Two Poems for Thanksgiving

The early inhabitants of this continent / passed through a valley of ice two miles deep / to get here, passed from creature to creature / eating them, throwing away the small bones / and fornicating under nameless stars / in a waste so cold that diseases couldn’t / live in it. Three hundred million / animals they slaughtered in the space of two centuries, / moving from the Bering isthmus to the core / of squalid Amazonian voodoo, one / murder at a time; and although in the modern hour / the churches’ mouths are smeared with us / and all manner of pleading goes up from our hearts, / I don’t think they thought the dark and terrible / swallowing gullet could be prayed to. / I don’t think they found the smell of baking / amid friends in a warm kitchen anything to be revered. / I think some of them had to chew the food / for the old ones after they’d lost all their teeth, / and that their expressions / were like those we see on the faces / of the victims of traffic accidents today. / I think they threw their spears with a sense of utter loss, / as if they, their weapons, and the enormous animals / they pursued were all going to disappear. / As we can see, they were right. And they were us. / That’s what makes it hard for me now to choose one thing / over all the others; and yet surrounded by the aroma / of this Mexican baking and flowery incense / with the kitchen as yellow as the middle / of the sun, telling your usually smart-mouthed / urchin child about the early inhabitants / of this continent who are dead, I figure / I’ll marry myself to you and take my chances, / stepping onto the rock /which is a whale, the ship which is about to set sail / and sink / in the danger that carries us like a mother.

Denis Johnson, “Proposal”