One Speaks Of Totems

One Speaks of Totems
by Robert Kallansa

American hair, American shoes,
he wears blue jeans, faded, but new,
and a wool vest decorated in the Tsimshian style.
Sanguine wolves on felt,
pooling hotly around his fat hips,
bubbling from holes in his heart and his barrowed memory,
a squat woman figure on the back,
hairy and beaked—Tribal?
Lined with store-bought, mother-of-pearl buttons
sewn on with shiny, black thread.
Mother, mother, mother—Mother’s mother!
A matrilineal heritage swimming back ten thousand years,
breaching the blood and placentas of Tsimshian women.
Yet he talks of his Uncles, they raised him,
taught him to fish for publicity and Salmon!
Uncles under Mothers
teaching Potlatch and Salmon fishing
like it was before the liquor,
before Tsimshian meant three-quarters human being.
He doesn’t show his face when he talks,
eyes on his tools, splayed out for exhibition—
knives and chisels, some bent, some curled like talons.
He uses these claws to cut Cedar into Totems.
He represents the people of the Totem poles,
talks about his people to keep them alive.
He talks, and sings, and stutters, and they come to life,
lining their small, wind-whipped Alaskan beach like buttons.
Biting into Salmon backs,
feet painted hot and bloody, just out of mother.
Ten thousand. Five hundred. Fifty. One!
Three-quarters human being,
one quarter something else.

Read about the Tsimshian people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsimshian_language

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