Smoke Signals, Snowflakes, and Breath of Fire
Shadow Box, the Second. From The Art of the Girl in the Ekphrastic
A proem’s a real thing you know. As real as the paper airplane that precedes The origami the poem will become When it takes flight: Plane, bird or stingray. Electricity fills the air Like the backdrop To that funny story I meant to tell Before I got derailed into the beginning Of this here proem to my poem. So: I come into Sherman Alexie’s life, Or he into mine, From the weirdest angle. Oh behold how I obfuscate! The hour holds hands with me As I rehearse And gather my skirts Mid-air and observant As a sponge the sky holds Before it cries birds whose fleets Could be swimming, So elegantly they align their arrays. It’s an old movie poster with the tone Of Wells’ War of the Worlds Where I first met Sherman. I enter the story here, or he does, Depending on your angle of approach. In fact, it was the poster for SMOKE SIGNALS. It was at a theater in Berkeley in 1998 That I passed Everyday on my walk to campus With the man who was not About-to-be-my-husband yet but Who would be by next summer’s lusty Start - Fiancée however briefly - Where I first met Sherman. In the Smoke Of that signal, there, On that corner, in that window, At that time, in the reflection That looked backed at me And asked no questions because Eclipsed by a voice Which overtook it with its bully sneer. In that moment, I saw the poster for the movie SMOKE SIGNALS in the window of the theater Like a portal that was opening with my Family coming through it. “Is that your family?” A voice caught in the shell of its capacity issued a highly nasal snort, reserved for the effeminate gristle of an upper-class sinus canal with little to no toleration for itself. The imitation of a laugh looked around for approval, and, finding none, died back into its forlorn posture of contemptuous self-congratulation shadowed by the imperious silence it left in its wake meant to signal the imposition I had just become by refusing to play along with some lighthearted ribbing, an attitude that was most histrionically expressed in the sudden barometric shift of his personal mood as the mockery failed to ignite any reaction in its prey beyond a long, level, cool, unwavering gaze, held long enough to turn him over in a few times. My family was made up of three kids. Just like in the poster for SMOKE SIGNALS. And we were the spitting image of those three kids. That much was true. Consider me a grown Scout Finch. No one ended up on the wrong side of themselves on the pavement that day. But no one doubted they should have. That said, that moment never stopped my yet-to-be fiancée from remarking on my “family resemblance” to the Spokane tribe every time we passed the poster on our way to campus that year. Which was twice everyday, as long as the movie played, which must have been at least a few months. He wanted to let me know he knew I was Thomas. In the poster. It was meant to be A triple-decker Dagwood-sandwich-sized Insult Delivered directly to the sensibility of Me, a female with a sense of self Respect. He was calling me a man. An Indian man. And a freak. He was right though. …I was Thomas from SMOKE SIGNALS I had to be by my yet-to-be fiancée’s spell which cast my sis as Suzy Song (they twins) and Victor (same) as my brother. Is it a story only an Indian can love? No one seems to understand Unless… We saw Shakespeare in Love At that same ostentatious-curved and Hungry modern theater So different from the one we saw the Picnic at Hanging Rock in, itself precursor To the Castro, where Orson Welles’ Precocious if late-released Touch of Evil Would premiere later that year. Where are we now? I think I know It’s familiar terrain Watching it all Fill up with Snow.