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 Mount Saint 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.