Nokose Dancing: Hugh Foley

Migrations
George Looney

Lakota elders sit in dark booths down at the local diner. Some say they read the future in grease streaks on walls near the grill and swap stories of creation and the chaos before the coming of reason, before animals had speech stolen from them. Sit in a nearby booth and listen long enough and you might believe you could belong in that world. When their wives come to take them home, you might want one to reach down, pick you up in her arms and hold you to her breast as you start to cry. One elder speaks of the bittern, how this used to be a stopover on its migration. He speaks of nights its resonant call filled his ears and the mouth of the woman he loved. How, when she spoke, a bittern lifted from a shallow river inside him. How, when she touched him, the moon uncurled, opened its wings, and its long legs skimmed the waters of his flesh. The others nod. When the women come for their men they leave you there, waiting for the migration of the bittern to return everything to what it was, to return you to a place you’ve never been.

Figures in the Light and the Cold

George Looney

The cold is a distance the fulmar knows how to fly. When some of Perry’s men who’d gotten lost first heard the fulmar’s cry, they thought the dead were coming to welcome them into the white horizon unchanged for days. Though starving, they couldn’t bring themselves to kill birds with the voices of the dead and fell into fevers of hunger. One who’d been separated in a blizzard swore the birds kept him alive. Till the day he died he told the story of how a flock of fulmars settled over him and slept on his body to keep him warm. The next day, when he was found, no one could explain the feathers, and for days he spoke a language no one had heard. Another sat with him and listened to the nonsense. Each night, after the man the fulmar had saved was asleep, his listener would walk out of camp and lie down in snow and move his arms to make figures the others found in the daylight. It was the man who made the figures of angels in snow without remembering who was the first to kill a fulmar. The others didn’t ask what they were eating. The next day they set off and made it back to Perry’s camp where there was food and fire and men who had never heard the cry of the fulmar, for whom the dead were still dead and the cold was a distance they couldn’t navigate. The men who had eaten the fulmar led the expedition. For years the others told stories in bars of how in the mornings they found figures of angels in the snow all around them. How it kept them going, believing they were watched over by angels who slept in the snow.

Not Marrow or Muscle, but Love

George Looney

An old man once told me he had touched the spine of an angel. After midnight, he said, everyone he knew asleep, a full moon refracted through fog. This, he said, was before loss had wore out his heart. He wrote his lover’s name in the fog and, finished, his finger pointed to a vague shape lying in a patch of flattened grass. He said he knew right off it was an angel. When I asked how he knew, he shook his head. No one believes anything anymore, he said. Close up, he said, he could see through her except for her spine, which curved as graceful, he said, as an angel’s, each vertabra fit so perfect to the next it was clear what held them together wasn’t marrow or muscle, but love. He watched all but the spine become fog before bending down to touch the delicate bone. It was like touching the inner thigh of the woman he loved, he said, there where the flesh curves toward damp, labial warmth. Yet it was bone, the spine of what he knew had been an angel. Then the spine wisped off around his hand and into the fog and was gone. When he told me this, his hand trembled with memory or desire. He never said which. But he told me he had touched the spine of an angel. And I believed him.

George Looney's newest book, The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels, won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2005. His first, Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh, won the 1995 Bluestem Award. In 2000, Cleveland State University Press published his second book, Attendant Ghosts. In 2001, Pudding House Press published his chapbook, Greatest Hits 1990-2000. He is chair of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Penn State Erie, editor-in-chief of the national literary journal Lake Effect, and translation editor for Mid-American Review.