6.
Sometimes when I look along a corridor of the earth, I am aware that someone, a thousand years ago, saw exactly what I see, for the rocks and mountains are perpetual calendars, telling the soul’s time. And what is entered there are the numerals of eternity. I see and come away in humility.
7.
Dark firelight ripples on the frosted glass,
Mere shadows of processions where they pass.
At dawn the sky is like the curdled seas.
The snow transfigures landscape by degrees.
The camera contains the winter world,
The scene is on the lens. The cold is curled
About the solstice, and the range of time
Is broken on the needles and the rime.
Through time exposures are the heavens seen.
Behold with wonder that the moon is green.
A portrait of the family at best
Is that of you and me and all the rest,
And on the picture plane a homely birth,
A holy composition, peace on earth.
The Threads of Odyssey
1.
I dream again the far morning in which the boy comes to me. He takes my hand, and we walk on the edge of the village, along the river. He is more alive than I to the things around us—the sound of the soft wind, the glints of light that dance on the water, the shadows of birds that dart on the canyon walls, the smell of woodsmoke and the feel of the uneven ground beneath our feet. His senses are sharper than mine, and his capacity for wonder greater. The grasp of his small hand is firm. He shares with me his delight and curiosity. He is excited just to be, and his excitement spills over upon me, and I am more sensitive to the world than I was before we touched hands. He has wonder enough for us both.
“Look!” he nearly shouts, and he points to the northern sky, where a great tumbling cloud has appeared on the blue mountain. Had I not been with the boy, it would have seemed an unremarkable sight. But now as I look at it I see how extraordinary and how beautiful it is. And besides, it has the shape of an ice bear; then, roiling, it becomes a dinosaur and then a great mouse. In the long distance, there is a sound of rolling thunder, so low as to be nearly inaudible. We keep a customary silence, the boy and I. I know by his example that silence is the house of the soul.
2.
At midmorning it begins to snow. The sky has descended into the canyon, and the walls are invisible in the mist. It is the first snowfall of the season, and the boy is beside himself with joy. Even before he has put on his coat, cap, and mittens he is in the open doorway, pulling at my arm. Some flakes come swirling into the house, and in the swirl he dances. He is like the crow dancers at Zia who come down from the hills on New Year’s Day and beat their feet on the earth in perfect time to the drum. Or he is like a koshare, a small member of the ancient society of clowns, a definition of mischief and mystery and holiness.
I ponder the snow. Each unique flake glides to the earth and is gone. Were it possible to catch just one flake in midair, when it is pierced with sunlight, and hold it under a microscope, there would appear something like a prism, perhaps, but more intricate—or a dreamcatcher, a perfect symmetry, so fragile as to exist on the very edge of existence.
But to the boy the snow is more intrinsic to the world as a whole. He has no need to see with the mind’s eye the microscopic particles that are beneath the surface of the visible plane. No matter that he does not see beyond appearances. The apparent world is enough to fill his heart.
3.
So it is that an eagle can focus upon every object in its range of vision simultaneously. I can focus upon one. Oh, but to see, a single object at a time, the world in which I am alive! Surely that is worth dying for; to see clearly the wonders of wilderness and oceans and mountains, that is to earn one’s death. And to see the monuments of one’s life from the plane of age, that is good. The other day I saw the arbor at the homestead on Rainy Mountain Creek. It is vacant, and it is falling into ruin, and I want with all my heart to save it. Even old and dilapidated, it is beautiful to me, for it is one of the homes of my spirit. There I was brought from birth; there I was given my Indian name; and there, just beyond the northeast corner, my father was born in a tepee. I wonder if the arbor will stand as long as I do.
In the Malpais, the boy sees a double rainbow, very close in the east. It is more brilliant than any rainbow he has seen. And at Lukachukai he steps outside a hogan at night and beholds a sky full of stars. It is a sight that he will never be able to describe in words, but he will keep the vision as long as he lives. It is simply a signature of God, the universe drawn with light, wholly gratuitous and unexpected. In the presence of such things, there is only a still stance of the spirit, a quiet like creation. The boy is here, here in the world, in the embrace of eternity. He leads me to old revelations, those that I knew once upon a time.
4.
