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The great house birch with its girth he never quite could get his arms around, long felled, at last only its bark like a larva’s husk in grass leaning neck-high, hollow below mansards. He does not live in the peeling mansion, but a more-than-ample keeper’s cottage beyond rolled lawns and relics of Victorian elms where he muses in his study alcove. Touches the ancient coins, silver or bronze, their gleam on the baize-topped writing table — proud Athena helmeted; her owl agog beneath. Eternity glimpsed in the boy ruler Gordian’s profile, copper green. Trees on guard in browed dignity now the seething barrack of bees. Nearby a maple twisted by wind for decades spirals, a stair winding above the cone of shade. In his covert the son, reading Herodotus, Suetonius — staggering run of drachmas, staters, tetradrachms, glinting in rows.

Goya drew a pig on a wall. The five-year-old hairdresser’s son Saw, graved on a silver tray, The lion; and sunsets were begun. Goya smelt the bull-fight blood. The pupil of the Carmelite Gave his hands to a goldsmith, learned To gild an aureole aright. Goya saw the Puzzel’s eyes: Sang in the street (with a guitar) And climbed the balcony; but Keats (Under the halyards) wrote ‘Bright star.’ Goya saw the Great Slut pick The chirping human puppets up, And laugh, with pendulous mountain lip, And drown them in a coffee cup; Or squeeze their little juices out In arid hands, insensitive, To make them gibber . . . Goya went Among the catacombs to live. He saw gross Ronyons of the air, Harelipped and goitered, raped in flight By hairless pimps, umbrella-winged: Tumult above Madrid at night. He heard the seconds in his clock Crack like seeds, divulge, and pour Abysmal filth of Nothingness Between the pendulum and the floor: Torrents of dead veins, rotted cells, Tonsils decayed, and fingernails: Dead hair, dead fur, dead claws, dead skin: Nostrils and lids; and cauls and veils; And eyes that still, in death, remained (Unlidded and unlashed) aware Of the foul core, and, fouler yet, The region worm that ravins there. Stench flowed out of the second’s tick. And Goya swam with it through Space, Sweating the fetor from his limbs, And stared upon the unfeatured face That did not see, and sheltered naught, But was, and is. The second gone, Goya returned, and drew the face; And scrawled beneath it, ‘This I have known’ . . . And drew four slatterns, in an attic, Heavy, with heads on arms, asleep: And underscribed it, ‘Let them slumber, Who, if they woke, could only weep’ . . .

for Darlene Wind and James Welch I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace. Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace. I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn. I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

Tomb of a millionaire, A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen, Place of the dead where they spend every year The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars For upkeep and flowers To keep fresh the memory of the dead. The merchant prince gone to dust Commanded in his written will Over the signed name of his last testament Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips, For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance Around his last long home. (A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night. In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets. In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the newspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)

Wedding night Graciela bled lightly— But enough to stain his thighs— And left an alphabet Of teeth marks on his arm. At this, he was happy. They drank mescal In bed like the rich And smoked cigarettes. She asleep And the bottle empty, he hid A few coins in her left shoe, Earrings in the right. They worked long hours Hoeing crooked rows of maize. Evenings she wove rugs And embroidered curtains To market in Taxco. In short they lived well. However in the seventh month With child, her belly Rising like a portion of the sun, Something knotted inside her. The ribs ached. A fever climbed. Manuel summoned the Partera And though she burned pepper, And tied belts around The stretched belly, The child did not ease out. Days later she turned Onto her belly And between her legs Unraveled a spine of blood.

lonely as four cherries on a tree at night, new moon, wet roads a moth or a snowflake whipping past glass lonely as the red noses of four clowns thrust up through snow their shine four whitened panes drawn from imagined memory lonely as no other lives touching to recorded water all objects stare their memories aware lonely as pain recoiling from itself imagining the cherries and roses reaching out

The scent of pig is faint tonight as the lime trees hang their heads against gradations of blue, looking at the lone suitcase in the middle of the farmyard with a sense of solidarity. Also forgotten. Its owner never once looked up at them and exclaimed I was still soft-fingered when I planted you. In the plane, her gaze rests on a flock of cloud-birds, pinkish purple with elongated necks, rests on the plane’s wing-tip colored pink by the sun. Her head is heavy with this childhood cargo, like the hawk that usually flies between or above their branches, found skimming the ground with its catch of mouse or mole, or the barge that passes every day at four, its metal nose just out of the water, while empty at eight, its sleek sides flash signals to those on shore. Later, on the highway a row of trucks lit like orange squares in the setting sun— a colony of ants each with a piece of chrysanthemum on their backs—begins to reassemble memories; the petals become lining, the shape of the flower is lost, so that years later, looking at an old photograph, she will not remember the names of cousins and uncles but the exact bend in the river behind them, the pattern of trees.

