The Death of Sitting Bear Read online

  Into the sheer, glistening wind.

  The dogs are joyful,

  The sky blushes above snowfields,

  And she laughs.

  The mountain appears,

  Silver and pink in the dawn.

  The tracks of a lynx

  Are drawn straight on the blue slope,

  A long slant.

  A Modest Boast (Toast)

  My mind is sharpened by this sip of mead,

  Philosophers attend my wit indeed;

  Do not encourage me; there is no need.

  A Note on Animals

  Do elephants quest? I have seen them lumbering with purpose. Young foxes are so bold as to tease large predatory birds. Ravens watch. Penguins are poker-faced comedians, the Little Tramps of the polar ice. North of Greenland’s dog equator, the dogs are alert even as they sleep. Teddy bears are cute and cuddly. Real bears are humiliated. Horses are majestic; the head of a blooded horse is among the most noble images in the world. Within every tropical bush the promise of an iguana. The buffalo is the animal representation of the sun. The nature of whales is godlike. Of all creatures the mosquito is the most irritating and the least necessary. Cats are more dangerous and less intelligent than they appear. Dogs are less dangerous and more intelligent than they appear. The pedigree of dogs is distinguished; all dogs are descended from wolves. Wolves are superior and misunderstood. Snakes are the wise keepers of the underworld. The less said about marmots the better. Man is the most arrogant of the apes.

  Ago

  My children, when they were very young,

  Played in a great landscape, windy and wild,

  Near “the place of the bridge” on the Rio Puerco.

  In the middle distance were gullies and dunes,

  And a train moved slowly eastward

  As if stitching patches of color to the earth.

  Rabbits ran from the brown and yellow brush.

  My children knew the goodness of that place.

  Now when I go by, they are there. Something

  Of their delight remains among the rocks,

  Tsegi, the place of origin. Their laughter slips

  On the ripples of sand, and I look after them.

  Division

  There is a depth of darkness

  In the wild country, days of evening

  And the silence of the moon.

  I have crept upon the bare ground

  Where animals have left their tracks,

  And faint cries carry on the summits,

  Or sink to silence in the muffled leaves.

  Here is the world of wolves and bears

  And of old, instinctive being,

  So noble and indifferent as to be remote

  To human knowing. The scales upon which

  We seek a balance measure only a divide.

  The Night Sky at Coppermine

  At Coppermine we landed in order to take on fuel. We had come down from Holman Island and were on our way to Yellowknife. It was the middle of the night. The plane seated ten or twelve passengers, as I recall, but there were only five on board. We had been buffeted about in the wind and snow, and I was feeling the effects. I did not feel like moving from my seat, but at the same time I thought that a blast of cold fresh air might do me good, and I could at least stretch my legs. When I came to the door, the wind was rushing in with such force that I was nearly knocked backward. I braced myself and struggled out on the stairway. Then my breath caught in my throat. The Northern Lights were hanging, roiling, whipping on the sky, descending squarely upon me. The shock of this magnificent light show was greater than that of the icy wind, and I was stunned again. But nothing could distract me from what I was seeing: the snowy night sky unraveling into great ribbons of dancing color. I had seen the Northern Lights before, but they were never like these. It was an event of great spiritual moment, such as children know in their wonder and innocence. It was Christmas in the universe.

  Song Fragments

  1 (Lullaby)

  In the crook of my arm, place your head there,

  And I shall sing you a song of white bread and rye.

  And if you care not for my bread lullaby,

  I shall hum you the way to Northampton Fair.

  2 (Blues)

  Memphis Mister, play that horn for me.

  Play it slow, play a down-and-out melody.

  My woman done left me, left me high and dry.

  My baby done left me. Gonna lay me down and die.

  3 (Folk)

  Hang him high, Sheriff Garrett;

  Don’t let the Kid go free.

  Hang him high, Sheriff Garrett,

  Hang him from a white oak tree.

  4 (Country)

  Give me a honky-tonk girl,

  Give me a honky-tonk girl.

  Give me a girl whose skirts do swirl.

  Step to the front and step to the rear.

  Give me a hot wing and a bottle of beer.

  For Wallace Stevens

  Yes, I know that time.

  Evening is the afternoon,

  Snow is incessant.

  And blackbirds sit in the limbs.

  Do you know this time?

  Magpies range in the meadows,

  And antelope graze

  In foothills of the mountains.

  When the blackbird flies

  There is a deep emptiness

  In which presence was,

  In which nameless nothing is.

  When the magpie flies

  There is a bright arrogance

  Of four colors, a

  Flag for holy clowns, God’s own.

