For Alva Benson, And For Those
        Who Have Learned To Speak

          And the ground spoke when she was born.

          Her mother heard it. In Navajo she answered

          as she squatted down against the earth

          to give birth. It was now when it happened,

          now giving birth to itself again and again

          between the legs of women.

          Or maybe it was the Indian Hospital

          in Gallup. The ground still spoke beneath

          mortar and concrete. She strained against the

          metal stirrups, and they tied her hands down

          because she still spoke with them when they

          muffled her screams. But her body went on

          talking and the child was born into their

          hands, and the child learned to speak

          both voices.

          She grew up talking in Navajo, in English

          and watched the earth around her shift and change

          with the people in the towns and in the cities

          learning not to hear the ground as it spun around

          beneath them. She learned to speak for the ground,

          the voice coming through her like roots that

          have long hungered for water. Her own daughter

          was born, like she had been, in either place

          or all places, so she could leave, leap

          into the sound she had always heard,

          a voice like water, like the gods weaving

          against sundown in a scarlet light.

          The child now hears names in her sleep.

          They change into other names, and into others.

          It is the ground murmuring, and Mt. St. Helens

          erupts as the harmonic motion of a child turning

          inside her mother’s belly waiting to be born

          to begin another time.

          And we go on, keep giving birth and watch

          ourselves die, over and over.

          And the ground spinning beneath us

          goes on talking.