Snow on the Mountain by Rilla Askew
Oklahoma
Okla, “people” and humma, “red,” in Allen Wright’s Choctaw cognomen
For this heartland state where the Trail of Tears ended—not for Cherokees
Only, but for all Five Civilized Nations, for Sac and Fox, Osage,
Muscogee and Modoc, converging on Indian Territory
Just as the Red River, the Cimarron, the Washita at length all
Resign their names to the Father of Waters… Founding Tulsey Town, Creeks
Smoked a pipe for their “Council Oak,” which survived until struck by lightning,
Its successor sending roots each year closer to the Arkansas. Good
Divider, that, whether dry or flowing between well-heeled neighborhoods
And refineries transmuting black gold into half-timbered mansions
Or a sunny Italian palazzo where the foreign transplant views,
And may identify with, Tanzio’s St. John in the Wilderness.
In Bartlesville the copper flanges of Price Tower deflect blinding
Summers that till then discouraged highrise construction in pre-A/C
Oklahoma. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Atomic Age concept evidences
The need for pipelines when liquid commodities fill up new brand names
Like Phillips and Getty. Wealth would trickle down, too, to Art Deco Tulsa,
And to Greenwood’s blacktown, bigotry fast on its heels, with how many
Houses torched as a dramatic backdrop for lynch law and its strange fruit.
Don’t worry, someone would develop White City, but somebody else
Would make tracks as a singer of swing, the “Oklahoma Nightingale,”
Burning up the road to Kansas City in an oil-black Packard, then
Back down to OKC to gig with the Blue Devils in a Deep Deuce
Café where elusive brilliance, beguiling the midnight hour over
A scarred deal table, tapped its toe and took notes for Invisible Man.
The mapped outline is a schematic hand or gun, with the Panhandle’s
Index or barrel drawing a bead on former Comanche grasslands.
Stolid one-horse towns like Guymon, Beaver, and Texhoma endure that
Measureless vacancy, its natural monument the Black Mesa,
Noted as the highest elevation and a landmark transition
To the True West. Peculiar how four geographic sectors converge
On one pivotal state, the pipeline crossroads for an automotive
Nation. When Kerouac got his kicks on Route 66, he may have
Led Tulsans Joe Brainard and Larry Clark to pull up stakes for the East
And become fixtures in New York’s downtown arts scene, never mind the fact
That I Remember’s largely unread in the town remembered in it.
Daily you’ll hear Westminster chimes on the campus of T.U., ringing
“Here in OK—we speak English.” And so one does all over the state,
But spiked with Soonerisms, as in, “Hit’s rainin big,” or “The man was
Drunker than Cooter Brown,” or, “I’ve seen goat-ropins and worm-wrestles, but
Nothing like this,”or “He looked like trouble going somewhere to happen.”
Which no one said about Karen Silkwood, the night she left a union
Meeting in Crescent, invaded by plutonium, the ingested
Downer an autopsy detected to date not yet accounted for.
Lawton’s Fort Sill, Tulsa’s Lockheed, and McAlester’s ammunition
Plants evidence the martial character of a people whose staked claims
Were often guaranteed by gunfire, and whose blood paid for conflicting
Rebel and Yankee loyalties. No better training for war than team
Spirit—just ask Jim Thorpe, or, since you can’t, inspect the medals displayed
In his house at Yale. Where’s the Wrestling Hall of Fame but in Stillwater?
Alumnus Garth Brooks could show it to you some Homecoming Weekend, just
Before the annual dustup between Cowpokes and Sooners. Notice,
On the other hand, Egypto-Great Plains grandeur as evoked by grain
Elevators towering over Elk City and Ardmore. For, when
Oklahomans weren’t fighting, they were farming vast tablelands whose
Waving wheat inspired Prairie School lyrics by Rodgers and Hammerstein,
Even if “the wind comes sweeping down the plain” rather understated
Those middle counties’ weather-breeding propensities. Watch the twister
As pure turmoil lowers a drill-pipe to strike a gusher of red earth
From drought-struck, depressed homesteads, a bowl that, back in 1935,
Yielded no crop to its dazed tillers but exile and the grapes of wrath.
