Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Antoinette Nora Claypoole
51 years old
Taos, NM
antoinette nora claypoole, MFA in Creative Writing (poetry/fiction) from Antioch Los Angeles, co-editor of Wild Embers Press in Taos, New Mexico and author of new work RIVERS IN HER EYES (April 2003), as well as book about AIM (American Indian Movement warrior Anna Mae Pictou Aquash) WHO WOULD UNBRRAID HER HAIR: the legend of annie mae (www.dickshovel.com/clay8.html). Currently helping the Taos Poetry Circus thrive, published in too many anthologies/papers to list and truly believes the whole world is her very own claw foot tub.
Trail to Blue Lake
for the Tewa (Taos Pueblo People)
One.
Smooth landing lips hand me you. Lost renegade unborn inside a scene I sketched at seventeen. Maybe dark haired man, silent warrior of a raging nation is longing for celebration of our skin.
"Helicopter war zone man, you wear the wounds of many falls all clothed in braided power. Let me undo your hair ties." Coax, strive to memorize haunted kiva eyes speak of mystery sublime
in childlike tenderness, we are undressing rippled goose bump flesh in ceremonial secret fusions together come.To feel a place we knew we were before.
Two.
He was paratrooper in the war. Which one is unclear. There is a haze rising through his eyes as he tries to tell the story. The scar. Lives. On his beautiful red skin. I kiss it like I did once at Fort Meyers Beach. Circa 1977.
He flew prop planes of cocaine back then. Between the Keyes to whoever he pleased. Vietnam Vet you bet. And more than that.Tells me as I try to suck venom from chest. Wound. "Shrapnel, baby. Shrapnel." Rising any
Time, he was, like that sliver of hot metal shot into flesh, rising randomly to take your life. Stops a heart. Right there. "Roulette, he said, a trickster souvenir travelling the blood, can rip spirit from the body. Anytime. Gone home. Dead."
Loving him is like that. Shrapnel. You never know when touch will activate a shutdown, an unrehearsed alert "Flirt with me you take on the war which took me as a whore" he always said just as we would, like kids, climb through thickets of our lowrider bed.
Once I woke in the morning feeling that classic loving him was a farout shrapnel remedy to find a note that read "you deserve to find yourself a husband, baby." Baby never came inside our coming home again.
Three
Pueblo man who once lived near Blue Lake was sent to war before the President of the United States returned the lake to his People. Some things are better left between the dead.
He had been a paratrooper. The scar which travelled down his back was long and tender, like a kiss from a sailor to his new bride, portside right before he rides the ship to Normandy.
I slept inside this scar, beneath a wintered sky, tasting winds of war machine in the arroyo near our breath, vowing to catch him as he fell from cliffs of dreams which never included me
once. Brown rice and miso hippie. Macrobiotics and protest. Until fires of my lover vet converted me like Southern Baptist to a Roman Catholic. I drink his blood.
Become his body. Sacrifice flesh of his war each night he enters. Me. Saluting, honoring where he had gone. Praying. My son would never know this place
where war takes boys returns to their women shrapnelled parcels, shreds of human phantoms sealed in the land mine intentionally laid out to slay the children they once were.
Four.
What do I speak to my warrior lover "war is our love our ancient demise?" That once youthful conversion a lost Alexandrian tragedy burning down Persephone, an incomplete reality our years an endless mesa split by the river's gorge of our terrors, longing and deliverance.
What do I speak to my loves gathering at perpetual shrines built to all the times war has slain our selves? Do I blind their eyes, bury their efforts in a legend, a cedar chest, a pinon bonfire devouring the reason they left and returned home. So many years ago. No.
I roam the once a marshland beneath Taos mountain, ride an appaloosa into a sacred canyon showing them the way to that old place beside Blue Lake. Smitten I will shapeshift delicately into place before these words needed to be written. Resurrect a time of innocence. Tatoo us a home. Roam days of cool bliss into fierce heat. Kiss the tears, tear those scars from burning flesh revealling old ones holy peace deep in monsoon wind I will whisper "you blow through me, typhoon love, dissolving time, we are. Becoming places always seen before, we are choosing dreams we never meant to lose."
