Hannah Dierdorff
THREE POEMS
A Poem Changes Nothing
1889. Firemen try to douse
the grease fire across the street from the depot,
but the hose won’t fill, the superintendent away
working on his steamboat. The blaze races
through pine-board banks and saloons, consumes
thirty-two blocks before throwing itself
against the river’s shoulder. In my coloring book,
the flames still wait for the red of a crayon,
history blank and bordered by black lines.
Absent: the fires Colonel Wright ignites
in lodges and food supplies after the Battle
of the Spokane Plains. Absent: the 600 horses
he shoots. Absent: the names of the Yakima
and Palouse he strangles and hangs near Latah Creek.
A Power Comes Up Between the Voices
The pine is—quiet. For Adam was formed first
then Eve—a pine, a descendant of the ponderosa
communities that replace steppe sagebrush
around 4,000 years ago, 7,000 years after the ancestors
of the Salish cross a land bridge from Siberia, migrate
south as the ice sheet gives way to juniper and spruce.
15,000 years ago, ice damming the Clark-Fork river
ruptures, releasing glacial water east, ripping
loess and sediment from the Columbia River Basin,
carving the basalt that forms from a series of lava flows
beginning 17 million years ago. 180 million
years ago, volcanic islands collide and fuse
with the coastline near Spokane where ocean looms—
once unparsed, pre-pacific, not woman, not man.
Genesis
Begin with my body, with the memory
of my sister crying in the top bunk
all of those nights she wakes dreaming of fire,
the house on fire, ecology from the Greek
oikos, meaning house or home, my home
on Normandie Lane, a name I don’t know
yet as invasion, the world at war. Begin
on the street where I find myself nights
my sister’s dreams drop like needles, piling
the floor with ground fuel. Begin in the dream
where I stand on the asphalt in the cold,
wrapped in Noah’s ark, watching the flames engulf
the second story, the square pane of my window
shattering behind the branches of the pine.
Originally from Spokane, Washington, Hannah Dierdorff is a recent graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she taught poetry and writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cut Bank, Permafrost, About Place, Great River Review, and elsewhere.