The Death of Sitting Bear Read online

Into calendars and names.

  The Pursuit of Man by God

  Do you not know me?

  I AM that I AM. I am

  The guise I affect

  In holy art and scripture.

  But I am also

  A tempest of dark colors,

  Primal predator,

  Jealous of my Creation.

  You will appease me

  For I am close on your heels.

  In humility,

  In futility your flight.

  Hear the wind raging

  In my hot, impending breath.

  In merciful fury

  I will take fast hold of you.

  Revenant

  You are the dark shape I find

  On nights of the spilling moon,

  Pale in the pool of heaven.

  You are spirit, you are that

  Which summons me and confirms

  My passage. You know my name.

  Your ritual dance remarks

  The crooked way between me

  And the very thing you are:

  Mask, essence, and revenant.

  You are, as you ever were,

  The energy that sustains

  My mere despair. And always

  You are the dark shape I find.

  Death Comes for Beowulf

  Oh, man, this is wyrd. You shine

  In beaten gold and glory. You are

  Summoned, and you come without question.

  The Danes know of you. Indeed, who does not?

  Among your trappings, fame and fearlessness,

  The carriage of a conqueror, a Geat, a god.

  One by one inhuman beings turn to gore

  At your hurtful hands.

  But you too grow old, even as do those

  Whose lives you have saved and handed back—

  To what avail? All of life is but the flutter of wings

  Barely trembling on the walls of the high hall.

  You are not demented in your age. You are Beowulf.

  And for the last time you are summoned.

  Then there is glory without triumph, a worthy

  Equality in death.

  A black wind whirls on the smoldering pyre,

  And much is ended. Heofon rece swealg.

  The Mythic Harpoon

  In groves of eucalyptus

  We looked into the channel

  Where gray whales rode in passage,

  Their flukes flagging errant gulls

  And tunneling drifting waves.

  And they sounded into depths

  As dark as death, as unknown.

  Always they held us in thrall.

  Instinctively we dreamt them,

  And our dream was driven home,

  Deep into the cresting curve,

  A quick line taut in the mind,

  The mind reeling out of mind,

  Tethered to the tumult there.

  Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion

  I ponder how He died, despairing once.

  I’ve heard the cry subside in vacant skies,

  In clearings where no other was. Despair,

  Which in the vibrant wake of utterance,

  Resides in desolate calm, preoccupies.

  Though it is still. There is no solace there.

  That calm inhabits wilderness, the sea,

  And where no peace inheres but solitude;

  Near death it most impends. It was for Him,

  Absurd and public in His agony,

  Inscrutably itself, nor misconstrued,

  Nor metaphrased in art or pseudonym:

  A vague contagion. Old, the mural fades . . .

  Reminded of the fainter sea I scanned,

  I recollect: How mute in constancy!

  I could not leave the wall of palisades

  Till cormorants returned my eyes on land.

  The mural but implies eternity.

  Not death, but silence after death is change.

  Judean hills, the endless afternoon,

  The farther groves and arbors seasonless

  But fix the mind within the moment’s range.

  Where evening would obscure our sorrow soon,

  There shines too much a sterile loveliness.

  No imprecisions of commingled shade,

  No shimmering deceptions of the sun.

  Herein no semblances remark the cold

  Unhindered swell of time, for time is stayed.

  The Passion wanes into oblivion.

  And time and timelessness confuse, I’m told.

  These centuries removed from either fact

  Have lain upon the critical expanse

  And been of little consequence. The void

  Is calendared in stone; the human act,

  Outrageous, is in vain. The hours advance

  Like flecks of foam borne landward and destroyed.

  A Silence Like Frost

  A silence like frost hovers here.

  I look for the promise of being,

  But only the bare presence of death appears.

  I think of who I am and do not know.

  The God in whom I scarcely believe

  Is smug with me, tendering forgiveness,

  But as much as I, he is culpable.

  Here in these words is no silence broken,

  But silence lays a rime upon them,

  And, burdened with cold, they die away.

  On the wall across from my window

  A scarlet leaf spins slowly down,

  Touching here and there those that cling

  To the dark tangle of their waning life.

  It catches the bare edges of light

  And rocks into the drift and scatter below.

  Angle of Geese

  How shall we adorn

  Recognition with our speech?—

  Now the dead firstborn

  Will lag in the wake of words.