“The conquest is not sustainable . . .” —Winona LaDuke 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 this was during the French and Indian war I said, soon thousands of French and Indian people would be displaced, sold into indentured servitude my own family among them there would be bounties on the heads of Abenaki people in Maine, and the English would sow the fields of the Mohawks with salt thanks for bringing that up, she said the next book mentioned cannibals in the Caribbean, Indians who believed the Spanish were gods, Indians killing themselves, Indian women in love with Spanish pricks, Indians whose names, even when known, were passed over in favor of the ones given them by the Spanish stop writing about Indians she told me you’re making everyone feel guilty but the next book was back in Maine home territory the diary of a midwife right after that same French and Indian war and she was using herbs not found in English herbals and wrote that a “young squaw” visited her over a period of three weeks, but the famous historian said only that there may have been Indians in the area, while she wrote at length about white men dressing up as Indians to protest against the rich stealing their lands stop writing about Indians she told me again only louder as if I was hard of hearing you have to allow authors their subjects, she said stop writing about what isn’t in the text which is just our entire history this week, she said I’m really upset you’re telling the same story three times because there’s only one story about Indians and we all know what it is so I asked her if there are an infinite number of stories about white people and she told me to stop being racist so I stayed away from class for a week because they were reading a book about a mystery in the Everglades and I knew there had to be Indians in that swamp and I didn’t want to have to write about Indians again it was on to the next book written, she said by a Cherokee writer, which Leslie Silko, who is Laguna, will be interested to find out because the book was Ceremony but that is a small mistake sort of like saying that Dante is Chinese, so I overlooked it now, she told me write about Indians and I might have done that except she went on about Indians putting on a mask of whiteness like white people put on black face, and some of the students wrote it down in their notebooks and everyone started talking about minstrel shows then she wanted me to tell her if there is such a thing as an Indian world view and I said, well, yes and no, which I figured was safe since I would be at least half-right whichever answer she wanted, but when I mentioned the European world view, she said there isn’t any such thing which was quite a relief to me, I hate to think there were a whole lot of people thinking in hierarchies and as if the earth is a dead object and animals and plants and some people not having spirit then she said I’d better stick to what I know, that is, Indians, which is what I was trying to do in the first place, and that maybe European philosophy was too much for my primitive brain in spite of its being my undergraduate major and I pointed out that the oppressed always know more about the oppressor than vice versa, so she just glared at me and told me that I look Scandinavian which was a surprise to me and I wondered why I never was a prom queen since it was always the Scandinavian girls who got that honor, maybe they never noticed I was one of them. Exactly how much Indian are you anyway? she asked. I told her I guessed I was pretty much Indian. I suppose she wondered why I wouldn’t accept that mask of whiteness she kept talking about as myself

Drawn by ceremonial obligation up from sleep I woke and stepped into the borrowed black robes all ghost bureaucrats trained to redirect dreaming pretend we do not like to wear. I drove my black car to the stadium to sit on stage and be watched watching young expectant spirits one by one with dread certainty pass before me, clouded in their names. Then listened to no one in their speeches say you’re welcome for allowing us not to tell you it’s already too late to learn anything or defend whatever accidental instrument in us causes all these useless thoughts. Like if you walked for hours through the vast black avenues of those server farms all of us with our endless attention built, you could almost feel the same peaceful disinterest as when your parents talking and smoking raised their heads for a moment to smile and tell you go back upstairs and read the book you love about myths that explain weather and death. Now it is almost June and they are finally the children they always were. So more precise than anyone has ever had to be, go forget everything we told you so you can fix what we kept destroying by calling the future.

Kitty Goes Kommando and the Goldman Rats — Phooey! That blue scaffolding holds up the sky. Who did we think we were padlocking in, or out? Give me that huge looping black script no one can read, a secret glyph, and just where someone has smashed the window, Jesus the Way the Truth the Life and a dented aluminum frame. He bent down, we know, and wrote something illegible on the ground. A toothy black-and-white dinosaur gapes. I like the crack in this wall of monsters where skylines topple and ogres twiddle train tracks in their claws like pipe cleaners. Down the long, semi-abandoned street in Queens calligraphy gallops toward the shop displaying, like guitar strings, seven different iron rods for gates. Hole in the wall, rose sound-hole, ribbed sounding board — always from fissures and gaps melody strains as trains thunderclank across the girdered overpass, a siren keens, and a solitary man ambles past amputated acacias fisting out with leaves.