Duane Niatum

Never reaching the promised land in Canada, HIN-MAH-TOO-YAH-LAT-KET: “Thunder-rolling-in-the-mountins,” the fugitive chief sits in a corner of the prison car headed for Oklahoma, chained to his warriors, a featherless hawk in exile. He sees out the window geese rise from the storm’s center and knows more men died by snow blizzard than by cavalry shot. Still his father’s shield of Wallowa Valley deer and elk flashes in his eyes and coyote runs the circles and a cricket swallows the dark. How many songs this elder sang to break the cycle of cold weather and disease his people coughed and breathed in this land of drifting ice. Now sleepless as the door-guard, the train rattles like dirt in his teeth, straw in his eyes. Holding rage in the palm of his fist, his people’s future spirals to red-forest dust, leaves his bones on the track, his soul in the whistle.

A castaway blown south from the arctic tundra sits on a stump in an abandoned farmer’s field. Beyond the dunes cattails toss and bend as snappy as the surf, rushing and crashing down the jetty. His head a swivel of round glances, his eyes a deeper yellow than the winter sun, he wonders if the spot two hundred feet away is a mouse on the crawl from mud hole to deer-grass patch. An hour of wind and sleet whips the air, nothing darts or passes but the river underground. A North Pole creature shows us how to last. The wind ruffles his feathers from crown to claw while he gazes into zeroes the salt-slick rain. As a double-rainbow before us arcs sky and owl, we leave him surrendering to the echo of his white refrain.

The stars grow lemon in the field, spread like tea leaves in a cup; red-wing blackbirds fold themselves into the fence, corn dreamers. The sky undulating with clouds returns gold-throated arpeggios to the one walking at sunrise, sunfall. Light as the air I sit on my cottage steps; a tom cat come home to die for the day.

The twilight of your face, the unknown bird in your voice, draws me again to your eyes’ green vision, your song about that longest moment, a moon vulnerability, a Natalie I saw alone, at Carolyn’s party years ago, where you called me to your side, and I held my heart, cupped in shadow, as an offering to your smile, our soft-spoken isolation.

Raven steals your name for an autumn joke: buries you along with it under the thickest hemlock known to chipmunks. Too bad you were awake for the event. He accuses you of asking all the wrong questions over and over. You attempt revolt to prove his medicine wheel is cracked and filling up its own pit. He hollers your face is unmasked and madness has found a home. All stink and rotten fur, he says to you, claims you had a choice and forgot what it was. Now he says your pain must run for the river, the river for the wind. He chuckles and the dark chatters, turning you around until your shadow is the earth’s.

for Elizabeth Bishop You said to me that day, “There’s nothing you can do,” and spoke of Auden’s line: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” And though I honor you, especially your poems, the objects you dipped in light, then, left in the rainbow, let slip from our sight, I admitted, diving out of self, a sweet woman’s white caress, the hundreds of lives and places in books, failed to counter confusion. You did agree that it was Socrates who said to his Athenian friends that governments are only governments with many heads and cannot think as one. That history continues to show how they swing from war to peace and back again, in one wide gallow-sweep just as the pendulum of the world’s clocks returned its towns to craters. Now I must ask myself, fifteen cobalt-blue years later, if the dust of each new war that settles in our bones, and deadens a generation, is no more than negatives of the Kennedys, King, and Lennon, has less weight than what we felt the day the Apollo spaceship landed on the moon, and Auden’s line is true, then why did you to the end, live with the dark, sing into your ruin?