Social commentaries

Indian Vices (IN THE PERSONA OF FATHER OCH)

By nature Indians are very lazy and sworn enemies of work.
They prefer to suffer hunger than to fatigue themselves
with agriculture. Therefore, they must be forced to do this by their
superiors. With six industrious Europeans one can do more
in one day than fifty Indians
— Joseph Och, Missionary in Sonora: Travel Reports
of Joseph Och, S. J., 1755-1767

Statement on Energy Policy

It’ s true we have invented quark-extraction,
and this allows our aiming gravity at will;
it’ s true also that time
can now be made to flow
backward or forward by

the same process. It may be true as well that
what is happening at the focal point,
the meristem of this process,
creates a future kind of space,
a tiny universe that has

quite different rules. In this, it seems,
whatever one may choose to do or be becomes
at once the case. In short,
we have discovered heaven and
it’ s in our grasp. However,

graduate school first semester: so here I am writing about Indians again

thanks for bringing that
to our attention
she said the first time
to my response to a history text
about a famous painting
of the Battle of Quebec
that never mentioned the French
and only mentioned Indians twice,
once as nuisances, once
as the noble savage
kneeling by the dying
English general

Old Territory. New Maps.

You plan an uncomplicated path
through Colorado’ s red dust,
around the caustic edge of Utah’ s salt flats
a single night at a hotel
in the Idaho panhandle. Our plans change.
It’ s spring, we are two Indian women along
together and the days open:
sunrise on a fine long road,
antelope against dry hills,
heron emerging from dim fields.
You tell me this is a journey
you’ ve always wanted to take.
You ask me to tell you what I want.

Saint Patrick’s Again

Live jazz at El Fresco is one guy, electric plinks,
until he turns off the switch, closes his eyes,

and warbles a boy’ s tenor, wood-flute tones,
pure séance hymns from before Christians.

Rowdies at the bar stop fighting and stare
as seawater washes through the room,

seeping through floorboards to serpent dens.
The chorus stirs spirits from family lore.

Desmond, Big Miller, James MackGehee —
all rise from steerage and sing with the lords.

Home and the Homeless

The buildings are worn.
The trees are strong and ancient.
They bend against the grid of electric lines.
The windows are broken
by the homeless and the cold past.
I am home on the yard
that spreads mint, pales the Victorian roses,
takes into it the ravaged lilac tree.
The black bulk of plastic lies about
stopping unwanted weeds for the Landlord.
Tattered, the cedar tree is chipped to dry heaps of recklessness.
The unwanted spreads by the power of neglect.
The wear of traffic says that we are out of time,

Joe

A meadow brown; across the yonder edge
A zigzag fence is ambling; here a wedge
Of underbush has cleft its course in twain,
Till where beyond it staggers up again;
The long, grey rails stretch in a broken line
Their ragged length of rough, split forest pine,
And in their zigzag tottering have reeled
In drunken efforts to enclose the field,
Which carries on its breast, September born,
A patch of rustling, yellow, Indian corn.
Beyond its shrivelled tassels, perched upon
The topmost rail, sits Joe, the settler’ s son,

Night Travel

I.
I like to travel to L. A. by myself
My trips to the crowded smoggy polluted by brown
indigenous and immigrant haze are healing.
I travel from one pollution to another.
Being urban I return to where I came from
My mother
survives in L. A.
Now for over forty years.

I drive to L. A. in the darkness of the day
on the road before CHP
one with the dark
driving my black truck
invisible on my journey home.

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