ANAMORPHOSIS
Jana Sequoya

Falling...I am becoming... physical... remembered by the earth.
An opening between the stars is what I remember first,
Sounds mystical, but it wasn't
I fell for it anyway.
After that I was a word spoken by many tongues. Before I understood,
I knew the feelings of my speaker were mixed.

Eyes finning like fish through streams of relatives and charitable currents
of friends. Or trapped by impersonal shoals (don't take it personally)
in the homes of children who had none of their own.
"Beyond the pale," prayed the old woman, wrestling the thin body
in which I fought her
holding its head under the last of the faucet.
From the ceiling of the bathroom where I hovered above the battle
I answered, "Go in peace."
In peace, lied I, observing the ways of the earth.
In a dream I saw
the world was divided into two kinds of people, the eaters and the eaten.
I was a meal on the run.

My mother, I understood, was an instrument of the enemy. The feeling was
mutual. She was too young at my birth, and I too old.
I no longer lived in my body after I read the signs.
I thought I dreamed it, but later she said it was true. She says she lived in
the same house with me and the stranger called Grandma. I didn't know she
lived there, too. I thought my mother was retribution visited, sudden and
swift as an assassin. Or?
From my hiding place under the bed.
Curious about the possibility of forgiveness.
Cautious, I'd drag myself out. BUT:
Condensed fury, flailing and catching (me?) then gone.
That was my mother,
but I didn't know it.

One day the strange Grandma came to the room in which I had been
misplaced. She was followed by a woman I had met before under
circumstances of awe:
a beautiful house under walnut and fruit trees. Cats,
layered like shadows,
watched from the trees around a blue pool.
The whole place was guarded by small angry dogs.

The woman seemed fond of me, but afraid to show it when the man
was near. The tension
between them was a fracture that ran
through my body. On the afternoon she came to get me
the new man who
accompanied her didn't seem to mind
I was three years old.

Though they took me out of that place, it stayed with me as a threat. "I'll send
you back to Ruby's," she would say when I displeased her. Ruby's was the
place I got sent to, where the others like me lived. It was the place where I
could be counted on to repent of what I had done, for raising the stone in my
hand, and instead of saying "don't send me back to Ruby's ," saying, "O.K.
then, send me back to Ruby's." After a while my real grandmother whose
name was Nanny, went traveling and I was sent around again.

On my sixteenth birthday, my mother explained that she never liked me be-
cause I reminded her of my father. The telling of it was her gift to me. I have
his eyes, she says. They glitter like marbles when I'm angry, just like his. Like
him I'm primitive and strange; they all say that. My mother was the ragged
end of old riches from a long line of steel and cement. She's the stuff America
is made of. Raised in Swiss boarding schools, finished in Boston and delivered
to my father on a tennis court in Hollywood.

Troy Silas escaped from Indian territory after twelve years,
by joining up with a band of traveling preachers.
This is the legend of him that came down to me and it's all I have of him now,
except for his eyes, of course. That and the memory of a photograph someone
showed me at supper one night. A woman's arm (maybe my mother come to
visit) handed me the old snapshot: children on the ground gathered in front of
an Indian man and woman, themselves in front of a shabby tent. All the kids
were dark except the two who looked like me. They were my father and his
sister Inez, along with his full-blood brothers and sister. The grownups at the
table commented on my resemblance to light-colored ones. No one said
anything about the dark ones. No one said anything about the small dark man
and large dark woman standing proudly behind the kids, but I've never forgotten
them. They were my grandparents, I guess.

To get at the story of my father, you would have to turn over the story of
America and read for what's left out. My father was born too soon to be the
popular Indian. I wonder how he would have taken it. All he knew to want of
the Indian in him was silence. Not exactly the silence of my Aunt Hazel, who
used to come get me out of the home on week-ends. Not the silence of my
Aunt Hazel, who never spoke at all. In silence, she would place me on the
seat next to her in the car, and I watched the light from the street lamps
alternate with the dark as we drove away from the home. In silence she would
put me on the couch across from her easy chair where she sat with her sewing.
She paced her work with the contents of a paper bag from which she drank. I
guess the bag was in deference to me, watching her silently until sleep closed me.

I know this much about my father wanting to keep the Indian stuff
silent: it's a lot easier to own up. When I met him, when he came looking for
me, I asked him about it but all he'd say was, "You won't have to worry about
that." My father died on a highway in Colorado one night when I was staying
with my crazy aunt and uncle out in California. He ran his new Lincoln into
the back of a big-rig. He took Bill with him, his friend from childhood. He
really had it in for Indians, I think. This happened just when he got to a point
in his life where he could almost honestly claim to be white, because he had
worked his way up to this fancy car. That's the one thing I know was his
enduring value in life. A car that spoke white. I heard he actually worked for
the car that killed him (and that story seems to be a bad sign about working:
what you want can be the death of you). Formerly he had tried short-cuts to
the car: forgery. He had time to think it over for eight years in a Texas
penitentiary. Before that, believe it or not, when he was still around, my
grandmother says he took the money she gave him to buy me shoes and put it
down on a Model T. He was always looking for short-cuts. Maybe that' s
what he was after when he ran into the truck.

As for where he was born, sometimes he said it was Texas. Born
again, maybe, after doing his time there and thinking things over. But I think
he wrote down "Texas" on my birth certificate, instead of Oklahoma as he
wrote on my mother's marriage certificate, because Texas was once removed
from the truth of things, sort of a protective layer of uncoloring. He could
(almost) pass for white if he were passing where people weren't sensitized to
the presence of Indians. In Oklahoma a lot of Indians are sort of
indeterminate-looking like my father. They could be some different breed of
cat, not exactly your run of the mill Anglo, but not necessarily Indian either.
My father liked to tell people he was born in Boston because that put him
closer to being British, which after the car, was his highest goal. He could
play tennis and do some convincing ballet moves. I heard from grandmother
he used to do pirouettes down Hollywood Boulevard.

My grandmother wanted to like him because she was a pushover for
good-looking people. She was a beauty snob. My father liked to say that he
had tested for the part of Golden Boy which William Holden got. He had
some of what it takes to make it in Hollywood, but he was moving too fast
away from himself to get anything nailed down in any work-a-day world.

Looking out of his proud boy's eyes in rural Oklahoma, nothing
looked good enough to fit him. He was smart and he was pretty and he could
charm the birds off the fence, said my grandmother. He was born one of those special ones, the surviving twin. The old people say that the survivor has
double power. The life force that was in the other one went into this one, so
the power is concentrated. That can work for good or bad: the power is
neutral, but the container is loaded.

Owed To A Sculpture That Fell With Grace From the Tree

Eternity, you said I said, I'll try
Sooner than the silence fell
On wings not made in time to fly
When the wind pushed
Against a fate greater than the sky.
(S.F.S.U., 1988)

Falling...unremembering...to the earth. It wasn't
mystical; the wind pushed her. I found the pieces scattered under
the tree in which she was sculpted. Tried to put them back together
in darkness, everything blowing, with flowers I stole from the
borders of the campus. After that she was a word spoken by many
tongues. The feelings of her speakers were mixed: She didn't fly, but
she did move. It is said that among the Lakota this is the first
principle of mystery. Skan Skan, it is called--that which moves.

Jana Sequoya
Stanford, 1992