Poet's Choice

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By Robert Pinsky

Sunday, February 5, 2006

There's a theory that American poetry resembles jazz. Both arts create innovations that, adapted to tamer forms, enrich popular arts: jazz harmonies in pop music, fragmented narrative structures in the movies that recall modernist poetry.

The speed and daring associated with American cultural mixing can be distilled in a poem with a compression, inwardness and nuance that no movie or song could match. Arizona poet Ofelia Zepeda is a poet who writes in two mother tongues. Some of the poems in her book Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert are in both English and the language of the Tohono O'odham, or Desert People. The sense of cultural mixing can call up a certain longing for home in a way no mere cultural purity could do:

Bury Me with a Band

My mother used to say, "Bury me with a band,"

and I'd say, "I don't think the grave will be big enough."

Instead, we buried her with creosote bushes,

and a few worldly belongings.

The creosote is for brushing her footprints away as she leaves.

It is for keeping the earth away from her sacred remains.

It is for leaving the smell of the desert with her,

to remind her of home one last time.

Here is another poem dealing with death and customs:

Long Hair

On the other side they sing and dance in celebration.