Again the Far Morning

by N. Scott Momaday

  Light,

  Appearing barely

  As the thinnest wash,

  Seeps from the ridge,

  And day breaks

  In successions of the sun

  Reporting westward

  Across the cold, kindled land

  Towards Tierra Amarilla.

  December 29, 1890

  Wounded Knee Creek

  In the shine of photographs

  Are the slain, frozen and black

  On a simple field of snow.

  They image ceremony:

  Women and children dancing,

  Old men prancing, making fun.

  In autumn there were songs, long

  Since muted in the blizzard.

  In the summer the wild buckwheat

  Shone like fox fur and quillwork,

  And dusk guttered on the creek.

  Now in serene attitudes

  Of dance, the dead in glossy

  Death are drawn in ancient light.

  Fort Sill

  Set-angia

  You were riding in a wagon to the train.

  A tree took shape in the distance.

  You began to sing; it was more than unseemly.

  The words of your song were so powerful

  That nothing less than death could contain them.

  At times, many years later, I hear the song,

  Not as it was, but as it sounds across time.

  Oh my warrior! I love you to sing!

  The rattle of your breath, rising to the sun,

  I hear among the screams of the hunting horses.

  At Risk

  I played at words.

  It was a long season.

  Soft syllables,

  Images that shimmered,

  Intricate etymologies.

  They cohered in wonder.

  I was enchanted.

  My soul was at risk.

  I struggled

  Towards hurt,

  Towards healing,

  Towards passion,

  Towards peace.

  I wheeled in the shadow of a hawk.

  Dizziness came upon me;

  The turns of time confounded me.

  I lay in a cave,

  On a floor cured in blood.

  Ancient animals danced about me,

  Presenting themselves formally,

  In masks.

  And there was I, among ancient animals,

  In the formality of the dance,

  Remembering my face in the mirror of masks.

  In the Bear’s House, 1999

  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 towards 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.

  Via Dolorosa

  A spitting snow

  Striking adobe walls,

  The cleaving of winter.

  A prologue to spring.

  Ghosts revel in the fields.

  Their tracks tracing

  Whorls and switchbacks

  On caliche.

  This year the miracle

  Of Easter

  Is sung on bare bristles

  Of the injured earth.

  A grave pilgrim trudges

  Under the heft of the cross,

  Trailing a bright spatter

  Of black blood.

  —Santa Fe

  The Remembering

  They converge in water

  That is absorbed in the dark needlework

  At their feet.

  Light smokes above them,

  Piercing the high weave of pines.

  The brake is dark but for the low illumination

  Of old snow and bracken and the hoar of the hair

  Above the withers.

  She squats, her throat wound round

  And her thick haunches bowed,

  Her broad head borne back beneath her shoulder.

  Her feet roll in mud, and her eyes behold

  His vague advance, his long looming.

  From her daybeds she has risen in his nostrils,

  Aching thee.

  He takes her, rotating his forearms upon her flanks,

  Laying his jaw hard along her spine.

  She rocks under his weight—

  Yield and brace, yield and brace, is staggered—

  And her breath, raveled with his breath,

  Resembles wind and rain roiling,

  And thunder, far away, rolling.

  An image, like remembrance, shimmers in his brain:

  A great fish, urgent from the bottom,

  Rises fast in the channel, breaks the water

  And becomes still and iridescent

  Momently in the hard hold of the air,

  Then plunges into darkness again, and again.

  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 camasroot 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.

  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,

  Into calendars and names.

  Scaffold Bear

  Bears love the taste of whiskey.

  —ESTHER NAHGAHNUB

  Here in this cave of sleep

  I know of an animal on the slope.

  No one has seen it,

  But there are stories.

  Juan Reyes dreamed of it too.

  It reared against a moonlit cloud

  And sundered the dream.

  A young girl spoke of it with wonder,

  Having heard it scoop the river for its food.

  My own story is this:

  A good man killed himself.

  The next morning a bear, stripped of its hide,

 
; Lay on a scaffold in a range of trees,

  Bleeding, breathing faintly.

  Its great paws had been removed.

