The Death of Sitting Bear Read online

  Publisher’s Note

  Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poet’s intent, whether it’s Walt Whitman’s lines stretching to the margin like Route 66, or Robert Creeley’s lines descending the page like a string tie. The printed poem has a physical shape, one defined by the negative space that surrounds it—a space that is crafted by the broken lines of the poem. The line, as vital a formal and critical component of the form of a poem as metaphor, creates rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, tension, and so on.

  Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intended—with the pressure the horizontal line brings to a poem, rather than the completion of the grammatical unit. The line, intended as a formal and critical component of the form of the poem, has been corrupted by breaking it where it was not meant to break, interrupting a number of important elements of the poetic structure—rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, and so on. It’s a little like a tightrope walker running out of rope before reaching the other side.

  There are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands. On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poem’s structure.

  We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indent—similar in fashion to the way Whitman’s lines were treated in books whose margins could not honor his discursive length. On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break.

  This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating poetry e-books in a world that is imperfect for them—and we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised. Despite this, we’ve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them.

  —Dan Halpern, Publisher

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  To the memory of Yvor Winters

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Publisher’s Note

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Preface

  Part I

  Bequest

  In the Forest

  A Siberian Hunter, Remembrance

  To the Farther Camps

  A Darkness Comes

  A Hero’s Burial

  The Kiowa No-Face Doll

  A Sloven

  Alaskan Games

  A Modest Boast (Toast)

  A Note on Animals

  Ago

  Division

  The Night Sky at Coppermine

  Song Fragments

  For Wallace Stevens

  The Woman Looking In

  Transparency

  Spectre

  The Great Fillmore Street Buffalo Drive

  The Snow Mare

  The Bone Strikers

  Yahweh to Urset

  The Essence of Belonging

  To an Aged Bear

  The Bear

  A Benign Self-Portrait

  Prayer for Words

  On the Cause of a Homely Death

  The Blind Astrologers

  The Pursuit of Man by God

  Revenant

  Death Comes for Beowulf

  The Mythic Harpoon

  Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion

  A Silence Like Frost

  Angle of Geese

  Birdsong

  Shade

  On the Neva

  The Whale in Amber

  The Dragon of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges

  Nous avons vu la mer

  A Chronicle

  Before and After

  The Theft of Identity

  A Couplet in Tongues

  Dictum

  Need

  JFK

  Song of Longing

  Stones

  Poem After Lunch

  Approach

  English, the Language

  A Story of Light

  This Train

  War Chronicle

  The Rider of Two Gray Hills

  Visitation at Amherst

  Fire

  First Poem

  Meditation on Wilderness

  Olga

  The Galleries

  Remembering Milosz and “Esse”

  Death Song

  Dichos

  A Witness to Creation

  Sobremesa

  Appearances

  Arrest

  An Oasis There of Many Colors

  Afterimage

  The Listener

  The First Day

  Revision of the Plains

  A Blooming of Appearances

  Sweetgrass

  Rustic Dream

  Severance

  Seasonal

  Rough Rider

  Almost Love

  On Spring in the Alexander Gardens

  This Morning the Whirling Wind

  Part II

  A Century of Impressions

  Part III

  The Death of Sitting Bear

  Note (on Set-t’an Calendar Entry)

  Set-t’an Calendar Entry

  Susquehanna

  Pigments

  Linguist

  Dancers on the Beach

  Ultimus

  The Spheres

  A Presence in the Trees

  On the Stair

  Lines for My Daughter

  There Came a Ghost

  Nenets

  A Measure of Rain

  La tierra del encanto

  To Gaye

  Jornada del muerto

  Octave

  Yellow the Land and Sere

  The Window Through Which the Light of a Candle Glowed

  Torrent

  Reconciliation

  A Mythology of Belief

  Northern Dawn

  The Pilgrims

  Babushka

  A Woman Walking

  Seams

  Gamesmen

  Prairie Hymn

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by N. Scott Momaday

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  The poems in this book reflect my deep respect for and appreciation of words. I consider myself especially fortunate to have been given a rich sampling of storytelling as a child. My mother was well versed in English literature, and she taught me how to discover the wealth within books. My father, who was a Native American of the Kiowa tribe and whose first language was unwritten, told me stories from the Kiowa oral tradition.

