Page 20 - WTP Vol. X #5

Translated to Somewhere Else (continued from preceding page)
another slat of wood bearing the more accurate word, “Massacre.” It had started to rain. We were silent for
a while, then visited by a young Lakota woman with
a beautiful face and very bad teeth. A year later, my wife (whose pen name is Cally Conan-Davies) pub- lished a poem about it called “Wounded Knee, South Dakota”:
Her bracelets made of bead and buffalo bone, sunbursts arcing a way into the dark,
blue for sky and water, green for meadow lark. She ties me to something I can never own.
Painted on a board above the ditch
the agony of speech in one changed word— battle recharged into massacre.
A boy appears holding out a dream catcher
but the soft archery of rain begins to fall. The stacked grave bears a single cross. Cars rot in the field. The sky is enormous, and a tree—feeling the air for a lost touch.
America is a country given to forgetting, and now in its anger and division, alternative histories are pelted back and forth like brimstone. I may feel hurt by stories, but I am not harmed by them, and the stories of Wounded Knee, both the massacre of 1890 and
the protests of the 1970s, serve to remind me of my brotherhood with all the lost.
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So what does it mean, now that I have been trans- lated to somewhere else? I look out my windows in Tasmania and see a landscape not unlike the San Juan Islands of Washington State, my childhood home. Having grown up on land still inhabited by Lummi, Nooksack and other Salish people (though they were generally segregated on reservations), I now live on land of the Nuenone and the Melukerdee. Not long ago I participated in a fire workshop led by a young man descended from one of the Aboriginal bands in the northwest corner of the island. What is the de- gree of his blood relation, and what is the accuracy of his cultural memory? I do not really know. I can only respond to it with respect and attention, hoping to learn from him how to live less destructively on this land. We are all, to some extent, inventing our stories as much as remembering them, and we needn’t as-
sume knowledge of absolute truth to know that truth matters, and story matters, and meaning matters.
I learned as much from a very young Englishman named John Keats, who called it Negative Capabil-
ity, a way of residing with “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” God bless John Keats, I say, and God bless D. H. Lawrence.
I am just beginning to learn how to love my home. I love it as much as I love anywhere I have ever lived, and more, but I am newly translated and have much to learn. Australian people are the best help, includ- ing Australian writers and artists. I love the best fictions of David Malouf and Kate Grenville, Tim Win- ton, Patrick White and Richard Flanagan, the essays of Helen Garner and the late Clive James (who was translated to England), the poems of Les Murray and Kevin Hart (who has been translated to America), Ju- dith Wright and Dorothy Porter and Gwen Harwood, Peter Porter (translated to England) and Kenneth Slessor and so many others I haven’t the presence of mind to name. This could become a list poem when
it should rather be an anthology of quotations, all the many words that are teaching me to live and write. I bow down to Yothu Yindi and Paul Kelly and Archie Roach. Because I am hard of hearing, I am slow to learn the words of the songs. But that does not pre- vent me from singing and dancing to them. The best artists teach me not to judge too hastily, but to reside with beauty, as well as my uncertainty and doubt.
None of this prevents me from loving the best in America, even with its errors and troubles. As I write, the war in Ukraine reminds me again how violent societies can be, how vigilant we must be against the arrogance of the powerful everywhere.
Every day, I am translated anew. Every hour, every minute, the river flows by me and the Southern Ocean surges toward me and the stars roll overhead. There is work to be done. I am not one thing, and I have never been one thing. I am a man who loves, and love is in motion.
Mason is the former poet laureate of Colorado. His many books include Ludlow: A Verse Novel, The Sound: New and Selected Poems, Davey McGravy: Tales to be Read Aloud to Children and Adult Children and Voices, and Places: Essays. A new collection of poems, Pacific Light, will be published this year. He lives in Tasma- nia, the island state of Australia.
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