Family Tree

A boxer grandfather who once fought Star Bad Boy who sired six beer drinking German sons all with the same big hands.		The grandmother I never knew who might be responsible for the heft of my thighs is for certain the origin of my father's sauerkraut and fine venison sausage perhaps for his sweet tooth and maybe mine, too.
	My father turned those boxer hands to percussion and gesture tapping and clapping and snapping the quick step songs but buttercupping the fingertips to croon on bended knee the long drawn Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have loved you.
My Chippewa grandmother who was a midwife and medicine gatherer tiny twig of a woman who bore twelve children bore the loss of two babies to influenza the loss of one grown son to white man's war and the loss of a generation limbo Indians turned to alcohol.		My Indian grandpa who squints darkly into cameras of the past who raised two generations on snake-infested allotted land twenty-eight slow horse miles from the village store his crinkled story eyes my first memory at two.
	My mother born of dawn in a reckless moon of miscegenation whose foot rode the pedals on fifty years of Singer sewing machines her needles dancing rituals on a ribbon shirt blending our jagged mismatched edges in a crazy quilt.
Two uncles who ran away from Pipestone Indian boarding school and an auntie who stayed who lost her fingers saw them caught mangled in the laundry press who beaded kneaded quilted and braided her way through four children just the same		Houses and fish camps full of cousins who rotated authority on marbles sex and skunk ettiquette whose probation blues and 49 songs deprived me of bee stings broken bones swimmers itch drunken despair and suicide in whose tangles litters blonde and black-haired softball players I fearlessly set down my suckling babies.
	My great grandfather Na-Waan, Mi-na-waan-ni-goz, Lover of Natural Things, whose Antell heart I am said to bear who carried his name with humbleness as I try to and sometimes with rage fire brown eyes sharp as any weapon who cupped his hands around fertile seeds brown fingers the pinecone shelled house of protection.
All my relations.