Swallowed Light

by Michael Wasson

Overview

Ocean Vuong meets Natalie Diaz in dreamlike, blood-soaked verse that explores the cost of memory and mourning.

Swallowed Light begins at the opened clearing of myth, at the mouth of history. In his breathtaking debut poetry collection, Michael Wasson writes into the gaps left by a legacy of erasure—the wholly American fracture of colonialism—where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom against its own vanishing. These poems mourn and build with pattern and intricacy, intuition and echo, calling ocean and heartbreak and basalt, monsters and bullets and bones, until they form one vibrant song.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596001
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	05/10/2022
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael Wasson is Nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. He is the author of Swallowed Light (Copper Canyon, 2021) and This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017). In 2019 he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Read an Excerpt

Face-to-Face with One of the Gods

’éetu: so be it, he says—
& I ignite a flame

striking a wooden match along the torso of

my god: a face mirroring a boy afraid of only him-

self: a shadow spills behind us

like long standing trees on the first broken

morning of the new year:
he slides a finger inside

my mouth: a forgotten bird-
song droning louder than

our shivering: my tongue
I feel bruising: his fingertip

somehow a softened pit of fruit: this sugared

nail: my mouth shut as I look up toward him

in the light: wind through the trees: wind in

his matted fur: my hair a forest fire: our faces now

gone—but the taste of one last chance

to live.


On the Aggrieved

There’s a white wall & just beyond is another—a soft voice says just behind me. Every friend you’ve ever had will pass through here. The kitchen is a mess.
Isn’t it your turn to wash the dishes again?
Go make kindling for this wall. The hatchet’s there.
Warm up this house because it’s winter again
& skin is another word for forgetting your blood is in motion. Check the closet where your brother is held four inches above the carpet. Take his large hands to clean the ash in the fire stove. Check the dresser for the pistol your mother gave your nephew.
Search the pillows for any resin left of every dream here whittled down by another beginning to night. We call that dusk. So get naked & turn off the light you’ve left on for twenty-five years. Silly boy. Look in the mirror. When you hold his left-handed knife to the thick vein in your neck do you hear the wall say steady
yourself? Or is it him’pe’ewyíin hiwc’éeye because it’s better
to shoot yourself in the mouth? To hear a name call back to you through a silence made from a body half yours. Take the buck knife & finally cut into the paint. Part what you can. Until it’s nothing but you & every broken-open body standing together in the room. Put your hand through the hole you made. Reach out to the unspoken rainfall cooling your wrecked hands. Say to it that there’s a white wall. Say you broke past the bones & into the heart. Reach farther until you touch another hand & you know someone’s there just outside. Feel how the rain might slow into snow & your breath brightens from the dark held in your mouth.


On the Horizon

& I said let there be dark pouring from the mouth at day break. Let there be an aftertaste in the back of the throat. Let each locust leap from the slow light being dragged over the earth.
Let every angel not named
Michael ask do you not know
the single click in the mouth
is a tear you are
to always live in? Let the garden remember fire for it is you who will dress the wounds of this place. Let another god forget you were ever born.
Let light begin &
blackout from remembering flesh as a touch to tell you the skull once kissed the blood laced with warmth held a body in place years ago.
That silence is forgotten between each soft blow of the heart until we finally stop. A name we never speak anymore. A head wound by living a life here. Tonight let me tell you human form is meant to be a beauty I will continue to ruin.


Self–Portrait Toward a Fugue [No. ___ in __♭ Minor]

Even in my wildest dreams, there I am held in the arms of my country: a country leaving me with the crushed shine of a man’s shadow: where I am a boy again surrounded by my god’s failure of a forest: where the bodies of men are silhouettes slipping their fingers down my throat: I say I will change the world in my wildest dreams—which means the bullets loaded in my mouth are only teeth: & only crooked teeth
& not the white lilac-
like stains leading me to a window: so clear in my wildest dreams, my hands are like this:
gone—fingerprints the braille of a mouth reading touch & moving like sound emptied into a perfectly rounded hole: my wildest dreams
I forget the colors left behind my eyelids: & the blinking of every eye-
witness—the murderers held so close
I swear they’re in my hands: in the window my skin is turned to a human-hollowed doorway—I shatter what light has done to me: in my wildest dreams where the given body is a form of flight
& in this latest version I step into the wreckage—to find the other side of
me blooming toward you.