  I became a poet. I believe poetry is the highest form of verbal expression. Although I have written in other forms, I find that poems are what I want and need most to read and write. They give life to my mind.

  I have a recurrent dream. In it there is a child who lives hundreds of years ago in a village in Anglo-Saxon England. Early one morning the child is awakened by its parents, who whisk the child away into the forest. There, around a clearing, are gathered the people of the village. They chatter with excitement, and the child does not know what is happening. Then a little old man,
dressed in a ragged robe and hood, steps into the clearing, and a hush falls on the scene. The old man begins to speak, “Hwaet we Gar-Dena in geardagum . . .” And he recites Beowulf, the oldest poem in the English (Old English) language. It is a long recitation, of some 3,182 metrical lines, but no one turns away. It is a singular, mesmerizing occasion. It is a great story told. The child, especially, is transported. Here is indeed the discovery of wonder and delight in words. For the child it is an epiphany, a first fulfillment of the imagination. At once and forever nothing will be as it was.

  It seems to me that I am that child. I too have had the profound experience of discovering the power of language and literature, first in the oral tradition, then in writing. My father would begin a story with the Kiowa word Akeah-de, “They were camping,” an ancient verbal formula that reflects the nomadism of the culture and is likely thousands of years old. I was fascinated by the Kiowa stories, and I begged my father to tell them to me over and over again until they were fixed in my mind. I have lived with them for many years and they remain a foundation of my creative expression.

  Story is the marrow of literature. The story does not end with the last word. It goes on in the silence of the mind, in that region in which exists the unknown, the mysterious, and that origin of the word in which all words are contained. I profess the conviction that there is only one story, but there are many stories in the one. Literature can be likened to a rolling wheel of language. It reinvents itself with every telling of the story, and in its timeless procession it has neither beginning nor end.

  A poem is a moral statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse. It is a moral statement in that it involves judgment and choice. The poet judges the validity of his subject and chooses what he considers the appropriate vehicle of its expression. The judgment is an ethical procedure, as is the reader’s (listener’s) obligation to judge the poet’s judgment. In a real sense the human condition is the universal subject of literature; arguably there is no other. Verse is measure. The basic difference between poetry and prose is that poetry is composed of predetermined measures, iambic pentameter, for example.

  The poem, as such, does not exist in Native American oral tradition, for the verbal equivalent is not composed in English poetic measure. Rather, there is song and such verbal variants as oratory, spells, chants, prayers, etc., all informed with poetic or lyrical undercurrents.

  In my early career as a poet I wrote out of the oral tradition, making use of the character of Native American expression that I acquired as a birthright and by way of having grown up on Indian reservations in the Southwest, specifically the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo.

  In 1959 I was awarded a Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University, where I studied under the direction of the distinguished poet and critic Yvor Winters, who instructed me in the history of the lyric poem in English. Winters was my true friend, and he influenced my life as a writer in ways that I continue to discover. I am profoundly in his debt.

  In my time I have seen many things, and I have traveled widely over the earth. My writing is supported by considerable experience. In Arizona I have seen the Navajo Yeibichai and heard the haunting chants of the mountain gods. In Moscow I have seen numerous commuters reading books of poetry on the Metro, and I have attended poetry readings to standing-room-only crowds in large arenas. In Siberia I have heard the Khanty songs of the bear ceremony. And in London I have heard the words of Shakespeare and Ben Johnson. I can only hope that there are soft echoes of these voices in my work. It would be a grateful satisfaction.

  At Stanford I experimented with different forms of poetic composition. During my tenure there I received a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent a year on leave in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I read Emily Dickinson in manuscript. She wrote in intricate patterns and rhyme schemes, and she described brilliantly the landscape in which lived her whole life. I learned from her something about the spirit of place.

  My friend and predecessor at Stanford, Thom Gunn, tried his hand with syllabic poems, poems measured solely by the number of syllables in each line; I too wrote in syllabics. The 5-7-5 syllabic form basic to haiku is one that informs the section of this collection entitled “A Century of Impressions.”

