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, or is it thirty-one? Figured all my years carried the same hard thaw. Out here, houselights hid deep inside the trees. For awhile I believed this road cut across to Spring Creek and I was trucking home. I could kid you now, say I ran it clean, gasping on one lung, loaded by a knapsack of distrust and hesitation. I never got the tone in all the talk of cure. I sang Honor Songs, crawled the railroad bridge to Canada. Dizzy from the ties, I hung between both worlds. Clans of blackbirds circled the nearby maple trees. The dark heart of me said no days more than these. As sundown kindled the sumacs, stunned by the river’s smile, I had no need for heat, no need to feel ashamed. Inside me then the sound of burning leaves. Tell them I tumbled through a gap on the horizon. No, say I stumbled through a hummock and fell in a pit of stars. When rain weakened my stride, I heard them singing in a burl of white ash, took a few more days to rave at them in this wood. Then their appaloosas nickered in the dawn and they came riding down a close ravine. Though the bottle was empty, I still hung on. Foxtails beat the grimace from my brow until I took off my pain like a pair of old boots. I became a hollow horn filled with rain, reflecting everything. The wind in my hand burned cold as hoarfrost when my grandfather nudged me and called out my Lakota name.” In memory of Mato Heholgeca’s grandson