Relationships

Reaching Yellow River

“It isn’ t a game for girls,”
he said, grabbing a fifth
with his right hand,
the wind with his left.

“For six days
I raced Jack Daniels.
He cheated, told jokes.
Some weren’ t even funny.

That’ s how come he won.
It took a long time
to reach this Yellow River.
I’ m not yet thirty,

Ghost Dance

Two hundred seventy
Ghost Dancers died dreaming
That humanity would drown
In a flood of White sins.

Then the renewed earth
Would reclaim city and town,
Leaving only Ghost Dancers
And those who lived by nature’ s laws.

History books say the threat is gone.
The Ghost Dance died with the ancestors —
Wovoka and his sacred dream
Were destroyed.

Each time it rains,
I go out to the sidewalk,
Where the tree roots
Have broken the concrete
Listening to the water’ s whispering:

Colors of the Comanche Nation Flag

Red

Mupits’ breath, in moonlight, outside a child’ s bedroom window

Hunter’ s bones scattered on the prairie

Fragrance of Comanche gangstas who entered The Zoo Club
and assassinated the bosses of Underworld Seven,
a Navajo crime syndicate

Little Stoney Burgess’ s footprints after catching ghost sickness
by running through Post Oak Cemetery chased
by snot-nosed bully, Blender Plenty Bear

Blue

Family Tree or Comanches and Cars Don’t Mix

Spanish captive, Hoahwah, married twin sisters.
The one wife called Double
turned into a snake
after eating a nest of glossy eggs.
Snake Woman still lives on Mt. Scott,
sleeps facing west.
The sun a white skull itself
bathes her on the cedar breaks.
In rectangular dreams
she calls the young men grandson.

The other sister Tsi-yee, named after a war deed
(her father charged a cavalry office
knocked him off his horse then lanced him to the prairie)
bore three children: Tabe titah, Namnetse, and Sam Hoahwah.

International Hour of Prayer for the Yellowstone Buffalo Herd

From morning’ s mouth
the bones emerge,
a prayer is whispered
over rounded horns;
the prairie is beyond
the quivering hump
and holy smoke sparkles
released in the breath.
Braided sweetgrass,
be about their hooves;
although the grip of hunger
lies heavy on the land,
let endless native grasses grow
among the yellow stones
and between the stars.
Even if only one man had
begun to sing, actually
it was thousands, She who came
to Wisconsin farmers
and transformed their lives,

Grandmothers Land

around the house stood an
orchard of plum, apple and pear
a blackwalnut tree, one white pine,
groves of white oak and willow clumps
the home of Jessie was largely redwood

blood, flesh and bone sprouted
inside her womb of redwood
for five generations
the trees now stand unpruned and wild

after relocating so many years before the War
the seeds of Jessie have returned

The Voice

1

song gives birth to
the song and dance
as the dance steps
the story speaks

2

the icy mountain water
that pierces the deep thirst
drums my fire
drums my medicine pouch

3

deep within my blood
a feather in the sky
foam on clear water
Tayko-mol!

4

free as the bear
and tall as redwoods
throb my blood roots
when spirits ride high

5

a valley ripe with acorns
and yellow poppies everywhere
as i stand here
dreaming of you

6

Deer Skull

1

I keep placing my hands over
my face, the fingertips just
resting on the place where I feel
my eyebrows and the fine end
of a bone. My eyes are covered
with the blood of my hands, my
palms hold
my jaws. I do this at dinner.
My daughter asks
Are you all right?
and by a common miracle
when I smile
she knows I am.


2

I ask her what she will do
after we eat. Sleep she
tells me. But I will clean
the deer skull, wash it.

Crawfordsville Confidential

1.

In the land of milk and cream delivered early
and daily, and always in glass bottles, we care
about good grooming and, of course, news
of slurs and curs... Can it really be that home

becomes a place to be stranded?
“I don’t see a single storm cloud
anywhere in the sky, but I can sure smell rain,”
out on the edge of Crawfordsville, Indiana,
where the answers and questions become identical
as evil twins.

Mythmaking on the Merritt Parkway

Aluminum sky. Only November
Leaks into early frost
Like a ruptured jug
Of gas. I’d rather hold
Onto this road with pliers
Than have another face of you
Frisk my heart. Cool hands,
The touch of every moon
Is crucial and incomplete
As a sponge bath. Leaving
A backbone of lights
Behind me, a blinking string
Of pelts in fox country,

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