Ghost Dance
i.
Ice [a trailer full of it] Taos, NM
Today, I learned that it rains for days in the desert. Yes. It rains and rains
but never did the ghost dances see much summer ice in this place—
ice exists here only as madness. [Lightning Bolts]
[a] Funnel cake Culture\Orgasm\Genocide\Reparations
Humans stand with looks of hunger, desperation. Oil slows their veins.
Believe in everything they say about extinction. [100 % American]
It’s a wonder we’re forced to celebrate when we’d rather
[Huey] the hotspring river hippie [just skied my whole darn life]
live by the ruins of the old bathhouse on the Rio Grande
where once there stood the only bridge and brothel in the land.
He waits there half naked with a mason jar full of herb,
waiting to get you stoned.
Big Horn Sheep [here] [there] [everywhere around]
A gentle demon waits to be lightly captured by apertures [nature itself]
once you already are there [trip relapsing]
somewhere on the wind, a distant birth.
ii.
POWWOW : a gathering of nations : singing / dancing / drum beat / drums
Navajo/Zuni/Acoma/Lacoma/Apache
World’s Fair 1904
White carnival wristband for the white
man
pictures of Indians to appease him A photo with Geronimo
flutes of wood cry into the wind
pictures of Indians to appease him [precious remnants of a genocide]
What can be done of our bloody past of awful Russian dolls?
What is the price of admission?
I know better than to mistake my ends for my beginnings—in this end, we are beginning:
Má : the syllable of the earth mother across time and cultures
uttered from
a drum: buffalo hide stretched tight across a cedar band, the heartbeat like this:
thuthumpthuthumpthuthumpthuthumpthuthumpthuthumpthuthump
but no, she says, changing rhythms; what we hear in the womb is:
swoosh-swoosh/swoosh-swoosh/swoosh-swoosh/swoosh-swoosh
the sound of fluids going through the womb: what the embryo hears until birth
and then
ADÍOS ,
the sound stops:
Now
hungry for milk
sweet meat of the bison
that were once dark clouds
sitting at trailerside, eating it up, sweet blood of the melon that we drink from here now
the children who now dance the children who dance
were once afraid. were once afraid, but no more.
Clapping of hands. Blue Sky. Dark Cloud. Beat of drum. Moan of flute whistle, whistle drone. Women reassuring children—Eagle woman dances, makes the world spin around Taos mountain—rip this white band from my wrist and lose the white dream that can’t last. I’m leaving this carnival town, to the land of silicon to drink the asphalt. It leaves petroleum ores in my blood.
Rud the oars of my blood. Rud with your oars through my blood to find my blood
cornered.
iii.
Why
is only lukewarm coffee what we have waiting on rain, sifting through the land,
looking for home, to find someone else who’s also looking, too—and with the
wheels so rusty as we go. And Go we must to where the river flows both ways,
back first to the storm clouds of the Rio Grande, back to our junkyard full of
immobile fords and sand, and back to our gathered mobile homes that never went
too far, never too far beyond Black Mesa, to where storms and more storms swallowed
up the white sun, where floods lit up the land, where rain spills down the
clouds, and the beams each drink each other’s lightning now.
iv.
Books in bag, rucksack packed,
I walk in and out of old tasks.
Flute in hand, song in head.
They danced the ancient ghost dance.
Here, it is too often that we are forgetting our past.
I dance the ancient ghost dance.
And who knows if it lasts through the task
of our unmasking.
I walk the path,
thinking, what lasts?
I walk the path.
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