  The Woman Looking In

  Near the Taganka Theatre she stands

  At a window, shaping talk with her hands,

  Wearing a fur-trimmed coat, a white fur hat

  And boots. The photograph is bare and flat:

  The woman, window, wall and winter fixed

  In time, in drab where cold and soot are mixed.

  And yet there is a luster on the plane,

  As specters of the Northern Lights remain.

  I imagine the woman is resolved

  To tell a fate in which I am involved.

  I’ve seen the tragedy performed next door

  And seen the ghost that wanders Elsinore.

  Perhaps the woman sees beyond the glass

  A spirit schooled in semblance and morass.

  Or is she poor Ophelia gone insane

  And peering through the frosted windowpane?

  The lens has opened on the dismal air,

  And nothing that the woman sees is there.

  Transparency

  I make you this gift with love,

  An expression of my spirit

  In clean strokes and bright colors.

  Seen for the composition it is,

  A road curves out to an edge of time,

  There is the burn of the setting sun

  And twisted brads in the foreground.

  Beneath these pigments an abstraction:

  Beheld in its deeper meaning,

  In the pure aspect of imagining,

  There is a muted evening looming

  In the ocher of orchards and autumn fields,

  And in the lambent flurry of leaves,

  You, intrinsic on the plane of desire.

  Spectre

  How faint her humble form

  Suspended there among the stars.

  She wears the mantle of a mendicant,

  Blue or black and meager against the cold.

  At her throat the winding of a shroud

  Extends the pallor of her face

  Into the water hue of her hair.

  She bears no expression,

  But a silence pulses at her lips

  Like lost whispers of the Magdalen.

  And she stands in the glitter of God,

  Against disclosure and the chill of heaven.

  The Great Fillmore Street Buffalo Drive

  Insinuate the sun t
hrough fog

  upon Pacific Heights, upon the man on horseback,

  upon the herd ascending. There is color and clamor.

  And there he waves them down,

  those great humpbacked animals,

  until their wild grace gone

  they lumber and lunge

  and blood blisters at their teeth

  and their hooves score the street—

  and among boulders they settle on the sea.

  He looks after them, twisted round upon his sorrow,

  the drape of his flag now full and formal,

  ceremonial.

  One bull, animal representation of the sun,

  he dreams back from the brink

  to the green refuge of his hunter’s heart.

  It grazes near a canyon wall,

  along a ribbon of light, among redbud trees,

  eventually into shadow.

  Then the hold of his eyes is broken;

  on the farther rim the grasses flicker and blur,

  a hawk brushes rain across the dusk,

  meadows recede into mountains, and here and there

  are moons like salmonberries

  upon the glacial face of the sky.

  The Snow Mare

  In my dream, a blue mare loping,

  Pewter on a porcelain field, away.

  There are bursts of soft commotion

  Where her hooves drive in the drifts,

  And as dusk ebbs on the plane of night,

  She shears the web of winter,

  And on the far, blind side

  She is no more. I behold nothing,

  Wherein the mare dissolves in memory,

  Beyond the burden of being.

  The Bone Strikers

  They stand grim in the distance,

  Brandishing the bones with which

  They strike. They are counted on

  Though they are poor and wretched

  In their wounds. Yet they are sung

  Among the camps, and their shields

  Are regarded with fear and wonder.

  How plain is their regalia! How rude

  Their savage style! They are chosen,

  And in the choice there is severance

  And sorrow. In near time they will go

  And roam the darkness, having gone.

  Yahweh to Urset

  I pray that you are kept safe throughout this day, that you live as wholly as you can, that you see things that you have not seen before and that more of them are beautiful than not, more of them delightful than not. I pray that you hold easily in your hands the balance of the earth and sky, that you laugh and cry, know freedom and restraint, some joy and some sorrow, pleasure and pain, much of life and a little of death. I pray that you are grateful for the gift of your being, and I pray that you celebrate your life in the proper way, with grace and humility, wonder and contentment, in the strong, deep current of your spirit’s voice. I pray that you are happily in love in the dawn and that you are more deeply in love in the dusk.

  The Essence of Belonging

  Consider the shiver of the mirrored moon:

  You appear in the shredded light,

  A figure fixed in approach, suspended.

  Like Nolde’s Sternenwandler you stand

  Mysterious among the stars. You persist,

  And a clean wind measures your persistence.

  Along a cleavage in space the day becomes,

  And you conspire in the invention of belonging,

  Radiant, jealously imagined, estranged from time,

  And to the crowded habitation of the mind

  You bring a solitude, a mere and sensual silence

  In which the essence of belonging belongs.

  To an Aged Bear

  Hold hard this infirmity.

