Linda Hogan

Linda K. Hogan (née Henderson, born July 16, 1947) is an American poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She previously served as the Chickasaw Nation’s writer in residence. Hogan is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.

 

 

A STORY
Linda Hogan

There is a woman who lives on a bed.
She is awake
watching the magpie that comes each morning.
Awake, she listens to the creek downhill,
and how one bird answers another.
She smells moist earth at sunrise
and memorizes how light
falls each day through a different angle of window.
 
She read about a bed-fast woman who heard a wild snail
eating leaves beside her bed.
She lived with that beautiful snail
beside her. Soon they knew one another.
In my world such true connection is honest love.
 
I too wanted snails.
But I live already
with wasps here many generations
who know me well enough
to ask to be let out for their daily chores.
 
They hunger and thirst in the fall
so I also feed them
before their deaths
then close the windows and doors against winter freeze.
Each night, too, I hear, feel, and love the cat,
softly purring beside me.
 
One cold night I went outside to look
at the lynx who appeared from a Northern sky constellation.
God knows there are medicines
walking forward in the cold of winter.
Here, the most powerful
is the walker on stones, rock walls, water or ice.
I know her lookout; Mountain lion, up there on the stone,
and she knows mine.
For her
I was named as a child.
We are kin of the same ilk,
and always I want to walk away with her,
the young, across the winter shine of the universe,
away from the body curve still in the bed.

======

THE HISTORY OF RED
Linda Hogan

First
there was some other order of things
never spoken
but in dreams of darkest creation.
 
Then there was black earth,
lake, the face of light on water.
Then the thick forest all around
that light,
and then the human clay
whose blood we still carry
rose up in us
who remember caves with red bison
painted in their own blood,
after their kind.
 
A wildness
swam inside our mothers,
desire through closed eyes,
a new child
wearing the red, wet mask of birth,
delivered into this land
already wounded,
stolen and burned
beyond reckoning.
 
Red is this yielding land
turned inside out
by a country of hunters
with iron, flint and fire.
Red is the fear
that turns a knife back
against men, holds it at their throats,
and they cannot see the claw on the handle,
the animal hand
that haunts them
from some place inside their blood.
 
So that is hunting, birth,
and one kind of death.
Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.
Red was the infinite fruit
of stolen bodies.
The doctors wanted to know
what invented disease
how wounds healed
from inside themselves
how life stands up in skin,
if not by magic.
 
They divined the red shadows of leeches
that swam in white bowls of water:
they believed stars
in the cup of sky.
They cut the wall of skin
to let
what was bad escape
but they were reading the story of fire
gone out
and that was a science.
 
As for the animal hand on death’s knife,
knives have as many sides
as the red father of war
who signs his name
in the blood of other men.
 
And red was the soldier
who crawled
through a ditch
of human blood in order to live.
It was the canal of his deliverance.
It is his son who lives near me.
Red is the thunder in our ears
when we meet.
Love, like creation,
is some other order of things.
 
Red is the share of fire
I have stolen
from root, hoof, fallen fruit.
And this was hunger.
 
Red is the human house
I come back to at night
swimming inside the cave of skin
that remembers bison.
In that round nation
of blood
we are all burning,
red, inseparable fires
the living have crawled
and climbed through
in order to live
so nothing will be left
for death at the end.
 
This life in the fire, I love it.
I want it,
this life.
 
====
 
INSIDE
Linda Hogan
 
How something is made flesh
no one can say. The buffalo soup
becomes a woman
who sings every day to her horses
or summons another to her private body
saying come, touch, this is how
it begins, the path of a newly born
who, salvaged from other lives and worlds,
will grow to become a woman, a man,
with a heart that never rests,
and the gathered berries,
the wild grapes
enter the body,
human wine
which can love,
where nothing created is wasted;
the swallowed grain
takes you through the dreams
of another night,
the deer meat becomes hands
strong enough to work.
 
But I love most
the white-haired creature
eating green leaves;
the sun shines there
swallowed, showing in her face
taking in all the light,
 
and in the end
when the shadow from the ground
enters the body and remains,
in the end, you might say,
This is myself
still unknown, still a mystery.
 
====
 
MEMBRANE 1
Linda Hogan
 
Being merely atoms unbound

what if there were a way to open the light
and heal ourselves
simply reaching between those atoms?
Cell to cell, the membrane
lets in even the finest particles, no matter they might
harm our lungs, our stomach, all that desires sweet air
and water fresh from earth.
We are each just one more child
traveling the unimagined universe,
a single organism with only one story
wishing to embrace the immeasurable feel of love.
How simple that should be
when birds have an inner language
passing through the silence that tells them when to rise and fly
all together. Perhaps something waits to be spoken between us;
the sea of which we were first made,
the thinnest skin of dark matter,
then my breath touching yours, so close to me,
the flesh of our lips touching one another, some feeling
rises and we sense something shining in our blood.
We are drinking in the light of stars crossing night sky.
I feel your thoughts, the fragrance of flowers opening
with the light of morning, the dew on petals,
the seed who opens in the rain.

====

TRUTH IS ALSO A POEM
Linda Hogan
 

Pretty Shield, even then, said nobody believed
the white man could kill all the buffalo.
No one believed in an evil that large.
 
Still some don’t believe they can
empty this world of an entire presence
and diminish the whole of our lives.
 
One country now closes in on another
telling themselves which are not real humans
and in truth too many do believe it.
 
What really is belief? Simply a convenient thought?
But I saw the lemon trees, so beautiful,
before they destroyed them all.
 
The humans and other graceful animals
had gone to those trees, even bitter. Singing birds as well.
Haven’t you seen them just as they were golden?
 
Later the believers dozed all the olives
so many years ago some barely remember
that no one fought back.
 
In my life, I’ve seen how the thread of evil
may stretch across any continent or ocean
with men following their orders, however wrong.
 
Did you ever think there might be this violent eradication?
Do you wonder how many other life forms may be feeling it, too,
and remember your god, in whatever form, is watching and listening.