I.
THE DEER PEOPLE
THE DEER PEOPLE
Stumbled under the shade of birds. Scratched a little hollow
in the dirt and hid the rings there.
Moved quiet and alone among the others. As if through snow.
Wearing the sage wristbands.
Considered sunshine and its synonyms. Considered its antonym:
the ebbing tide. Spot-lit, entered from the wings.
Stepped into a spirit world where the natural show themselves.
Wearing a guise of the same.
“disconnected” “little dreams” “false continuum” (Alice Notley).
Often a complete and common shyness.
To candle is to examine an egg’s freshness by holding it to the light.
Hole in the ozone. Hole in the soul’s tallow lining.
That grown men can hold their guns to the soft belly of a child.
That they can shoot someone who is so afraid.
The violence we have allowed to blow through us. Locked
bedroom door bucking in its casement.
Considered peace and its synonym. The whitetail doe and her fawn.
Crossed the field of the mind meadow-wise.
To ask a question is a promise that one will listen. How the fir
is within the fire. Wind in the windrow.
Saw not particulars but glow. Fed off the nose. Cleared the air
of all but the smell of clover.
THE PRONGHORN ANTELOPE PEOPLE
Antholops, a Greek name. Intermediate between goat
and wind. “Little horse” to the academics.
We are mirrors. Let the past imagine us.
It cannot be entertained. It is large, like an owl landing.
In the guidebook, the smooth green snake that crossed
my path is named the Smooth Green Snake,
in the story, which I have been invited to take a part in.
In the circle of intimates, which include the deer.
The Cheyenne word for tea: a flower soup, a soup of leaves.
The antelope mime for us the tragedy
of a language besieged, bounding past our industries,
jumping in the snowmelt stream,
falling back in their efforts to mount the bank. World view.
In theirs, few of us exist. A function of eyes
placed sideways so they have to sidle to see ahead.
Hip tricked against the highline. A solitary atop the ridge.
The blue sage whispers to the rattlesnake, coiled around
its stem to escape the heat.
Breakfast, a brewing fest of coolness. Morning fog, a feather
down. Winter burr. Summer rapids.
The antelope emerge from the seed-holes of evening: gully,
coolie, draw. Loosely beaded, an elastic string.
Their cloud design, all eyebrow. All shade unto themselves.
Color of rabbit tail and bone meal.
We could hunt them down, but then they would be dead.
We don’t discover them. They cross our paths,
ancestral members of a world we lost, the terra cotta shards
of a vein. Coal seams set on fire by lightning.
THE WIND PEOPLE
Wind people, like the buffalo,
are indigenous to our plains and demand the same fate,
the same reprisals. Burial after burial,
incremental, so that often we are too late to attend them.
But the sound of grief breaks.
The whimpering begins. The build-up, the acceleration.
Every known culture has taken upon itself
naming of the soul, usually in words for smoke or wind.
It slows us down the road in its direction.
Tourists return from the famous battlefield, chastened.
Where do the ghosts go, are they shouldering these gusts,
or, slipping our senses, do they bunker
floor-length, stooped over us but lost from our thoughts?
Who is it that manages the heavy lifting.
To lament, honor, feel shame. The composer
asks if there is a word that includes both apology and praise.
Confession perhaps, a plea for absolution. An open screen.
The shape of our violence somehow heard by us.
THE COTTONWOOD PEOPLE
Faint. Uncombed. Awash in rain.
They share the kind of beauty shared by older women.
Rhapsody in wind. Buds,
not leaves: the small greens crowding up behind them.
Music, if one could see it, its wicker, its cursive strain.
Spruce, which has the heavier sails, flapping.
You are everything you feel beside the river. (Seamus Heaney)
Through the silver-paned bark, the diamond pores of
sloughed-off skin. If I saw my soul, she would be this tree,
and I would love her.
Placing stops between the strings, a composer
warps the score though making noise is never the intention.
One can draw anything on paper and ask a musician to play it.
For instance, a violinist known for her sheer nerves.
It is good to be cold, to remember cold. Hushed by rain,
to be ordained in a dry place. Suppleness of the word posture.
By the time my friend received the diagnosis, she was no longer
prepared to accept it—
an afterimage shot with stores of pollen.
THE ASPEN PEOPLE
The heavy early snow that came
when leaves were green
bent willows and alders to earth,
broke the waistlets of yellow pine,
but worse, snapped in half
the plumy aspens near the roadside.
Ascetic. Thin and resonant,
thu...