Blood Run by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Civic, ceremonial, elegant effigy--Snake--
our purposes funerary, fundamental, immaculate.

Until sons of Orpheus, fools of fortune,
looters, anthros, squatters--their tractors, rakes--
altered, removed on superiority-driven raids.

When the animals leave this place,
now without protective honorary sculpture.
When River returns with her greatest force.

When flora, fauna will themselves back,
here where we all began ago, long for.
When our people return, to the place
offerings kept free, balanced, hallowed,

when The Reclaiming comes to pass,
all will know our great wombed hollows,
the stores of Story safely put by.
All will come to truth.

I first read about Allison Adelle Hedge Coke's poetry cycle Blood Run in Chadwick Allen's book Earthworks Rising about the literary uses and abuses of Native American mounds. Allen approached Hedge Coke's poems, at least in part, as a numerological exercise, counting the many voices and their place in the narrative: the Mounds, the River, the Deer, the Skeletons, the Ghosts, the Beaver, etc., etc. It all seemed a little silly to me, but I was interested in what Allen had to say about the importance of the voices themselves, which represent the different aspects of the Blood Run Mounds in Iowa's far northwest corner, how the act of letting the mounds themselves speak--as opposed to being spoken for by white historians and anthropologists--constitutes a radical act.

I wish I hadn't left Allen's book at work, because I'd like to go back and read through what it is he said about Hedge Coke's poems, and not rely on my former review, or on memory. For myself, what struck me most about the poems is the unfolding of their chronological structure: first, the Mounds speak from memory, from prehistory, and then they witness--along with the animals and the skeletons and the ghosts--the cataclysmic arrival of settlers, who tear the Mounds to pieces and interrupt the wholeness of the ecology of which the Mounds are a part. I liked the Serpent, a snake-shaped mound like the famous one in Ohio that has since been obliterated, who predicts his own return: "Though my body / suffered sacrifice / to railway fill, / my vision bears/ all even still. / Be not fooled. / Be not fooled. / I will appear again. / Sinuous, I am." And true to form, the poem then moves toward a narrative of future return, in which the river and the mounds are made whole again.

As poetry, it felt a little clunky to me. I love the sinuousness of the snake, the turning of its simple lines, but other poems struck me as being rather plodding. Perhaps that's all right, perhaps they're meant to be solid and earthlike. I did laugh when I got to the cycle's only rhyming poem, narrated by "The Jesuits"--Europeans who brought their ways of poetry with them as surely as their religion and their ways. But in the end I did enjoy the sense of the land speaking, and the interconnectedness of things, and the cycle's proud insistence that things which many have insisted are lost might return again, to their rightful place.