PUERILITY
Here we are, watching from the stage
The mythology of the Indians, our perspective
Undeniably Caucasian as we shear off the braids
In a rural school almost as Catholic. Struck
By our middle age like a slap on the hand
The ruler in the fist of a nun, demanding
Resignation, a resurrection from savagery
Though that will come in time.
This morning I felt death arriving, sorry
To admit itself through the stiffness of vertebrae
You seem to have strung around your neck.
Why would a man turn away from this? Why
Dress himself like a woman, in bangles
Or cowries? Refuse to cut his vanity
From the scalp, the bright colors of suicide
In his shirts? Even my spectacles belie it:
The termination where two worlds have met.
Once you would have been brave enough
To cultivate these trees without pruning them.
Again, even the skin of each life, twisting
Roiling under the sun, becomes useless inside
Where the ideal awaits, too often televised
As we sit like cudgels in a field of poetry
Ineffectual and worthless. Not one man anywhere
Is as beautiful as his image, no woman
Reflected in his eyes, the soul of evolution
Repudiated into stasis, perpetual childhood,
A death outside the obituaries.
So we kill the aboriginal, usurp the mystic
Mining for turquoise in someone elses
Sacred lands. The goal accomplished
We mock with our imitations and aerosol away
Bad smells from the camps. We sage
In our sorrows and worry our bedrooms, rituals
Managing our arrogance. My ancestors
Smeared blood on their bodies, slept in bogs
Terrified patrician Rome with their gaul
proudly on the Palatine Hill, derisively aware
As they decapitated your blind statues, their guts
Hanging low. Now I cast a new spell
Mix my earth with your vinegary wine:
Drink to the twilit silver of their streams
Passing through the pueblos, sheen of swords
Slicing through white dust like tears
Down a powdered cheek; break the circlets
Of pox on their blankets of brown skin
As they ring up our purchase at the drugstore
In Taos; and honor conquest by assumption
Of costume as they break-dance in the square
For pennies, tourist to tourist. In time
It will come to you too. Fat as pumpkins
Sitting in the homeless shelters, your gods
Weaning sick children with Kentucky Deluxe
Proclaiming themselves Mexican, acts
Of resistance, glancing down from the stage
Your puerility on trial in a waste full
Of arrowheads that cannot be seen by you
Though we each pass into the ghost fields
Of our crows feet, our gnarling bones
Softened by the buffalo fat of expensive lotion.
Tonight, your womanish death coming to you
Twilight will redden like the skin of Kenneth Love
Born in Pine Ridge and blinded by drink
Careening his broken-down rattle-trap up
Greenville Avenue, but riding on faith
Like a spear, an axe, on the hunt, riding closer
To the cliffs edge, hidden in the brush
As always, everything young fleeing before him.
Theres your Indian, unacceptable, the same as then.