  Custom intervenes;

  We are civil, something more.

  More than language means

  The mute presence mulls and marks.

  Almost of a mind

  We take measure of the loss;

  I am slow to find

  The mere margin of repose.

  And one November

  It was longer in the watch,

  As if forever,

  Of the huge ancestral goose.

  So much symmetry!—

  Like the pale angle of time

  And eternity—

  The great shape labored and fell.

  Quit of hope and hurt,

  It held a motionless gaze

  Wide of time, alert,

  On the dark, distant flurry.

  Birdsong

  Her voice was ever alive.

  When first I heard it

  I thought it was birdsong.

  Even now her words trip

  And ripple on the air. There is

  A warbler in the meadow.

  Shade

  You are present in the past

  And appear in memory,

  A braid of smoke, a vapor,

  And silence is your substance.

  You are nothing. Yet you are.

  You wend along the long way

  To a perfect destiny

  On a whisper of the wind.

  On the Neva

  He waits, who describes rainbows.

  Then more than the morning wind

  Strums the beaded string.

  He sets himself, sturdy on the plane of ice.

  Nearly numb, his hands tease and turn

  The frantic shadow into the circle below him

  And suddenly heave it into sight,

  And when it strikes the air

  It freezes instantly and becomes iridescent,

  And traces a perfect arc across

  The soft and smoking sun.

  The Whale in Amber

  A broken beach lies there beyond

  the rutted road. The wood

  inclines landward to the sky.


  Now is the quick quality

  of regenerated blood,

  the present that does not die.

  To be is to tread in time

  and place. Always are the dead

  beyond our ambitious reach.

  They invoke their perfect prime

  to sanction this narrow stead

  and conjoin us each to each.

  Above, the embers of time,

  barren in the ashen void,

  are strewn in random litter.

  Stasis humbles the sublime.

  Rule and motion are destroyed

  in the stark glacial glitter.

  The platter eye of the whale

  Holds the span. The great wayward

  beast would churn the lunar light

  and arc the undulant glow,

  the sea its dark amber, hard

  about it, in timeless night.

  The Dragon of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges

  The cathedral above the plain describes

  The faith of a medieval town, and yet

  Informs three ages of architecture.

  Roman remains of gate and garrison

  Stand to the blue rise of the Pyrenees

  And reflect the glory of far conquest.

  Now pastoral the military ruin;

  The haze of the valley is sweet-scented.

  From the cloister the Haute-Garonne lies out

  In a surround of lavender and green.

  High up the ghosts of artisans arrange

  The facets of stained glass into story.

  And in a dark recess the dragon hangs.

  In its grotesque and knobbed and leather length

  It bears witness to the veiled truth of myth:

  Monsters and men once flourished under God,

  And children of the mountains crept herein

  To tremble in the presence of the fact.

  The cave of the Cathedral is a lair,

  And there, in faith, to see is to believe.

  Nous avons vu la mer

  We have been lovers,

  you and I.

  We have been alive

  in the clear mornings of Genesis;

  in the afternoons,

  among the prisms of the air,

  our hands have shaped perfect silences.

  We have seen the sea;

  wonder is well known to us.

  A Chronicle

  Now they are gone who told me what I know,

  And I shall follow though my pace be slow.

  God grant me tenure and a time to go.

  Before and After

  In the window

  The dim rear view

  Of a naked woman,

  And beyond her a man

  Transparent as the rain,

  Standing at an easel

  And stroking color

  To a canvas plane.

  Her nape and shoulders

  Shimmer in soft light;

  A symmetry flares from

  The dimple of her spine.

  The artist, concentrated,

  Sees what is before him,

  The poet sees what is not.

  It is an equitable equation.

  The Theft of Identity

  They say my footprints are those of a bear.

  Yes, it is true. I crave the mountain air

  And find retirement in a lofty lair.

  Believe it or not; I really don’t care.

  Hey ho yah,

  Hey ho yah,

  Humph!

  A Couplet in Tongues

  She spoke a language known only to God.

  God gave a nod. Nothing to God is odd.

  Dictum

  If language is the instrument of thought

  And one relies on reason as one ought,

  Then words hold surely what is seen and sought.

  Need

  A grave mythology indeed,

  The story of the widow’s need,

  The story of the landlord’s greed.

  JFK

  We wept and could not put our grief aside

  And knew it was our innocence that died.