Given that Tom Mix once mixed drinks at Guthrie’s Blue Bell Bar, it makes sense
That grade-schooler John Berryman would cheer silent, horse-opera shootouts
At a Broadway movie house in Anadarko. What other sights would
A boy dream, climbing the Jacob’s ladder of an oil rig out from town?
As yet there was no Indian Hall of Fame, no series of bronze busts
Cast as uncorrodable heroes: Sacajawea, Sequoyah,
Osceola, Chief Joseph, and Will Rogers. When the latter spun his
Lariat and his wry yarns, with a redeemer-like knack for liking
Every man he could wink at, populism itself paved the road to
Fame and wealth. But his voice would never chime in with the bigotry of
Zealots bowing to an idol King James commissioned in former times:
’Twasn’t the Cherokee way, neighbors and friends. Meanwhile, those serenely
Historic heads dreaming away an April noonday under redbuds
And cottonwoods keep their counsel, a long vista of patinated
Commemoration neglected, mostly forgotten now, at least in
The bistros of Bricktown or among the lilacs in Utica Square.
No, today’s monument jolts its pilgrims into irreversible
Contemporaneity, the Age of Terror’s bereaved replacement
For the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Hatred has cleared space
For a reflecting pool and a lawn dotted with vacated bronze chairs,
Proving that petrochemical fertilizer has what it takes to
Blast a daycare center, and that tears don’t end just because the Trail did.
Native sons deployed in Iraq may have felt pangs of recognition
When the desert air swirled with abrasion, and ordnance bushwhacked Basra.
“Weapons of mass destruction!” and “No blood for oil!” say the clashing tags
While tanks grind forward and TVs in Tahlequah and Broken Arrow
Bless the America that Woody Guthrie called your land and my land.
Since when, though, did settlers pass up the chance, before the kick-off cannon
Fired, to get a jump on rivals? Given the groundswell hills and blackjack
Oaks, the long dawdling rivers and rich bottomland, and a firmament
Starry as the one Jacob dreamed before wrestling with his renaming
Angel, what person of feeling wouldn’t try to claim a tract of this
Territory? Or new Sequoyah not invent a syllabary
To frame his speech, or playwright not care to draft a sequel to Green Grow
The Lilacs? Red, Adamic earth drew them on even when no one knew
It rested on priceless deposits of energy—and long before
An infantry consumed its allotment of the grapes of wrath, grumbled
A cussword, and drove into the sandstorm to become invisible.
About the author:
Alfred Corn is the author of eleven books of poems, two novels, and three collections of critical essays. He has received the Guggenheim and National Endowment of the Arts fellowships, an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and one from the Academy of American Poets. In November 2017 he was inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame. His translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies appeared in 2021, and a volume of selected poems under the title The Returns appeared in 2022. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
In the artist’s words:
Rilla Askew is the author of five novels, a book of stories, and a collection of creative nonfiction, as well as plays, articles, and essays. Her first novel, The Mercy Seat was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award, the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, and was selected as the centennial book for Oklahoma’s One Book One State program. Her novel Harpsong, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, received seven literary awards including the Oklahoma Book Award, the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West, the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas, and the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Her novel Kind of Kin, the story of a fractured family and small-town community at the vortex of Oklahoma’s immigration laws, was a finalist for the Spur Award from Western Writers of America, longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and selected for Amarillo Reads in 2017. Askew’s collection of essays on race and place, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, was longlisted for the PEN/America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2018.
Askew received a 2009 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book in 2011. She has taught creative writing in MFA writing programs at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Nimrod, Tin House, TriQuarterly, World Literature Today, The London Daily Telegraph, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and elsewhere. Her most recent novel is Prize for the Fire, the harrowing tale of Early Modern Reformist and writer Anne Askew, who was burned as a heretic in 1546.