WHEN WRITING ABOUT THE WEST
by LILLIAN EMERICK VALENTINE
I begin with horses across the plains wild
herds are being removed in the thousands there is that
question of belonging of how long it takes to be considered
part of an ecology of course you could not ask
this in the same way about my people there being in our case
the violence of choice
my country has a habit
of speaking in the past tense it is a horse that is hard
to break when I say my family came over say
Oregon trail I want to anchor it in the preterite a tense
sometimes referred to as simple past but there is
a slipperiness on the rails of language the past participle barreling on
had come had risen had taken a sense of continuance
that obscures the ending
for years my family had eaten
thanksgiving dinner beneath the land-grant inheritance
framed in gold today again a man without shelter screaming
by the river I heard a woman say aloud sometimes
the compassion fills up there the passive voice was another
kind of violence my silence a third there is a way of speaking
about nothing I have never mastered the broad emptiness
of platitudes an open field
I have ridden a racehorse
at full gallop felt his sweat beneath my legs former wild
stallion once started could not be stopped when I was
ready to be done I jumped off
there are places
in the mountains where the ground echoes underfoot ancient
glaciers rushing on below like lived history hurtling under the language
we use to describe it my country has a way of speaking without
saying anything which in its way says so much my body has a way
of living on this land my ancestors once took
I mean to say
had taken do take have been taking would be—but here I am afraid
to bring it to the present continuous to conjugate the fact that I
am taking.
Lillian Emerick Valentine is a poet and farmer from Oregon. Her work can be found in Ecotone, The Journal, Frontier Poetry, Salamander, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel.
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