I wish I could get my poem to steam like that.
Lists build momentum, push things to edge,
which edge doesn't matter,
direction doesn't count.
Motion does.
But you can't just stack boxes;
I've tried that.
Maybe lists don't create momentum;
maybe momentum creates lists,
one blur down the highway,
the stacking and flattening of signs,
Boulder, Boise, Butte, Billings,
or wadded-up lives all thrown in the same trash can.
In Gallup they take polls,
count the countless Indians staggering home,
or away from home,
2 a.m., along 40, 32, 666.
Nobody gives a damn.
Just counting souls lost for the record books,
scientifically tracking the loss of steam,
the winding down to nothing, not even hope,
the old way dried up in Hunter's Wash,
the new way selling soil by the shovel load,
air to power the plant.
Who can face that with a sober eye?
©Steve Brown 1993
I wrote this long before I married Marci and we lived on the Navajo Nation for eight years. It grew out of admiration for a song, not a connection to a place. I simply got a vibe and followed it. I'd been across the Reservation a couple times, but that's it. The details came from looking at a map and using my imagination.
Having made my home on the Rez afterward, I'm surprised how much I got right. It feels like I already knew the area well when I wrote the poem, but I didn't.
Still, it is definitely an outsider-looking-in poem. It gets the details right the way a documentary does. What it depicts does indeed exist, but it is accidentally bias due to cultural differences, due to the vantage point of the writer. It looks down without intending to.
Having lived there since then, I can say there is a lot less loss of steam on reservations than outsiders think. Yes, there is poverty. Yes, there is alcoholism and other addictions, but I can tell you that there is more quiet desperation in white, suburban TV-land America than on the Rez.
Maybe it's because we don't have rodeo, or bingo. Maybe it's because we are divorced from the land or are too tied to our career-driven lives. I'm not sure. Maybe its that we don't have mutton stew and Navajo tea, but whatever it is, I definitely got it wrong when I associated loss of steam with the Rez.
Yet, the wonderful thing about poetry is that each work is a self-contained reality, driven by its own sun, its own energy. A work of art can be slanted, or outright inaccurate, and still be true within its own world.
Life is hard; people lose steam; they sell out or are sold out. They give up. That is real, so this poem is real. It follows a strand of energy to an end.
That is really all a poem has to do, and do well, to be.
It also honors a great song, Peter Gabriel's "Steam."
