{"id":1231,"date":"2018-09-19T21:51:58","date_gmt":"2018-09-19T21:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/?p=1231"},"modified":"2018-09-20T14:23:34","modified_gmt":"2018-09-20T14:23:34","slug":"two-poems-by-heather-cahoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/2018\/09\/19\/two-poems-by-heather-cahoon\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Poems by Heather Cahoon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heather Cahoon<\/strong>\u00a0received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana where she was the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholar. She won the 2005 Merriam Frontier Award for publication of her chapbook,\u00a0<\/span>Elk Thirst,<\/em>\u00a0and was awarded a Montana Arts Council Artist Innovation Award in 2015 to support the completion of her book-length manuscript entitled,\u00a0<\/span>Horselfy Dress<\/em>. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including\u00a0<\/span>Hanging Loose, South Dakota Review, New Poets of the American West<\/em>, and\u00a0<\/span>Poems Across the Big Sky: An Anthology of Montana Poets<\/em>.\u00a0Heather also holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D in history, anthropology, and Native American Studies. She lives in Missoula, Montana and works\u00a0as policy analyst, poet and artist. Heather is from the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana and is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

COYOTE AND THE CROSS<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I.<\/p>\n

When the west surged into the center<\/p>\n

of the world\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the word pulled back into heavy<\/p>\n

honey-yellow lines<\/p>\n

and scarlet patches drawn<\/p>\n

across the slight shoulders of certain blackbirds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But reality rubs raw the wounds of all stories<\/p>\n

until the scoured bones of self-evidence<\/p>\n

are all that\u2019s left.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Battling inside this orbed shell of space<\/p>\n

we find\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 stories are no different<\/p>\n

from other living forms<\/p>\n

the ragged haired aligned<\/p>\n

with every<\/p>\n

primal instinct to avoid demise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Consider Coyote, headbone raised to greet the night<\/p>\n

song through black tree moss like witches\u2019 hair.<\/p>\n

He delivers a message<\/p>\n

bound in the body<\/p>\n

of unwritten texts.\u00a0 Like birds, ring-necked<\/p>\n

and refined, his cries confirm the un\/believable.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

II.<\/p>\n

I count the breaths between bodies<\/p>\n

each syllable thrust from the chest\u2014<\/p>\n

from Salish to English, Francis to Clara,<\/p>\n

Antoine\/Atw\u00e9n<\/em>, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Mal\u00ed Sop\u00ed,<\/em> through Sop\u00ed, <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Py\u00e9l<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 back to\u00a0\u00a0 X\u0323all\u0313qs\u2014<\/em>or Shining Shirt,<\/p>\n

the medicine person who saw men in long robes, the sign<\/p>\n

of a cross, saw it all<\/p>\n

flung into being when,<\/p>\n

in slurred double whistles on the midwinter cusp<\/p>\n

of forest and field, a black capped chickadee<\/p>\n

sang the shadow sounds of his name.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But even before that the forest stood smoldering,<\/p>\n

apparitions with arms raised towards the sky.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

META<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Transformation always and in everything as in even false hellebore<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

recognizes the convertibility<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

of all phenomena, the casting of one thing<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

into another,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 as in <\/em>Spokani became the sun as in Coyote is a man <\/em><\/p>\n

is an animal is a teacher repeatedly killed and reborn.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

He suffers an endless series of deaths, some metaphorical some metaphysical, each one <\/em><\/p>\n

metamorphic.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(Spokani<\/em><\/strong>: <\/em>Son of Amotqn<\/em>, the Creator<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heather Cahoon\u00a0received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana where she was the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholar. She won the 2005 Merriam Frontier Award for publication of her chapbook,\u00a0Elk Thirst,\u00a0and was awarded a Montana Arts Council Artist Innovation Award in 2015 to support the completion of her book-length manuscript entitled,\u00a0Horselfy Dress. Her writing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":1237,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,8,1],"tags":[160,195,193,194],"class_list":["post-1231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-basaltblog","category-featured-articles","category-poem-of-the-month","category-uncategorized","tag-contemporary-american-poetry","tag-coyote","tag-heather-cahoon","tag-salish"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1231"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1244,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231\/revisions\/1244"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}