  The title poem, “The Death of Sitting Bear,” is the memorial to a Kiowa kinsman of extraordinary stature as a warrior and a chief. He inspired fear, wonder, and admiration in large measure, and his death was a self-orchestrated act of extreme bravery, loyalty, and the determination to be free. I feel his presence close by in my blood and imagination, and I sing him an honor song.

  Under the title of my poem “Prairie Hymn,” the final poem in this collection, is a concise formula from the Chippewa oral tradition:

  As my eyes search the prairie

  I feel the summer in the spring.

  These few words, in the precision, perception, and beauty they express, seem to me to embody the essence of poetry. When I was a boy, waking to the pristine sunrise and seeing the bright land rolling away to the horizon, the seed of poetry was invested in me. I felt the summer in the spring.

  N. SCOTT MOMADAY

  I

  Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around.

  From HOUSE MADE OF DAWN

  Bequest

  Oh, my holy and unholy thoughts

  Will lie scattered on these pages.

  They will do to make a modest book,

  Not something for the ages,

  But leavings for a lonely child, perhaps,

  Or for an old man dreaming.

  In the Forest

  For my brother, Yuri Vaella

  Oh my brother, I hear your footsteps

  In the forest. They are strong and even;

  They sound the rhythm of your great heart.

  You go among the tracks of the bear.

  Always the bear will guide you.

  You will come to an open space among the trees,

  And there you will dance. You will sing the songs

  Of the elders, those who have made sacred the earth.

  I hear your footsteps and your songs.

  Oh my brother, I will dance with you.

  Together we will celebrate our bear being.

  We will keep alive the holy fires.

  Aiyee!

  A Siberian Hunter, Remembrance

  In taiga I have gone a solemn way.

  A Nenets man I found. He had me say

  His name, Yuri Vaella, hunter and friend.

  His heart is one with mine beyond his end.

  To the Farther Camps

  In the making of my song

  There is a crystal wind

  And the burnished dark of dusk

  There is the memory of elders dancing

  In firelight at Two Meadows

  Where the reeds bend eastward

  I sing, and there is elation in it

  And laughter like the play of spinning leaves

  I sing, and I am gone from sorrow

  To the farther camps

  A Darkness Comes

  And I have seen the raging of the skies,

  The beating of fields in the raucous night,

  And waited for the searing dawn and light,

  The soaring sun, the swollen earth that dries.

  The rutted roads run away to nowhere.

  The mind is hardened and the will is lost.

  I wish for something in between. And mostly

  The wind burns my wishes on the air.

  Old men and women gather at the graves

  Of pioneers, and broken windmills mark

  Distances of despair and, scattered, stark,

  The bones of cattle and en
crusted staves.

  I look across the plain. The weather hums

  At dusk. I stiffen, and a darkness comes.

  A Hero’s Burial

  The hours are at hand, the scene is set;

  In readiness the grave.

  The dignitaries on the lawn are met

  In solemn stance, and brave.

  The hero is interred beneath the flag

  With stark facility.

  And now the stately interval will lag

  Into eternity.

  Rifles are fired as one, a bugle blown.

  The scent of glory weaves

  Among the final notes. And left alone,

  The mound and drifting leaves.

  The Kiowa No-Face Doll

  Kiowa Boarding School, Anadarko

  They see how you hold your doll

  With love and desperation.

  Are they to imagine expression

  On the bare, impenetrable mask?

  There is nothing to reflect

  The face of a child, glad or sad,

  Who see upon this sere surface

  Anonymity only, a random

  Fetish of precise uniformity.

  For those who brought you here,

  You are the image of your doll.

  For those who relegated you

  To military sameness, you bear

  The visage of a faceless race.

  A Sloven

  A sloven entered the parade,

  Was out of step and wanted aid

  To fashion well a bold charade.

  “I am the Emperor Norton.”

  His cry was heard by everyone,

  From Candlestick to Tiburon.

  None questioned his high majesty

  Nor did gainsay his sovereignty.

  His subjects set his spirit free.

  The sloven tarried and held sway

  Until at last he passed away

  And into legend by the bay.

  Alaskan Games

  A young fox scampers

  At the near wall of a pine wood,

  Just full of himself.

  A raven comes at dusk to play

  Hide-and-seek.

  She rides on runners