  Song of Longing

  Will you come to me now

  You must know that in the firelight

  I wait for you with longing

  You are there in the range

  Of my desire

  Will you come to me now

  Thee white moon shines on the cornfields

  Evening falls among the melon rows

  The orange sun sets on the mountains

  The river runs sparkling on blue stones

  And the long reeds bend and sway

  I will welcome you with sweetgrass and sage

  Will you come to me now

  I sing in my heart of your coming

  I sing in my soul of your coming

  Stones

  There are things of strange aspect in the world, things that you come upon without expectation, and they are the more meaningful for that. One day, on an Easter Sunday, I was walking in the foothills of the Pamir Mountains in Central Asia. It was a brilliant morning, full of crystal clear air in a green and lavender landscape that intensified the shadows of clouds sailing across the sun. I found myself in a dry wash, a narrow depression in which water must have run after hard rains. There were stones about, stones of various colors and shapes, such as you see in the beds of mountain streams. Then, remarkably, I saw at my feet three white stones. They were exactly alike, and they were precisely the size and shape of hens’ eggs. After nearly half a century I have not forgotten them. They were, I believe, the gifts of the goddess Eostre, of whom I knew nothing at the time. Such stones contain an ancient story of survival and renewal. The story is told from year to year, and it becomes more nearly complete with each telling.

  Poem After Lunch

  Cheeses, fruit, exotic tea,

  A simple repast, gardenside,

  Under a yellow umbrella.

  Bright sampler of the afternoon.

  Not only that. I tasted of

  That entity that was the two

  Of us, that composition

  Of conjoined being

  In the clarity of autumn.

  Approach

  It will approach without your consent

  It will stand before you without cheer

  or malice

  It will not be without meaning

  But it will mean without your understanding

  It will reveal nothing without

  But without caprice or ambiguity

  It will reveal the cold reality within

  English, the Language

  It is so much in vogue,

  There are so many words.

  Words, those conceptual symbols,

  Are used to build poems

  And to guide airplanes into Calcutta.

  We must respect them; they are sacred.

  It is said that words, once spoken,

  Remain in the air forever. I hope so,

  Although I would prefer silence

  To many utterances I have heard

  Or made indeed. Let us not harvest

  All the words floating in the air. Instead,

  Let us hear in our most receptive minds

  The words of Shakespeare and Winnie the Pooh.

  A Story of Light

  When the leaves turn

  And the light of the forest deepens,

  I will remember a thousand words between us.

  Those that enclosed us, as in the pattern

  Of shadows that shiver with the turning leaves,

  Recount a story that was told about us by those

  Who told stories in the caves. We danced

  To the music of the words. On our tongues

  Were shaped the names of our original being.

  This is what the storyteller said: The leaves turn,

  And in the light that emanates from the leaves

  There is enchantment. There is wonder.

 
This Train

  Who will ride this train,

  Moving on tracks of time?

  Who will ride this train?

  Who will hear the wheels

  Rolling, metal on metal, grinding

  Distance away toward the sea?

  This train will stitch patches of color

  To the fields. This train will make

  A seam along the taiga,

  And rivers will reflect its passing.

  There will be the middle of nowhere.

  Who will ride this train?

  This train will sever the nights and days,

  Trailing sound through random towns,

  And defined in the vague lights of forgotten

  Outposts. This train will run

  To some destiny at the end of the road.

  Who will ride this train?

  War Chronicle

  MEMORIAL DAY, 2010

  There came the beast, rapacious and obscene.

  There came hysteria. We watched the sky

  Implode, the steep flight of dark angels, keen

  And shrill, like meteors before they die.

  And ragged children of the ruins roved

  In roiling smoke and scatter of debris.

  In loss and lunacy so were they moved

  To balance madness and mere sanity.

  Let sunlight gather in their hollow hands,

  And solace be the harvest of their fears,

  Purchased with pain, dry seeds in sterile sands,

  Until from ashen night the dawn appears.

  The Rider of Two Gray Hills

  To the Mountain of Thunder I ride

  My horse is the slithering wind

  In his tracks will blessings follow

  In the place of moonlit waters

  I will slake my thirst and sleep

  In the dawn I will make my prayer

  and ride on

  There will be wonders about me

  Bright lightning on obsidian skies

  Rain and rainbows shining

  Grasses shivering