4
There were many horses in my herd. On horseback
I rode through the barrier of distance. I was of
The Centaur Culture, drifting on the beat of hooves.
My favorite son, a pipe bearer, was slain in Texas.
I went there and gathered up his bones, leading
A pony that bore them through the camps. At night
I placed them in a ceremonial tepee and called out,
“My son is at home. Come and pay your respects!”
5
Like grasshoppers the soldiers and settlers came.
The ruts of wagons were entrenched in dust
And whirlwinds sundered the vast weavings of
Timber and grass. The buffalo wallows were dry.
Brooding, I held the wrinkled hand of shame.
I mourned the pipe bearer whose bones gleamed
In fire- and moonlight. I stroked the hair of
The pipe bearer’s mother, and together we wept.
6
The Kaitsenko warriors were desperate to be free;
In summer, when the creeks were high and slow,
Our spirits were fettered. We craved danger.
There came a wagon train on the Salt Creek prairie,
And we fell upon it. On my hurtful hands were
The stains of blood and blame. I became a captive
And was imprisoned at Fort Sill. Overnight,
In chains, I grew old. My spirit was stolen away.
7
In irons I was placed in a wain, a red blanket
Of the Kaitsenko about my head, and driven across
The fort, an escort of armed outriders on either side.
Singing my death song, I made strong medicine.
Gnawing my wrists to the bone I slipped my bonds.
Blood beaded the bone, the color of watermelon.
I conjured a knife and attacked the teamster.
The outriders opened fire, and I slumped down.
8
There is fury and confusion, then a final calm.
I barely see the cracks in the creaking boards;
They ravel and wave. There comes a shadow
On the sun, and I feel the weight of nothing fall.
I cannot feel the heft of time. The air is empty.
The soldiers take hold of me, bear me beyond hurt.
Their hands are not like the hands of my people.
They cradle me, but they do not hold my heart.
9
In the arrogance of the Kaitsenko I had spoken,
“By the time we reach that tree, I will be dead.”
In my stricken mind I dreamed of time, winter
1870–71. In the Set-t’an calendar the drawing of a
Man made of bones and the image of a sitting bear:
My son come home, O my warrior son come home!
Time is a clock at Fort Sill. From a number I come,
And to that number I return. It is a good round way.
10
If death lingers in a dream, let it be a worthy dream.
Let me see my son astride a hunting horse running
Ahead of brave warriors. And let me see him home.
May he and I be remembered in the Sun Dance, and
May our footsteps roll in the thunder of hooves.
And when the moon ascends in the summer night,
May our voices enter into the call of the prairie wolf.
Let our last song drift in the crooks of bright rivers.
11
I become the being I was at the mouth of the log.
Between birth and death is the way of the warrior,
And there is nothing at either end but a dream.
I have lived the whole circle; nothing is left,
And in that nothing is everything for the Kaitsenko.
There is bravery, steadfastness, generosity, and truth.
It is a good day to die, for I have seen the dawn and
Dusk. I have seen high-headed horses racing.
12
In death my hair is lifted on the wind. My blood,
Seeping from my wounds, glistens in the afternoon.
Will strong words follow in my way?—“He died
As his son died, taking hold of the warrior way.
Himself, set against the living tree, is in form
The likeness of a sitting bear.” Away in the dusk
There is quiet in the camps. Stories are told,
And a final faint light settles in the silver grass.
Note (on Set-t’an Calendar Entry):
According to their origin myth the Kiowas entered the world through a hollow log. The earliest evidence we have places them in the Yellowstone country. Sitting Bear himself is believed to have been born in the Black Hills, and his paternal grandmother an Athapascan woman of the Sarsi tribe of western Canada. Clearly he had roots in the north and took part in the migration of the Kiowas to the Southern Plains.
The Set-t’an Kiowa annual calendar was painted on buffalo hide and depicts the years 1833–1892. The entries are pictographs arranged on a spiral, one for the summer and one for the winter. The summer is indicated by the form of a Sun Dance lodge, the winter by a vertical black bar. There can be little doubt that Sitting Bear knew of this calendar, particularly the entry of 1871 commemorating the retrieval of his son’s bones.
The tree is no longer on the grounds at Fort Sill. The road beside which it stood bears the name Sitting Bear.
Set-t’an Calendar Entry
WINTER 1870–71
Set-ä’ngya Ä’ton Ágan-de Sai, “Winter when they brought Set-ängya’s bones.”