  The bear spoke to someone there, perhaps to me,

  For in this cave of sleep

  I am at home to bears.

  —Tucson

  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.

  —Tucson

  Notes on a Hunting Scene

  The hunt was ended and the hunter cold.

  The far incline of fields and taiga extended to the moon, and the bear

  Lay lifeless on a sledge.

  Unaccountably, a woman began to laugh, and her laughter was like ice

  Rattling in a tin cup. Had it been frozen, it would surely have glittered

  Like candlelight upon icons.

  The hunter trudged to the fire. A wolf howled in the west, and cold

  Was the condition of the world at midnight. Owls were ornamental, and

  They were ominous. Behind the hunter’s eyes were geometries of time

  And distance, intersections of sorrow and fatigue. He imagined his

  Grandfather fishing through the ice. A fish, when it was hurled into the

  Air, froze instantly and made an iridescent arc upon the sky.

  The bear had crept on the edge of the taiga, rearing now and then to

  Sniff the wind. When the end came, it slumped slowly down and made

  Its bed. It died at a moment between the final rattle of its breath and

  The awful silence that followed, the moment cannot be fixed exactly in

  The range of time.

  The woman drank from a bottle and laughed again.

  In the village pain was preserved in the way that embers are kept alive.

  Life did not persist without pain. Somewhere it is written.

  The bear lay lifeless on the sledge. Sooner or later the singer would

  Come, and everything would have its place in the relief of ritual.

  Winter Solstice at Amoxiumqua

  For Barbara

  In the village, ketha’me

  in the canyon, ketha’me

  in New Mexico, ketha’me

  a fine snow is falling.

  The flakes swirl

  as if to discover a wind

  purling upon the laden limbs.

  To the west

  the canyon wall, blacked out,

  is nonetheless present and looming.

  Upon it lowly remain

  the ruins of Amoxiumqua.

  Imagine a bear standing

  in a street of that ancient town.

  There is no moon,

  no light by which to see

  the fine snow falling.

  In the dull memory of its blood

  the bear discerns the swirling flakes,

  and points of cold

  sting its nebulous eyes.

  Then, when its wild brain

  can no longer conceive of the sun or moon,

  the shifting fog becomes almost luminous,

  and it conjures, as a gift, the village below.

  Meditation on Wilderness

  In the evening’s orange and umber light,

  There come vagrant ducks skidding on the pond.

  Together they veer inward to the reeds.

  The forest—aspen, oak, and pine—recedes,

  And the sky is smudged on the ridge beyond.

  There is more in my soul than in my sight.

  I would move to the other side of sound;

  I would be among the bears, keeping still,

  Not watching, waiting instead. I would dream,

  And in that old bewilderment would seem

  Whole in a beyond of dreams, primal will

  Drawn to the center of this dark surround.

  The sacred here emerges and abides.

  The day burns down, the hours dissolve in time;

  The bears parade the deeper continent

  As silences pervade the firmament,

  And wind wavers on the radiant rime.

  Here is the house where wilderness resides.

  Seven Photographs of Winter

  1.

  Here is another season of the air,

  An essence other seasons softly bear.

  The wind engenders dreams of holiness,

  And we are come to goodness, more or less:

  To wish you all that you deserve and need,

  Good health, good work, good company,

  Godspeed.

  2.

  Munich on the last Christmas of the millennium: What could be better than a fine repast at Dallmayr, then a stroll through the Christkindlmarkt in the Marienplatz? The sun is low, casting a rose and orange glow behind the great domes of the Frauenkirche. The stalls, filled with sweet edibles, ornaments, and handicrafts from all of Bavaria glitter in the colored lights. The air is crisp and fragrant and particular. There are snowflakes on the ascending night.

  One concerted sound rises above all others, that of a choir on a balcony below the great glockenspiel. It seems almost ethereal, some perfect vibrancy from a world beyond. The great throng of people in the square are transported. They are as one, a body wholly held in the trance of music, devotion, solemnity. Their faces are turned upward, their common humanity borne upon the eternal spirit of this holy night. Even as it ends, they hold on to the chorus that is now echo, now void, at last applauding with mittened hands, a tribute that does not break the silence.