On a day such as this, in the far morning, when the wind was cutting and shrill among the bare black limbs of the elms and junipers, and the fields were frozen, the boy thought of what would become of him. The world was a lonely place, but it was full not only of possibility but of promise. He might have been thought of as poor by many—if he was thought of at all—but he thought of himself as a man on a horse, and that vague, enchanted image, that preliminary drawing of a centaur, was enough to define him in his becoming, enough to lift his heart seventeen hands above the ground.
“Who am I?” the boy asks. I have been expecting the question. It is the most important question he, or anyone, can ask. “I don’t know,” I reply, “or I know only in part. But you must search for the whole answer. It is yours, yours only, to find. That is the object of your life.”
He shrugs, eats an apple. I regard him. He is vital, curious, unknowing of his acute vulnerability. Well, so long as he doesn’t know. The unknowing gives him a chance.
We breakfast, the boy and I. He seems not to taste his food, but to take it for granted. I think of what a physician once said to me, “food is food.” As for me, I savor my toast and eggs. The boy will come to be a maker of imaginative omelets, I think. How can it happen? Perhaps it comes about with the feel of a fresh egg in the hand—the bare beauty and simplicity of it, the sensation of cracking it open, the understanding that it yields sustenance, a thing at once delicious and nourishing. I take an egg from the bowl and hand it to him. He holds it with respect, or suspicion. The two things are indistinguishable in his face. I marvel at things that emerge on the far side of my memory.
Say that I live in motion. I love trees and mountains and the walls of canyons. My heart is touched by the stillness of an early morning. But it is at last the things that move with my blood that excite my imagination. A horse that races in the plain, a river that runs fast, a wind that whips at my eyes, a wedge of migrant geese on the sun: these are my benedictions, the definitions of my migrant soul. Migration. It is a word that lies in my brain like a leaf. It rustles and turns, and it spins, like a weaver’s wheel, the threads of odyssey.
New Poems
There Was a Time
There was a time
I wanted nothing so much as you.
In the rain I loved you, in the hot days.
The corn ripened. We were children of storms
And of seasons.
We ventured from each other and were lost.
But, oh, those salty songs of the damned!
Death has a green foot,
And we dance like fools.
Anywhere in a Street into the Night
Desire will come of waiting
Here at this window—I bring
In old urgency and fear
Upon me, and anywhere
Is a street into the night,
Deliverance and delight—
And evenly it will pass
Like this image on the glass
American Ballad
Where do you come from,
And where do you go?
Where do you
come from,
My Cotton-eye Joe?
Well, I come from the darkness,
And I come in despair.
I come from the darkness
And again will go there.
Black smoke’s arisin’,
Yonder comes a train.
Winter’s comin’ on,
Hear the whistle in the rain.
Down in the valley,
The valley so low,
The rails run to darkness.
To darkness I’ll go.
Well, there do you come from,
And there do you go,
For there do you come from,
My Cotton-eye Joe.
The Stones at Carlisle
Here are six rows of children. How
Symmetrical the small array.
The names are dim and distant now.
We come and go, and here they stay.
Please pray they rest, and bless each name,
Then reckon innocence and shame.
The Northern Dawn
At Coppermine I saw the Northern Lights.
They wove a green and purple drapery,
Shimmering in place, seeming to descend.
Nothing could seem more constant, more
Perpetual in pale motion. But brief, ephemeral
They were, mere fringes of the ghostly havoc
That pervades the universe, the silent strings
Of infinity, the colors of music beyond time.
Plainview 3
The sun appearing
a pendant
of clear cutbeads, flashing;
a drip of pollen
and glitter
lapping and overlapping
night:
a prairie fire.
An Ivory Edge
What of those fingers,
Those long lovely hands?
Will you place them so
Upon the linen
Of god, the pristine snow,
And carve old epics
With your story knife?
Division
There is a depth of darkness
In the wild country, days of evening
And the silence of the moon.
I have crept upon the bare ground
Where animals have left their tracks,
And faint cries carry on the summits,
Or sink to silence in the muffled leaves.
Here is the world of wolves and bears
And of old, instinctive being,
So noble and indifferent as to be remote
To human knowing. The scales upon which
We seek a balance measure only a divide.
The Old Cemetery
On this electric evening I come here.
It is a place I know and love and fear.
Returning is a ritual of dread:
I would be elsewhere than among the dead.
Belonging is the compass of my soul,
And here the fractions of my self are whole.
Ancestral whispers echo in my brain.
They weave within me, constant as the rain.
I hear my name; my blood informs this ground
And surges in the lightning all around.
