Poetry

Hardie

You know how tiny kids walk up to you, raise their arms and expect to be picked up—I used to do that; that was me. Me, with my diaper full and my nose half-crusty. I remember being eye to eye with the little doors underneath the kitchen sink—I was a child seriously. I used to…

Snipers

The owls are impossible, priceless, a hundred points at least. They live at night and call from the dark like children. Their heart-shaped faces, their moth-like silences—. But the carrion crows are obvious. They enter the pines with parts of their wings still caught in sunlight. Four, then five of them bitching, ragging the emptiness….

Old Folsom Prison

Here’s a romantic prison for you. This could be Scotland: a crag and far below the froth-marled river. Where is the stag, the laird, where are the baying hounds? Welcome instead to Hotel California. Johnny Cash sang right there, in Graystone Chapel, and from the blue, disconsolate congregation he drew, like blood, whoops and yelps…

Buffalo Spirit Song

Great God of any particular mood. Sometimes it is all too bovinely obvious. Driving home from the Indian college I followed a car jammed full of buffalo heads snaking along the road to White Clay. Belching smoke on a blistering day the rusted heap of a car cruised, exuding the miasma of red men with…

New Folsom Prison

Heat sensors, cameras on automatic pan, vast slabs of prefabricated wall trucked in and joined on site like grandiose dominos. . . . It took the state eight years to plan to keep those men apart from you and me and only sometimes from each other, for even gang rapists and murderers are social animals….

Bear Meadow

In this field of day lilies just opening, beating for sun in this lush summer bear meadow, I tried to find a way to stay in your world, wife. The field hummed with life, the bugs and frogs and jeering birds but no words came as I had hoped from the sky blue as a…

Note to a Culture Vulture

Some years ago in your infinite European boredom you finally concluded that maybe Indians are really a noble race, yes, somewhat tragic but definitely tied to the earth. So, you decided to become one. Why not? Who would care? And who would know the difference? Your cheekbones were a little high and you were a…