  It defines you. You are old.

  Now fix yourself in summer,

  In thickets of ripe berries,

  And venture toward the ridge

  Where you were born. Await there

  The setting sun. Be alive

  To that old conflagration

  One more time. Mortality

  Is your shadow and your shade.

  Translate yourself to spirit;

  Be present on your journey.

  Keep to the trees and waters.

  Be the singing of the soil.

  The Bear

  What ruse of vision

  escarping the wall of leaves,

  rending incision

  into countless surfaces,

  would cull and color

  his somnolence, whose old age

  has outworn valor,

  all but the fact of courage?

  Seen, he does not come,

  Move, but seems forever there,

  Dimensionless, dumb,

  In the windless noon’s hot glare.

  More scarred than others

  These years since the trap maimed him,

  Pain slants his withers,

  drawing up the crooked limb.

  Then he is gone, whole,

  Without urgency, from sight,

  As buzzards control,

  Imperceptibly, their flight.

  A Benign Self-Portrait

  A mirror will suffice, no doubt.

  The high furrowed forehead,

  The heavy-lidded Asian eyes,

  The long-lobed Indian ears.

  Brown skin beginning to spot,

  Of an age to bore and be bored.

  I turn away, knowing too well

  My face, my expression

  For all seasons, my half smile.

  Birds flit about the feeder,

  The dog days wane, and I

  Observe the jitters of leaves

  And the pallor of the ice-blue beyond.

  I read to find inspiration. I write

  To restore candor to the mind.

  There are raindrops on the window,

  And a peregrine wind gusts on the grass.

  I think of my old red flannel shirt,

  The one I threw away in July.

  I would like to pat the warm belly of a

  Beagle or the hand of a handsome woman.

  I look ahead to cheese and wine,

  And a bit of Bach, perhaps,

  Or Schumann on the bow of Yo-Yo Ma.

  I see the mountains as I saw them

  When my heart was young.

  But were they not a deeper blue,

  Shimmering under the fluency of skies

  Radiant with crystal light? Across the way

  The yellow land lies out, and standing stones

  Form distant islands in the field of time.

  There is a stillness on this perfect world,

  And I am content to settle in its hold.

  I turn inward on a wall of books.

  They are old friends, even those that

  Have dislodged my dreams. One by one

  They have shaped the thing I am.

  These are the days that swarm

  Into the shadows of legend. I ponder.

  And when the image on the glass

  Is refracted into the prisms of the past

  I shall remember: my parents speaking

  Quietly in a warm familiar room, and

  I bend to redeem an errant, broken doll.

  My little daughter, her eyes brimming

  With love, beholds the ember of my soul.

  There is the rattle of a teacup, and

  At the window and among the vines,

  The whir of a hummingbird’s wings.

  In the blue evening, in another room,

  There is the faint laughter of ghosts,

  And in a tarnished silver frame, the

  likeness of a boy who bears my name.

  Prayer for Words

  My voice restore for me.

  —NAVAJO

  Here is the wind bending the reeds westward,

  The patchwork of morning on gray moraine:

  Had I words I could
tell of origin,

  Of God’s hands bloody with birth at first light,

  Of my thin squeals in the heat of his breath,

  Of the taste of being, the bitterness,

  And scents of camas root and chokecherries.

  And, God, if my mute heart expresses me,

  I am the rolling thunder and the bursts

  Of torrents upon rock, the whispering

  Of old leaves, the silence of deep canyons.

  I am the rattle of mortality.

  I could tell of the splintered sun. I could

  Articulate the night sky, had I words.

  On the Cause of a Homely Death

  Even the ashes are instilled

  In dust. Imagine it was age

  And worthy destiny fulfilled,

  Not fear, not loneliness, not rage.

  The Blind Astrologers

  Now, at evening, we hear them.

  They sheer and shuffle, cracking

  Branches and heaving the air.

  Always shyly they appear.

  In radiance they take shape

  Faintly, their great heads hung low

  On arcs of age, their dull eyes

  Compassing the murky moon.

  They sway and impress the earth

  With claws. They incise the ice.

  Stars of the first magnitude

  Pulse the making of their dance.

  They ascend the ancient bridge

  And lay fishes in our way,

  So to feed us and our dogs.

  Along the green slant southward

  The blind astrologers blaze

  The long traces of our quest.

  They lead us, dead reckoning

  By the suns they cannot see.

  We regard them with wonder,

  Fear, and sorrow. They mutter

  And cry with voices like ours;

  They mime a human anguish.

  When they take their leave they fade

  Through planes and prisms of rain

  Into the drifts of story,