Voices exact a memory of those
Who lie about me. And time will enclose
The void between us. Let no thunder cleave
This fragile union, nor this taking leave.
To You Who Named Me
Kiowa George Poolaw, ?–1938
Indeed you were filled with wonder.
Namegivers walked in wonder then.
You bent your voice to story and
The songs of origin and age.
I must have heard you in my infant sleep.
Or barely waking to the tones
That were ancestral and discreet,
Guttural in the deeper throat,
Run through with sorrow and restraint,
And yet forgiveness and consent,
And somewhere in the syllables
An ancient joy, a welcoming.
Thank you, grandfather, that I am,
In your voice, in my name. Aho.
To a Man Among Us
For Robert Henry
You emerge in time and chance
One of us, rude in the rigor of birth.
Uncertain and tentative, sowing seeds of promise
As a boy. And now, as a man, you transcend
The limits of locality. You find your stride.
You see to the horizons. You breathe the air
Of crystalline mornings. You walk in the grasses
Of the plains, along the red banks of rivers,
In the foothills of the turning earth.
In scripture and verse you are at home.
You ascend the stair of justice
And take your place among those
Who have fashioned the bulwarks of civilization.
We wish you well and Godspeed. Be of cheer
In your going. Be the keeper of right and rule.
Rhymes for Emily
She wrote with such ungodly haste,
You’d think there’d be a ton of waste.
Fact is, she listened to the birds
And learned the twittering of words.
For Unborn Children
I am.
And knowing how to be,
I am among those who are.
We are old and poor in our existence.
But we make gifts
For those who will become.
Spectre
How faint her humble form
Suspended there among the stars.
She wears the mantle of a mendicant,
Blue or black and meager against the cold.
At her throat the winding of a shroud
Extends the pallor of her face
Into the water hue of her hair.
She bears no expression,
But a silence pulses at her lips
Like lost whispers of the Magdalen.
She stands in the glitter of God,
Against disclosure and the chill of heaven.
Keahdinekeah, Her Hands
I remember
My great-grandmother’s hands.
They were narrow and gnarled
And weak, with no grasp at all.
Mostly they were soft, so soft
That I could not imagine them
Taut and strong as those
Of a woman who held the reins
Of racing horses, who raised
Camps on the windburned plains,
Who handled horns and hides.
I am long removed from her,
But her being is bled into mine,
And I keep the bleak memory
Of her way, and the give-away
Of blood and bone.
Great-grandmother,
Be for me the long way backward
And the blind way ahead. I am
A tracker of the lost herds.
In the deep memory
You are whole and vital. I am
Your shadow, marking the ruse
Of time. We are children of the sun.
In the holy riddles, we endure.
Gladly I remember,
In your little, trembling hands
There was lightly held a gathering
Of many years: old men singing,
Children stamping the ochre earth,
Magpies drifting in fields of snow,
Thunder rolling, and among
The dark saddles of the Wichitas
The howling of wolves ascending
To a hunter’s moon.
The Passage Between
Because it’s there.
—G. H. L. MALLORY
—a passage outside the range of imagination,
but within the range of experience.
—ISAK DINESEN
The sheer face lay opposite,
Both over and under him.
His lungs burned in the as
cent.
His eyes congealed in the cold,
And at last he could not see.
Or what he saw was nothing,
An ice that reflected death,
Present and invisible.
Below he had imagined
The summit within his reach;
He could not imagine now.
There was only the descent
Into mere experience
And the blind passage between.
For Wilma Mankiller, an Honor Song
Your spirit is known to the earth.
You are worthy of great renown.
The river knows of your spirit,
The forest knows of your spirit,
The mountain knows of your spirit,
The prairie knows of your spirit.
Your spirit is known to the earth.
Your spirit is known to the animals.
You are worthy of great renown.
The eagle knows of your spirit,
The bear knows of your spirit,
The wolf knows of your spirit.
The mountain lion knows of your spirit.
Your spirit is known to the animals.
Your spirit is known to those who now welcome you.
Let them keep you safe in their camp forever.
We who follow, let us sing and dance in your honor.
Suzdal
Wind in the broad blades,
Bent figures in the fields,
Low walls of an ancient kremlin,
In the rare, rude splendor
Of old Russia, I am young;
I am the singer who sang there.
The Galleries
Do you sense them there, the ones
Who invented art, who saw
That we might see? They linger
Now within these galleries,
Mute, marginal in their minds,
Again the Far Morning Page 4