what might be.
A boy and a story. The dawn coming. Horizon ever so near.
When we knocked on his railroad worker housing door.
Daddy was shocked. In his underwear. Shadows upon.
And the background of his and Mama’s and our history.
We come to discover each other. All failures and gains.
Counting and mattering, no matter the time or sequence.
We laugh and hug and cry. Daddy. Daddy. We’re here.
Once again together. Family, history, travel, time, love.
To say what time is, even fifty years in the past to now.
In this moment, Skull Valley is just as real as it ever was.
Memory we cross and cross again. Treks, trauma, and on.
We do know what time is. It is loss and gain. A lingering.
Within discovery we come to ourselves. Finding. Destiny.
Moments recalled like friends. It was that way or another.
We’re fairly certain either way. Stories. They are with us.
Time doesn’t forsake. It doesn’t soothe or decrease. Never.
Skull Valley. A time for a boy. History engulfed beyond.
When I went back. Recently. I ate with friends at the cafe.
By the railroad track. I was fascinated by photographs.
Of the mountain lions in the mountains nearby. Ever there.
No matter what. And the stories of bones. Tall tales or truths.
They’re told. Apaches, it’s said. Wagon trains. Lies or no.
Our history is more than here. We know more than realize.
We realize what we don’t know. Or want to know. Truths.
Stalk us, just like they found. A boy. More than fifty years ago.
He discovered a world beyond Acoma. A world apart.
And a world together as time, memory, as story. As his own.
We seek and are found. Secure. Actual. Safe. And serene.
Last summer near Prescott that boy fifty vast years later.
Found carved images on stone walls that fit his hands.
Carved in time. Eternal as stone. Past and present. Ever.
Let’s say it is ever an ongoing story.
Culture and the Universe
BY SIMON J. ORTIZ
Two nights ago
in the canyon darkness,
only the half-moon and stars,
only mere men.
Prayer, faith, love,
existence.
We are measured
by vastness beyond ourselves.
Dark is light.
Stone is rising.
I don’t know
if humankind understands
culture: the act
of being human
is not easy knowledge.
With painted wooden sticks
and feathers, we journey
into the canyon toward stone,
a massive presence
in midwinter.
We stop.
Lean into me.
The universe
sings in quiet meditation.
We are wordless:
I am in you.
Without knowing why
culture needs our knowledge,
we are one self in the canyon.
And the stone wall
I lean upon spins me
wordless and silent
to the reach of stars
and to the heavens within.
It’s not humankind after all
nor is it culture
that limits us.
It is the vastness
we do not enter.
It is the stars
we do not let own us.
Busted Boy
BY SIMON J. ORTIZ
He couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old,
likely even fifteen. Skinny black teenager, loose sweater.
When I got on Bus #6 at Prince and 1st Avenue,
he got on too and took a seat across from me.
A kid I didn’t notice too much because two older guys,
street pros reeking with wine, started talking to me.
They were going to California, get their welfare checks,
then come back to Arizona in time for food stamps.
When the bus pulled into Ronstadt Transit Center,
the kid was the last to get off the bus right behind me.
I started to cross the street to wait for Bus #8
when two burly men, one in a neat leather jacket
and the other in a sweat shirt, both cool yet stern,
smoothly grabbed the kid and backed him against
a streetlight pole and quickly cuffed him to the pole.
Plastic handcuffs. Practiced manner. Efficiently done.
Along with another Indian, I watch what’s happening.
Nobody seems to notice or they don’t really want to see.
Everything is quiet and normal, nothing’s disturbed.
The other Indian and I exchange glances, nod, turn away.
Busted boy. Busted Indians. Busted lives. Busted again.
I look around for the street guys going to California.
But they’re already gone, headed for the railroad tracks.
I’m new in Tucson but I’m not a stranger to this scene.
Waiting for the bus, I don’t look around for plainclothes.
I know they’re there, in this America, waiting. There; here.
Waiting for busted boys, busted Indians, busted lives.
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