On The Color of Life and Death
The History of Red
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Linda Hogan
First
there was some other order of
things
never spoken
but in dreams of darkest
creation.
Then there was black
earth,
lake, the face of light on
water.
Then the thick forest all
around
that light,
and then the human clay
whose blood we still
carry
rose up in us
who remember caves with red
bison
painted in their own
blood,
after their kind.
A wildness
swam inside our mothers,
desire through closed
eyes,
a new child
wearing the red, wet mask of
birth,
delivered into this land
already wounded,
stolen and burned
beyond reckoning.
Red is this yielding
land
turned inside out
by a country of hunters
with iron, flint and
fire.
Red is the fear
that turns a knife back
against men, holds it at their
throats,
and they cannot see the claw
on the handle,
the animal hand
that haunts them
from some place inside their
blood.
So that is hunting,
birth,
and one kind of death.
Then there was medicine, the
healing of wounds.
Red was the infinite
fruit
of stolen bodies.
The doctors wanted to
know
what invented disease
how wounds healed
from inside themselves
how life stands up in
skin,
if not by magic.
They divined the red shadows
of leeches
that swam in white bowls of
water:
they believed stars
in the cup of sky.
They cut the wall of
skin
to let
what was bad escape
but they were reading the
story of fire
gone out
and that was a science.
As for the animal hand on
death’s knife,
knives have as many
sides
as the red father of war
who signs his name
in the blood of other
men.
And red was the soldier
who crawled
through a ditch
of human blood in order to
live.
It was the canal of his
deliverance.
It is his son who lives near
me.
Red is the thunder in our
ears
when we meet.
Love, like creation,
is some other order of
things.
Red is the share of fire
I have stolen
from root, hoof, fallen
fruit.
And this was hunger.
Red is the human house
I come back to at night
swimming inside the cave of
skin
that remembers bison.
In that round nation
of blood
we are all burning,
red, inseparable fires
the living have crawled
and climbed through
in order to live
so nothing will be left
for death at the end.
This life in the fire, I love
it.
I want it,
this life.
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