[Untitled]

But before you live you must remember every word your mother never said.
Like here’s the most perfect hole to reach into because what remains is a space like the hands you’re beginning to forget. Promise me before you live you remember the darkest you’ll have ever been won’t be holding steady a cocked barrel in your mouth the wheat field below the house lit by another autumn. It was always me blooming you inside me. Before living swear to me you’ll forget the way a body carves out its own season to lie down in.
To never forget the trees lining the field before the sun sets at last. Beyond are the torn ghosts you are to always remember.
There is a voice that leaves will always hold for you there.
& before you live you must remember that night is always falling somewhere in the world. Someday autumn could be just another hole that winter empties into.
Remember me for this hunger
I brought you into. That your warm body has never lived without me.


You Are There, Almost, Without a Name, Without a Body, Go Now

You find the house burning again & every-

one inside: the plum trees, skeletal

in the back yard like an entrance

to every secret we have ever mouthed: how

our teeth left intact, after centuries, were our own

little blessings—even for every day-lit lashing

we had to take: for your tongue: open the door

to find another you
talking to your mother

in a newer language so
American you’ve longed

just to remember: your father—it is said somewhere

in a leather-bound book of translations you’ve torn

from its rotted spine—can only be here as long

as he carries what remains of

the back of his hand-
warmed head. &

he’s here, isn’t he—
with the very same

smile as god’s last bullet retracing

its arc from a faint line of black

shadow: come here, you
without a body—

my nameless baby
boy: before the house

collapses in-
to the horizon’s

monstrous throat: come here, my dear,

& tell me every story about the directions

you found in your own lungs—about

breathing to find your way home.


Ant & Yellow Jacket

pamc’itpáaswisana, kawó’ ’iceyéeyenm qepsqepsnéewitki kaa hináashanya píswe. – támsoy kaa ’alatálo

Reach for

the slick hook

in my mouth:

bright hunger

a pulse between

us: & here

at the chest

a bee’s heart

pressing an ant’s

caged ribs before

collapsing. Who

said the body

would break

quite like this

that the face

could seal

another’s? Feel

how alive

your skin is

how these lips

now lock yours:

when does

the breath finally

vanish as both

our bodies erupt

into a single arch

of basalt?


Ezekiel 37:3

When I close my eyes I see / him, my lord. Do you not
remember me? I ask the half-buried / bones in ochre dust

& shedding / their deadened histories—yóx̣ yóx̣
yóx̣ they answer. Like a house / creaking open its doors

to reveal all that was left / behind. That day what did I even know of a plea / but his beloved

body beginning to stir / against itself? My lord, here is one shadow—our rainless valley / opening the earth

as though the entrance to a gun-/ shot wound. Here is where our graves echo / a nation & this nation

is yours / alone, my lord. It always was. / An oiled stroke of forest smears the hills / days before the fire comes

to take us back. Here— / my lord, is the skull / joining its spine—the body’s standing / ladder—a column of rungs

like years of lives taken / & draped from the nape of the neck.
Lord, forgive me for I cannot / dance with you this way. As

these bones. As you leave / your imprint the air eats away like ghosts / the width of stories found

in translation. Where my heart is / the very same humming-
bird lifting the end / of every sunlit petal left / to be

shredded by the any trace / of summer. Here, thirsted—
na’tóot I pronounce. & the dot appears / in his skull. It forms

just enough to fit this mouth- / swabbed bullet through / once again—the way the North Star reenters / the skin

of every night—to salvage itself. & I can’t / help but turn away. For I’m afraid of the loss / of even my own

eyes. For I cannot bring myself / to peer into those eyelets shaped in the image / of rain

puddles found / around the bodies of our nation. How they won’t stop boring into me. Like / this. & I just can’t— / forgive

me, tóota’. With the lord / at my side as half of my skeleton awaits your flesh—the forgotten half of me / to bloom back

over you like the start / of another hour. Ticking the sound of jawbones desperate to swallow / the evening. Here, once

a field seared off tomorrow’s / atlases. Once an ocean of qém’es blooming out / of season—under the dead

light / draining the sky. ’íinim píst, my lord, I see / his lips as a kiss blown / apart—like the gift of first breath. / It’s the blood-

rushing dark / rising from beneath his skin / beginning to flash me back. Soon this body / is yours to collect you pledge

in their rattling tongue / of salvation. Here / is my father’s mouth / warmed—tightening / parted only by its weight—lord, look

into him. Like a well filled / with its unlit promise towards water. & I promise to remember / this final opening

cocked back & waiting / to breathe. How this / singular fleshed jaw is myself / now remade in its first shape. The body

before the body.

