Jeffrey Yang

Bouteloua black grama grass red chino side- oats blue grama grass hairy buffalo- grass toboso three-awn land’s dawn 旦 sun over sand, tumble wind- mill witch- cup- saltgrass plains love- indiangrass, prairie cordgrass, pink pappusgrass, sprangle- top green knotroot bristle, bluestem, tangle- head, sacaton panicles open, golden drop- seed blooms desert winter- grass, awns twist, un- twist,such syllables flicker out of grass : Nanissáanah thirst, ghost dance native spirits, active roots, footstalks to soil as to site, stems bend, range- lands wave, seiche fields sway, clouds pass over- grazed grass staked, fenced dries, weakens, dies, fallen crowns, the grasslands what comes to pass, ranch- hand lands, live- stock livelihood wildlife gone, displaced, migrations impeded, scales im- balanced the years spread, each itself hitched to everything else in the universe nodes hollowed, drought- land years, drops on the hardpan nature is endless regeneration trichloris, muhly, switch- grass, wind misses 沙 沙shasha through the pass- es, whispering seeds will pass, will pass within leaves listening grasses,not only the revelation but the nature behind

of Azamor at the mouth of the Oum er Rbia River Province, Doukkala Dorantes’s slave, with Captain Castillo and myself Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca named in honor of Alhajahad grandson to the conqueror of Canaria, four far from a tribe, lost band of followers, at once master and slave, trader and healer lost, after shipwrecks, having starved, our thirst so great we drank salt as foretold by the Muslim woman from Hornachos We sought war and gold and souls among the barbarians, burned their villages, then separated, lost, but in the end escaped by the mercy en la pasión de nuestro redentor Jesucristo to tell the tale of the Seven Cities of Cíbola The hunger and thirst we endured the people always cured, whatever they had they gave us, warmed us by their fires, sheltered us People who mourned their dead children for a year, each morning before sunrise, the whole clan wept, noon and at daybreak, household didn’t eat for three months, so deep is their mourning for their children People of the bison, men naked, women and elders clothed in deerskin, the land parched, maizeless, they boiled their water with hot stones, we headed into the setting sun, following the maize road, surviving each day on a handful of deer fat, crossed the river, to the people who only ate polvos de paja,powders of grass, for four months of the year, they gave us flour and squash and frijoles and cotton mantles, we crossed the medranos, the people gave us beads and coral and emerald arrowheads We saw women in lengths of cotton, closed with ties in the front, half-sleeves of buckskin that touched the ground, and wearing shoes The people sought our blessings, thought we came from the sky, Estevanico speaking for us, as we passed through a great number of diverse languages, we knew six, but found a thousand differences We were fed on the hearts of deers, some feared and fled from us, the people having been chained by the ones who came before us, the ones we sought so feverishly to tell them No more killing No more chains, please Do no more harm, Holy Majesty, the wretched and disastrous end we suffered on account of our sins