  3.

  We arrived at the dog camp above the Minto Flats. Through the afternoon and evening Tekla, age six, extraordinarily pretty and precocious, and I made friends. We told each other stories. She interviewed me, writing with keen deliberation in her notebook. She drew pictures for me. She gave me a stick, wrapped round with brightly colored yarns, her own artistic creation and a kind of sacred totem, I believe. She showed me how to set the ice tray, filled with water at room temperature, outside the door, and in fifteen minutes we had ice for lemonade. She showed me how to bring firewood in a sled, how to feed the puppies, and how to bounce her baby sister on the bed. Everything she did was done with charm, imagination, gladness and good will. I was smitten.

  The next morning Tekla’s mother Susan and I went mushing, I in the basket and Susan on the runners. There was a wonderful silence on the white world, barely broken by the hard patter of the dogs. I watched the team lining out before me, moving in a kind of choreography, bearing us on gusts of pure exhilaration. My eyes, stung by the cold, were tearing. It seemed to me that we were going very fast. Then in my peripheral vision, on the right, there suddenly appeared something close at hand, and I was startled. There, on her own sled, drawn by her own dog, came Tekla gliding past us in a bright blur. She sped away, giggling in the joy of childhood, dissolving into the wall of wilderness. And I was borne there, too, on the sheer edge of wonder.

  4.

  This year the weather was crisp and clear, of a New Mexican brightness that is like glitter on the air. In January there was a perfect day for the Matachina, a Spanish dance that expresses in art the unique amalgamation of Spanish and Indian cultures in the Southwest. When I was a boy I had seen the dance in falling snow and imagined that it could not be more beautiful. But the purity of light this year gave to the costumes of the dancers a brilliance beyond my imagining. The costumes of the Matachina are the most colorful of all in Pueblo ceremony—scarves and ribbons of every color, headdresses o
rnamented with silver and semiprecious stones, tassels of sparkling beadwork, and wands that flash and dazzle in the sun like fireworks or a thousand prisms clustered in the golden glare of winter afternoon. Squash kiva danced to a drum. Turquoise kiva danced to violins, played by descendants of Conquistadors who live in the old Spanish villages nearby. In my boyhood these fiddlers were old men, land grant labriegos and santeros. This year they were younger men, turned out in the fashion of a rock band, who set up a small amplifier in the plaza, near the shrine of the patron saints. Porcingula and San Diego must have tapped their feet and smiled.

  5.

  The Christmas orange is not as indispensable, not as definitive as it used to be. To tell the truth, I myself was not, as a boy, filled with awe to find an orange in my stocking. I knew it would be there, after all. (There was no Christmas without it.) And after all an orange is an orange. Nor have my children been especially taken with the Christmas orange. Oranges have come to be ubiquitous, common as burrs, and therefore taken for granted. A fruit for every season.

  But think of this. My father was a Native American, a full-blood Kiowa, born in 1913 on the Great Plains in Oklahoma, in the deep interior of the continent. When he was taken as a small child in a wagon to see his first Christmas program at Rainy Mountain Church, he had never seen a Christmas tree, and he had never seen an orange.

  When an orange was given to him, and he held it in his hands, he must have been filled with wonder. Here was a beautiful bright ball, of a color that shone like the sun, marvelous to see, cool and textured to the touch. Moreover, when it was opened, like a present from the earth, there was inside a meat fragrant, succulent, tender, full to bursting with a juice so sweet and delicious as to humble his imagination. He would not have another orange until the next Christmas, but he would remember this one, and he would cherish the memory as long as he lived.

  My father became a teacher, and he and my mother taught at Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, for a quarter of a century. The day school there went through the first six grades. Every year, before the Christmas program, my father went to the produce markets in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and he brought back many good things to eat—and always oranges. No child at the Jemez Day School ever went without a Christmas orange.

  I am told that the Three Wise Men brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christchild. I like to think that the gold might have been an orange, and that the Christchild might have found it wonderful beyond the telling.