Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Landscape: Lake Ontario Butterflies

Their transparent green fires
the pale sky and lake--a beach brightened
by bathing suits nouveau pink as lipstick,
the neon orange of sunset, children
and their mothers, who freshly lift arms
to whipped waves. Wish:

to be that watercolor gliding
with the weight of summer sails,
tinged by early dark;
to be the paint that gathers in
the dark and light of all creation--
drifts, curls, climbs across
an emptiness that disappears
in turquoise, rose and raw Sienna,
Naples yellow, Prussian blue--
afloat beyond all human reach, until
the sudden blink of wings
in someone's eyes again lets beauty live.

Core

The first forest folded
over granite domes,
a DNA of earth
and stone. Young trees
bloomed and yielded
to storm, fire,
human pasture.
These woods seem too small
for their history.
Trails turn inward
toward the old hollows
of the founding families
of Unquitiquesset.

I reach Wampatuck,
then Chickatawbut--an exile
with a single memory asks
who pulled this world apart,
who left quarries
blue for fish
and now, even for
boys to leap from--

sediment, showing
nothing's gone, only changed.

Reliquary: Roots

Here is Squamaug Notch,
an indentation in the journey back
toward Indian Camp Path.

Prescott, Acton--
paths without native names--
curl around Ponkapoag
and Housicwhissick ponds.
Above the archaic
tapestry, three hills--
Chickatawbut, Wampatuck
and Kitchamakin--stand
their families up against
the rain of forgetting
that falls on towns
pinned with pine-green street signs:
Squantum,
Unquity,
Neponset
or Naponset-- 
relics of a language
that draped this rib of coast.

I climb across
the quot's and squa's,
feeling them out like
the que's and quien's
of a language I call
"first." Can I, pilgrim from
another place and time, shake out
the paleo-roots to spring alive
the whole Algonquian territory
as if this speech had a power
theirs did not?

Language is
the name for what I know.
And what I don't
is breaking through its threads.

Woenaunta

   -- "It is a warm summer."

The Journey--

Barren miles
could not keep us back.
We chased giants
that fell to chasms.
Our points flew, burning
 star tips across,
into our future.

How the dangers
of that journey were followed
by what came between us.
Water flooded the path
where our group crossed

and looked back--unsure
how we might, a divided
people now, remain one. 

This way,
earth softened,
pushed up trees to give us
chestnuts, houses.

We gathered rice.
Grew white corn--teosinte;
children; a small nation.

The Naponset
bore its silver tribute
to our hard work.

And, on the tallest hill
above this first village,
we rested--

our faces tipped
toward that warmth
kept from us
for thousands of years.
Woenaunta, we said, in unison:
it is a good summer. 

Brush
against slate
and you'll be startled
by the heat, stored
in this land. Hear the gulls
return every summer
to the kettle pond
and watch them circle
each dusky peak
for what you cannot see.
Under evergreens,
pine needles
fall shadowed, trails fade.

But without human form,
our memories escape
into the land's blue fringe:
scrappy bushes hunt hilltops
for sun and water;
gouged, black-barked
trees refuse to fall;
valleys of stone
broken upon stone
save for the ancient rivers
a place.

We come for you, not
to hunt,
though death must,
but to preserve
these roots: few, small,
yet worthy of life. 

*The translation of "woenaunta" is adopted from "A Small Nomenclator of the Indian Language," appendix to Alden T. Vaughan (ed.), William Woods' New England's Prospect (1977).

House-A-Fire

-- In memory of Chikataubut,
beloved sachem of
the Massachuset tribe
during the early 1600s 

Back to earth
goes the fire's power;
an old man, governing
from the tomb, seizes
lightning sparks to catch
the fire-fighting people by surprise,

to keep us from forgetting
the great hot core beneath,
forging its elegies of stone.

If there is heart
here to break,
let it beat in flames
that win back this hill's name.

Hollow

Wind catches red,
blows the leaves back
into my face as I walk
the broken black path
through oak-pine woods.

Bolts of light
unfold between branches,
vision groping aloud
for a greater sense.

Young pines are tipped,
stone-filled banks lean
into the disappeared river,
and the weird song of an owl
casts about in this hollow like
some equation I should remember,
the length of this darkened loop,
and the questions I resolved

   to have answered
before reaching the end of midlife.

Years of Pleistocene ice
and ordinary human effort have cut
more than one heart out of here.
Jagged edges of rock tilt
quartz mirrors up, to hold
an escaping sky.

A Map of the World

Two yellow booklets,
the black-letter law
of my mother's childhood,
taught me history, geography,
the story of the Chibchas
who hammered gold
into bracelets, masks,
odd shapes like land
masses floating on Earth.

My first year in this country,
I floated among words,
pairing Spanish with English,
to anchor
the numbered continents with names.

Africa: equidistant
from either home, a memory
of two-legged strangers
whose children painted dark caves.

Oceania, dragging
Australia and a fleet of
prefixes and suffixes
across the sea.

Asia, Antarctica:
twin vastnesses,
human and not.

Europe: fairy tale of bickering
kings and queens,
sparks of Germanic and Latin
languages, tips of swords
that sliced America in half.

When I discovered America
was two continents at school,
one at home,
I felt like Noah
packing the Ark

with all things strange
and ordinary, old and new--

not knowing what
my watery world might become,
whose map
would help me find
where everything belonged.

Ayahuasca Vines Elegy

He lifted his head to the masters,
mountains of flute and smoke.

Studied the curves
of air and sound.

Joyful scholar,

flown to the city of angels
to solve
the great puzzle of English.

Not enough--
so he entered law
with two torches:
desire and intelligence
threaded light to where
each child, a citizen
of one world, was crowned.

He toasted with us,
friends and family,
with pisco and papas arequipenas,
humble Inca wisdom
that made us feel the fullness
of every effort--

the intricate terraces
spread out for us
as he continued on

to the infinite study of love.

Iris Gomez was born in Cartagena, Colombia and immigrated to the U.S. as a child. She has an M.F.A. in poetry, a law degree, and works as a public interest attorney in Boston. Gomez's latest collection of poetry, Housicwhissick Blue: Poetry of the Blue Hills Reservation, was published in 2003 by Mellen Poetry Press. An earlier collection received second prize in the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize competition sponsored by the University of California at Irvine and she is currently seeking a publisher for it. Gomez's poetry has appeared in ArtWord Quarterly, Caribbean Writer, Cimarron Review, River Oak Review, Crab Orchard Review, Mid-America Poetry Review, Potpourri, and Whiskey Island Magazine.
Gomez, currently a staff attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute in Boston, is a nationally recognized expert on asylum law and the rights of immigrants. She also teaches immigration law at Boston University School of Law. 
"Core," "Reliquary: Roots," "Woenaunta," and "Hollow" are all drawn from Gomez's collection of poetry, Housicwhissic Blue: Poetry of the Blue Hills Reservation (Mellen Poetry Press, 2003). "Reliquary: Roots" and "Woenaunta" were first published in Blueline. "Hollow" was first published in Larcom Review: A Journal of the Arts and Letters of New England; "A Map of the World" first appeared in Cimarron Review.