Five Songs for Lazarus Shale by Laura Da’

As a word of pretext, I’ve decided that reviewing books of poetry really does disservice to the poetry, so I am attempting a correction by reviewing individual poems.

from Tributaries

“It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlement is approaching to a happy consummation.”

— President Andrew Jackson, 1830

1.
There was a word for village
that meant all at once:
perfect home
perfect man
all human systems working in harmony.
A Shawnee village was a good genius society.
Names were to be guarded.

First memory:
clambering onto a horse
toes splayed for purchase
peering over the swayed back
at a curving glimmer of tributaries.
Listing rows of corn as far as the eye could travel.

I love this initial description of the nature of the village’s “good genius society” contrasted with the turn to “Names were to be guarded.” since in a way the first stanza is opening up the name “village” and what it means to the speaker of the poem. The invocation of memory here is important as the tension between the land pre- and post-colonization, as is corn which seems to act as a bit of a stand in for the land and the culture and identity of the indigenous inhabitants.

We’ll also assume here that the “curving glimmer of tributaries” (I <3 “curving glimmer”) of the land give this book its title, so I may refer back to this poem assuming I write about more from this book (likey, as I’m really enjoying this book!).

2.
Running on spindly legs
and speaking in a bubbling rush of Shawnee
the boy fled through can breaks
when the Indian Agent called.

A child’s arrow ripped with a gar’s fin
pointed to the eddy.

In the wilted moon,
the Quakers gave him the name.
Bible held hovering out of reach
as he grasped at the inked picture
of a man shouldering out of a stone tomb.

The agent sat in the back pew, sniffing the end of a quill,
a slim flask of ink between his knees.
wet trail of letters on the ledger: Lazarus Shale.

I had no idea what a gar was when I read this, so I figured that I might not be the only one.

I love the “spindly legs” and “bubbling rush of Shanee” here. Capitalization of the “Indian Agent” (unnamed and largely undescribed except for the brilliant “sniffing the end of a quill” image that paints him as potentially trying to intoxicate himself on the smell of the ink) works to invoke the force of the state rather than the work of an individual. The same with “the Quakers” who also are brought up in relation to “the inked picture”. The multiple references to ink reinforce the conception of Western reliance on written edicts and legality strip this child of their identity and produce the new one of Lazarus Shale, the official identity of the person on “the ledger”.

The first stanza suggests names needed to be guarded, but in this stanza “the Quakers” and the “Indian Agent” are guarding names using ink. Guarding identity.

3.
Tawny coffee beans, bolts of calico, molasses,
rations passed out the back door.
Speculation at the trading post
on the topic of removal:
Lewistown first, then Lima village
Hog Creek on down the curve of the river to Wapakoneta.

Sap moon cold.
Traders walking foundered horses over coals
anticipating army requestions.

Lazarus tracing letters in the ash,
his aunt stitching rounded meadow flowers onto doe skin:
pumpkin yellow, greasy blue and green, white-heart red beads.
The baby waking every so often to press a few grains into her chubby fingertips.
Tallow flicker across their mother.

Why, Sister, you’re beading in the old style.

In the rafters,
her fingers turning back to unbraiding.
The family’s dried corn falling in dusty ropes.

The sonic movements of the first two lines of this poem deserve extra special attention, so I recommended reading them aloud if you haven’t already. Here they are again:

Tawny coffee beans, bolts of calico, molasses,
rations passed out the back door.

Bringing back our theme around names… notice that the speaker follows the word “removal” with a list of formal names (perhaps from the “map” which is another version of the “ledger”). Meanwhile, Lazarus is forming his own words in the ash, writing words that will disappear in the wind.

His aunt is stitching a map in colors, and the “old style” is invoked here, mirror the question of memory and time (from what perspective is the speaker speaking? personal memory? imaginative memory? a person alive at the time?).

The conditions that Lazarus and his aunt are living under, their relationship to the army here to remove people like them from their land is not specified directly but invoked through the corn as “falling in dusty ropes”.

4.
Journeying cake.

In the morning,
Quakers pressed wrapped suppers into their hands,
reading from the Book of Ruth over the noise of the muster.

Generic native ash-caked baked in an open fire

Dig under the crust to find the varieties of corn
in the charred fields of Wapakoneta:
dent
flint
Boone County White
Bloody Butcher

Journeying cake Shawnee cake or every man’s cake becoming jonny or johnny cake.

Walking away, south along the Scioto
looking back often
Vivid shoots of green corn
rippling along the trail in a delicate commotion.
Fingers bent against the leather satchel
pinching at grains of corn bread.
Lazarus, who else could tell his story?

Naming invoked again and again here, emphasized by the italics. The types of corn destroyed by, presumably, the army’s burning of fields (a tactic used during removal to starve indigenous people and force them to leave their land) paralleled with the transformation in name through appropriation of a “Generic native ash-caked baked in an open fire”.

The question of who the narrator is and their relation to Lazarus is specifically invoked by the final line of this section. The “Vivid green shoots of corn” that “[ripple along the trail in a delicate commotion.” are a stark contrast against the “charred fields of Wapakoneta” suggesting that the speaker is revisiting the place where Lazarus lived once and the poem itself is engaged in an act of remembering him, perhaps conjuring his memory by “pinching at grains of corn bread.”

5.
In Shawnee tradition
one is cautioned to cross a river
quickly, without looking down
to tempt swift creatures
ready to rend the body in riparian embrace.
Underwater panthers.
Left to ponder such beings,
the mind balks.
Mad River.
Scioto.
Great and Little Miami.

Shawnee translations of the rivers of Wapakoneta.
Auglaize River: the falling timbers of the river.
Blanchard’s For of the Auglaize: claws in the water.

The final section ties up the poem nicely by, in a variety of different ways, naming those tributaries that give the book its title, that feed the corn, that invoke the memory of Lazarus, and that hold in them a spectral violence the likes of which the speaker undoubtedly senses the land holds today from the legacy of removal and colonization.