Free Original Fire by Louise Erdrich Page A

gray rolls underneath the couch.
    Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
    Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
    or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
    who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
    matches, at all.
    Except one word to another. Or a thought.
    Pursue the authentic—decide first
    what is authentic,
    then go after it with all your heart.
    Your heart, that place
    you don’t even think of cleaning out.
    That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
    Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
    or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
    again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
    or weep over anything at all that breaks.
    Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
    in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
    and talk to the dead
    who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
    patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
    Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
    except what destroys
    the insulation between yourself and your experience
    or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
    this ruse you call necessity.

Morning Fire
    My baby, eating rainbows of sun
    focused through a prism in my bedroom window,
    puts her mouth to the transparent fire,
    and licks up the candy colors
    that tremble on the white sheets.
    The stain spreads across her face.
    She has only one tooth,
    a grain of white rice
    that keeps flashing.
    She keeps eating as the day begins
    until the rainbows are all inside of her.
    And then she smiles
    and such a light pours over me.
    It is not that white blaze
    that strikes the earth all around you
    when you learn of the death
    of one you love. Or the next light
    that strips away your skin.
    Not the radiance
    that unwraps you to the bone.
    Soft and original fire,
    allow me to curl around you in the white sheets
    and keep feeding you the light
    from my own body
    until we drift into the deep
    of our being.
    Air, fire, golden earth.

Asiniig
    The Ojibwe word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are alive. They are addressed as grandmothers and grandfathers. The universe began with a conversation between stones.
    1
    A thousand generations of you live and die
    in the space of a single one of our thoughts.
    A complete thought is a mountain.
    We don’t have very many ideas.
     
    When the original fire which formed us
    subsided,
    we thought of you.
    We allowed you to occur.
    We are still deciding whether that was
    wise.

2 Children
    We have never denied you anything
    you truly wanted
    no matter how foolish
    no matter how destructive
    but you never seem to learn.
     
    That which you cry for,
    this wish to be like us,
    we have tried to give it to you
    in small doses, like a medicine, every day
    so you will not be frightened.
    Still, when death comes
    you weep,
    you do not recognize it
    as the immortality you crave.

3 The Sweat Lodge
    We love it when you sing to us,
    and speak to us,
    and lift us from the heart of the fire
    with the deer’s antlers, and place us
    in the center of the lodge.
    Then we are at our most beautiful,
    Powerful red blossoms,
    we are breathing.
    We can reach through your bones
    to where you hurt.
    You call us grandfather, grandmother.
    You scatter bits of cedar, sage, wikenh, tobacco
    and bear root over us,
    and then the water
    which cracks us to the core.
     
    When we break ourselves open—
    that is when the healing starts.
    When you break yourselves open—
    that is how the healing continues.

4 Love
    If only you could be more like us
    when it comes to the affections.
    Have you ever seen a stone
    throw itself?
    On the other hand
    whose idea do you think it is
    to fly through the air?
    Mystery is not a passive condition.
    To see a thing so perfectly what it is—
    doesn’t it make you
    want to hold it,
    to marvel, to touch
    its answered question?

5 Gratitude
    You have no call to treat us this way.
    We allow you to put us to every use.
    Yet, when have you ever
    stopped in the street to lay your