Table of Contents

Aposiopesis [or, The Field between the Living & the Dead] 5

I

Ezekiel 37:3 9

Swallowed Prayers as Creation 11

Ant & Yellow Jacket 13

Resurrect 15

Testament #90 16

O. Unilateralis s. I. 18

Self-Portrait as 1879-1934 20

I Say After-Rain, You Say hahalxpáawisa 22

Gather Up the Bones & Arrange Them Well 23

Portrait with Smeared Centuries 25

On the Horizon 27

II

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear 31

A Boy & His Mother Play Dead at Dawn 32

Wintering / heelwéhtse 34

Years Later, na'pláx, in the Yard, Asks Me to Rename Him 35

The Exile 37

Paq'qatát cilakátki 41

Close to Each Other with [a/the] Body 42

Self-Portrait as Collected Bones [Rejoice Rejoice] 43

Ligature 44

This Faithful Purge, on Behalf of Your Heavenly Father 46

Self-Portrait as Article I[I]. [Treaty with the Nez Percés, 1855]: Cession of Lands to the United States 48

III

Face-to-Face with One of the Gods 53

Your Still-Life Is No Longer Still 55

A Poem for the háawtnin' & héwlekipx [the Holy Ghost of You, the Space & Thin Air] 57

Self-Portrait toward a Fugue [No. _in _b Minor] 60

[Untitled] 61

World Made Visible 63

The Bones of Us 65

This Dusk in a Mouth Full of Prayer 69

A Soliloquy Would Imply That the Stage Is Empty 71

On the Aggrieved 76

I Am Another of Yourself: Hand-Pounded Bark, Handmade Paper: Sumi Ink: Gayle Crites: 2016 77

You Are There, Almost, without a Name, without a Body, Go Now 81

Notes 85

About the Author 89

Editorial Reviews

This collection draws its shape around holes and tunnels, the vulnerability of feeling overcome, the legacy of violence, and the honesty required for truly stating one's feelings. . . . Shaped out of contemplation, mourning, and a desire for renewal, these poem carefully build as they consider their subjects. One poem instructs, ‘Carve the wind apart/ into one single/ lasting answer,’ which serves as a motif for the poet's own lyric exploration of light, boyhood, and nimipuutímt language and storytelling. A late poem ends with ascendancy, having ‘let my last/ eye open.’ These deeply felt pages offer a bold tapestry of imagery and thought.”—Publishers Weekly

"With this release, Copper Canyon Press has raised further into the light these remarkable poems by Michael Wasson. The earth has never been still. It has reverberated with the losses it has absorbed. Through his poems, Wasson has unearthed the buried bones of generations and brought their lives into the daylight. This is the work of a poet, and the importance of such work can never be underestimated."—New York Journal of Books

“Wasson’s lyrical verse seems to turn over and over again, like a marble on the tongue, this idea of lost language, serving up to the reader different iterations of how language is related to culture, family, freedom, and the body.”—West Trade Review

"Many of Wasson’s exquisite poems hold the bones of his ancestors, which hold a different weight, reflect a different energy. Wasson, who is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Lenore, Idaho, writes about the people and the land shattered by colonialism. That is: the fractures that separated children from their parents, severed the living from their lives, and scattered the bones of ancestors far from their communities."—Broadsides to Books

"Tinged with mourning, Michael Wasson’s Swallowed Light deals in folklore, history, and the preservation of a vanishing language. These poems are riddled with ghosts and bones, bullets and colonization, and the space between the dead and the living. They are also woven with nimiipuu stories like that of the Ant and the Yellowjacket as well as Biblical references. As I read Swallowed Light, I was reminded of Marie Howe’s famous last line, 'I am living. I remember you.'"—West Branch

"Sometimes a collection of poems reads like a beautiful field guide. This is true of Michael Wasson’s latest collection, Swallowed Light, which not only includes beautiful images wrought in careful lines, but also helps us understand who we are by understanding the history of where we are. We need poems as guides and reminders. We need poems that help us see and resee. And we need poets like Michael Wasson to help us do both. Swallowed Light proves once again that Indigenous voices are essential to understanding the complexity of land through its history, the culture that still lives in it, and the language born of it."—ISLE

"For all the pain of this collection, these poems are full of breath, of light. They open outward, they invite the reader in, they fill the dark corners of history with a tender gaze."—Southeast Review

From the Publisher