“Call It Fear”
The language in this is pretty oblique but it seems to deal with the author’s sense of fear of the unknown. She refers to it symbolically, referring to the fear as “this edge” and using images of darkness and death to characterize it. She (again symbolically) juxtaposes this with the symbolic image of “a string of shadow horses” that act upon her in a transformative way, “pulling [her] out of [her] belly”.
“White Bear”
The piece begins with the image of a woman about to board a plane; she pauses before boarding, which initiates a pensive tone. “She has felt like a woman/balancing on a wooden nickle [sic] heart”. The wooden nickel is a false token that stands in place of a real nickel, made of wood instead of a more permanent metal, so maybe we can infer that there is some falseness or ephemeralness in her feelings. She goes on to describe an image of a white bear which has “the whole world balanced in/between carved of ebony and ice”. This contrasts the reference to balance in the poem’s first stanza; it may be that this is a fantasy imagined by someone who is at a transitional and seemingly angst-ridden point in her life and is fantasizing about the power of the white bear as a way of looking hopefully toward the future.
“Summer Night”
This piece depicts someone is at home on a hot summer evening waiting for someone else to arrive. From the emotional symbolism we can assume that this person is a mate or lover; the speaker describes “an ache” and burning. The line breaks reinforce the notion that something’s missing in the picture.
“The Flood”
In this piece Harjo is appropriating a Native American myth (the “watermonster”). But rather than destroying her as the myth portends, she points to its transformative possibilities, seeing in the watermonster’s lake “the girl I could have been at sixteen,” and later “the wife of the watermonster”.
The prose form conveys the sense that this is a tale (or an updating of the traditional myth) rather than a poem.
The lake seems to be symbolicaly equated with the myth in the poem’s final stanzas (“The watersnake was a story no one told anymore. They’d entered a drought that no one recognized as drought”). This points to the importance of perpetuating and honoring one’s culture (equating it to life-giving water).
American Lit Journal 