For this winter the Set-t’an calendar records the bringing home of the bones of young Set-ängya, indicated by a skeleton above the winter mark, with a sitting bear over the head.
In the spring of 1870, before the last sun dance, the son of the noted chief Set-ängya (“Sitting-bear”), the young man having the same name as his father, had made a raid with a few followers into Texas, where, while making an attack upon a house, he had been shot and killed. After the dance his father with some friends went to Texas, found his bones and wrapped them in several fine blankets, put the bundle upon the back of a led horse and brought them home. On the return journey he killed and scalped a white man, which revenge served in some measure to assuage his grief. On reaching home he erected a tipi with a raised platform inside, upon which, as upon a bed, he placed the bundle containing his son’s bones. He then made a feast within the funeral tipi, to which he invited all his friends in the name of his son, telling them, “My son calls you to eat.” From that time he always spoke of his son as sleeping, not as dead, and frequently put food and water near the platform for his refreshment on awaking. While on a march the remains were always put upon the saddle of a led horse, as when first brought home, the tipi and the horse thus burdened being a matter of personal knowledge to all the middle-age people of the tribe now living. He continued to care for his son’s bones in this manner until he himself was killed at Fort Sill about a year later, when the Kiowa buried them. Although a young man, Set-ängya’s son held the office of Toñhyópdă’, the pipe-bearer or leader who went in front of the young warriors on a war expedition.
(Excerpt from Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians by James Mooney)
Susquehanna
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is a town in which the leaves turn and fall in October. They scatter and skid in the streets; they are rolling facets of the autumn sun. The farmer’s market is alive with commerce and music. There are melons and squash of various stripes and colors. There is sourdough bread on which to spread brie with threads of blue in it. Pretty Mennonite girls are about and children tumble in the grass.
The town of historic significance. It was a munitions depot in the Revolutionary War and was shelled by Confederate forces in the Gettysburg campaign of the American Civil War. It was also the site of perhaps the greatest experiment in education
and domestic diplomacy in American history.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was founded in 1879. Before it was closed in 1918 ten thousand American Indian children were sent there to be shorn of their native identity, to be “civilized.” The great experiment was a great failure. Less than one tenth of the students graduated, many more died at the school, traumatized by disease, loneliness, and despair. Those who returned to their homes or who were dispersed into the dominant society were unable to live wholly in either world; they were dislocated in their minds and hearts.
The words “sacrifice” and “sacred” are related. The children whose sacrifice is marked by rows of gravestones in the Carlisle Indian School cemetery were and are, in their innocence and martyrdom, sacred beings.
I have come to Carlisle to observe the one hundredth anniversary of the closing of the Indian School. Some of the descendents of the students have come as well, and I count myself among them.
The town and countryside are becoming rich with color. There is already a bountiful harvest of pumpkins, and nearby, the Indian river Susquehanna courses along walls of green boughs blushing. There are ghosts. The lost children are like leaves whirling slowly on the bright water. They dip and enter into the mist of time. They are no longer visible, but they are there. They touch the face of eternity.
Pigments
Altamira
On the long littoral,
they grazed in his view,
the rude rounded forms.
He closed his eyes,
and they were profoundly there,
stolid and serene.
He longed to define them,
to lure them into memory
and confirm their sacred being.
He strove for utterance
but had only the language
of signs and pigments.
On the wall of a cave
he traced their existence,
and his hands trembled.
In the vortex of dreams
they crept upon the wall
and the plane of his perception.
They milled before him.
He regarded them and wept,
having been in the hold of wonder.
They would succeed him,
beloved, constrained to his spirit,
and at last given to darkness.
Linguist
First the language of love,
Then that of fear, then that of solitude,
Keeping the beat of burning rain.
Lightning glances on the west,
And the soul comes to rest
Among the darker languages.
Silver grain wavers below the hills.
In moonlight there are apparitions
Ranging along a crooked creek,
Leaning into hollows of silence
And waiting not to hear nor to be heard.
The black earth shines in the crack of thunder
That is itself like a rolling language,
Unintelligible, deep in the shadow of distance.
Dancers on the Beach
The sky lies on the earth at night.
The moon lays on the earth a light
consequential. On the blue sand
are firelit figures dancing, and
their shadows are tentacles bound
among the trees. The brittle sound
of clackers rattle on the beach.
