I'll read a poem doesn't have anything to do with Indianness.
A lot of times people think that you should just be writing
Indian poems if you're Indian.
And there are a lot of other things to write about.
Here's one called Lady in a Distant Face.
And my wife and I once went to visit a woman who taught up
at the University of Montana.
It was on a Sunday afternoon about 2 o'clock
and she was very lonely woman.
And as it turned out, we stayed with her until 2 o'clock
at night drinking scotch for about 12 hours straight,
and doing a lot of talking.
But she had been to France and it
seemed like her whole life centered around France.
And she wasn't in France.
She was in Missoula and felt really constricted.
So it wasn't quite the same thing she thought.
And so when we came home, I wrote this poem, not
that night.
I couldn't spell my own name that night.
Lady in a Distant Face.
The odd way you comb your hair, those big hands drawing circles
in a room and a Mormon background,
you become the Sunday all day scotch friend
who needs a friend to keep these mountains back.
We came up country not knowing your Paris days,
the summer wide search for Frenchmen with wild hair
and eyes that made for easy lies.
No life is chilly as your own when time makes parents foreign
and brothers come to mock you when you're drunk.
Summer was no lifetime.
It rolled with games and play on sand with sullen kings.
Bikinis fit you then.
You fit the beaches with your famous boys.
Life so shallow, you could end it with a kiss.
What bird could go alone this unnoticed?
On those beaches did you fly for seven years
then drop exhausted in the sea?
The fishermen they knew you for a fraud
rescued you with words that meant go home, home.
The steamer edged you from the scene of what is nice,
the Paris days of sun and mortgaged gold.
And now here in these mountains that hold you from yourself,
the wind blowing down your final face, you tell us what we know.
Time is clean and brief for girls
in a wild time passed for ladies up like smoke in narrow wind.