WEBVTT

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Oh, yeah.

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The write up in the
Wildcat mentioned something

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about my good old days
in the Forest Service.

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And this is one poem that I
wrote thinking back on that.

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I worked with a couple crews
of Indians, Navajo and Hopis.

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And I was always
trying to talk the Hopi

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Indians out the kachina dolls
that they carved between fires.

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Then I suppose they
sold them back home

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in their pueblos in the winter.

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Well, as you'll see
in the poem, I finally

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talked this guy out of one.

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But I suffered for it first.

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So this is called
Lies Between Fires.

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Kachina dolls I think, are
mostly made of cottonwoods.

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"These cottonwoods
strung out in winter

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are what saved nobody's
wild horses Al tells me.

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They approach carefully,
step-by-step across the snow.

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Rejected lovers
turned voluminous

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from finding wilder lovers rush
in to sink their teeth deep

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into the trunks.

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Are what saved his own people
once, rushing in behind them,

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men and women feasting
on the crumbs.

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And so they dance
now and thanks,

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a miracle of leaves
growing from their ears,

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from their brown
inappropriate thumbs.

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Or so he tells me as we
jump over the tailgate, one

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race covered with soot.

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After the hour of gesturing
through an obscene story

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about a fox to his enemy,
the laughing Navajo,

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who won't speak English, knowing
I'm as much of a liar as he is.

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Knowing what I really
want is kachina.

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So night after night,
waiting between fires,

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he's got to tell me the whole
story, story after story.

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How covering himself with
pollen he hacked this chunk

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from a riverbed with
an axe, as if I were

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some hungry anthropologist.

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His back turned,
hiding the work.

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Then one day down with the tool
shed, performing some trick,

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flashes the little god
at me in his open palm.

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Grinning at the universe
with its wooden teeth,

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a tuft of real Hopi hair
in its ear, he winks.

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'Take it,' he said,
understanding everything.

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Think the right thoughts.

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Make it walk."

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