Michael Wasson (born 1990) is an American Nimíipuu poet from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. Wasson is the recipient of a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship in Literature, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Commencement Award in Poetry. In 2019 he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
A Poem for the háawtnin’ & héwlekipx [The Holy Ghost of You, the Space & Thin Air]
Michael Wasson
’inept’ipéecwise cilaakt: (I am wanting to) hold a wake / (I am wanting to) hold the body
Had this body been made
of nothing
but its bright skeleton & autumn-
blown skin
I would shut my eyes
into butterfly wings
on a mapped earth. Had the gods
even their own gods, I could re-
learn the very shape
of my face in a puddle of sky-
colored rain. Extinction is
to the hands
as the lips are
to the first gesture
the tongue carves into the slick mouth
just before
prayer. In every way
the world fails
to light the soft inner
machine & marrow
of the bones in motion — I imagine
smudging my tongue along a wall
like the chest
I dare to plunge in-
to, the Braille of every node
blooming out
as if the first day-
light of wintered
snowfall. This night —
like any fleshed boy I dream
of a lyre strung
with the torn hair of hímiin &
in place
of my dried mouth — there
it is. Whispers
in the blue-black dark after c’álalal
c’álalal reach out
toward my teeth to strum
this wilting instrument. &
once awake, I’m holding
its frame to build
a window back in-
to the world. Had this body
been held after all
these years, I would enter
you to find my frozen self
& touch. Like the gutted animal
we take
in offering. & live.