The dancers curtsy each to each.
And in the density of dream
the dancers sway, the breakers gleam.
At dawn the revelry subsides
and there remain the crescent tides.
Slowly the footprints fill and fade
like memories the mind has made.
Ultimus
When I have reckoned time and space
And broken from the world’s embrace,
Remember what was good in me
And see beyond my frailty.
In all my days I did mean well.
Remember not how short I fell.
The Spheres
His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence.
—JAMES JOYCE, “THE DEAD”
They are spheres, you know,
Burnt out and mummified; yet they shine,
And among them we shall make our way.
It is said there is a music. Imagine!
I think that in a fever I have heard it—
A music faint as leaves that twist into grass.
It rings, barely audible, like wind chimes
across the way.
And we are drawn like moths to the spheres.
The spheres are burnt out and mummified,
And in timelessness they shine! They do shine!
One by one we enter that eternity, remembering
The chimes of mere mortality, and
fire, then embers, then ash.
A Presence in the Trees
What presence in the trees does not appear?
For nothing in the trees engenders fear.
A vagrant shadow in the trees draws near.
On the Stair
Too often has it been too late.
I risk my soul and contemplate
The instant that is lately dead.
I reckon what I might have said
Had I been quicker in my brain
And given words to weave again.
But you are gone, and I am left
To find my tongue at last, bereft.
On these dark steps my wit is keen.
Imagine what I meant to mean.
Lines for My Daughter
Cael. 1962–2017
With reverence for the earth you venture
into vague margins of advancing rain
and behold crystals of the sailing sun.
The clouds weave ribbons of shade and eclipse,
rippling on the colors that compose you,
sand, sienna, jade, the speckled turquoise
of mountain skies. And in your supple mind
there are shaped the legends of creation,
and in them you appear as dawn appears,
beautiful in the whispers of the wind,
whole among the soft syllables of myth
and the rhythms of serpentine rivers.
Once more you venture. The long days darken
in the wake of your going, and thunder
rolls, bearing you across a ridge of dreams.
I follow on drifts of sweetgrass and smoke,
on a meadow path of pollen I walk
and hold fast the great gift of your being.
I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
There Came a Ghost
There came a ghost in the night,
Having about it a translucent
Cast, a pale radiance of wonder.
Indeed it was illumined within
As by the moon. It spoke to me
In a language I did not know
But quite understood. It told me
That it had once been immediate
In my world and that it had seen
Me walking hand in hand with
A presence bright and beautiful
And illumined as by the moon.
The ghost took my hand, and
We walked by the sea which was
Illumined by the moon. After
A time I realized that the hand
In mine was the hand of a child
And mine the tracks in the sand.
Nenets
I look for them,
And I grow uneasy and impatient.
Was it yesterday or last year,
When the limbs of the taiga
Began to crisp and harden in the cold,
That they promised to come?
Will they approach from a distance
Bearing bloody hides and hooves?
First I will hear their
chanting perhaps,
Or the uneven steps of their ritual dance.
And, yes, I will fear them again.
Not now, but in time I will find advantage
In the falsehood of a sign, a gesture
Of welcome, and I will take up with them.
Together we will hunt the dark beasts
That have no words with which to forgive.
Winter is coming in. Soon firelight will glow
In the frosted windows of the village,
And we hunters will huddle and seek solace
In the blue serenity of the freeze.
A Measure of Rain
In the measure of time
We take unmeasured steps
In the way that rain
Falls upon a flood,
Striking upon nothing
but itself.
Beads of rain gather
As on the wires of an abacus.
We calculate a random sum
Of which the value is finite,
The unknown infinite.
It is not a matter of time
but rain.
La tierra del encanto
Clouds build on the northern ridge
Where the shades of night grow pale
And there comes a rain like smoke.
The mountains loom and recede. And
Below, the umber plain is a pitted hide.
There the distance of time runs out,
And the mind extends beyond itself.
I have seen in the twist of wind
The landscape severed and heard
The edged cries of streaming hawks.
First light is a tapestry on canyon walls,
And shadows are pools of illusion.
I am a man of the ancient earth
For I have known the desert at dawn.
To Gaye
Let us go to the dance again.
Let us be given shawls and robes.
Let our children be given names.
You belong to me, and I to you.
The Death of Sitting Bear Page 6
