When this topic came up, that was
what I thought of as something with more life in it.
So I guess I have to say it's downhill from another poem.
That's the one that occurred to me.
I had two or three others that related.
One is to this class.
And I'm passing through this phase.
It's called A Sound From The Earth.
Somewhere, I think in Dakota.
They found the leg bones.
Just the big leg bones of several Buffalo
and a gravel pit.
Near there, a hole in a cliff has been hollowed,
so that the prevailing wind of autumn
thrums a note so low and persistent
that bowls of water placed in that cave will tremble to form.
The grandfather of Crazy Horse lived there.
They say at the last.
And his voice like the thrum of the hills made winter
come as he's saying boy, where was your buffalo medicine?
I say you were not brave enough, boy.
I say Crazy Horse was too cautious.
Then the sound he cried out for his grandson
made that thin agency soup that they put before him tremble.
The whole earthen bowl turned into foam.
Now, the occasion for this is I thought of it at that class
said a little bit of it.
And it is something that goes like this.
I remember reading in Scientific American
that somewhere I think in Dakota,
they found the leg bones, just the big leg
bones of several buffalo and a gravel pit.
Documentary right out of Scientific American
stolen and smuggled into the first stands of my poem.
Now, from here on, though, and I've been through this routine
before and I know my way, and I feel a little guilty about it,
I hope it's all right for a new student generation.
From here on, it turns into a documentary.
Not of something had happened, but as
something that is happening because I'm
doing the documentary.
I mean, the writing is so immediate.
It makes the thing happen about there's
a hole in this cliff that thrums this note.
Well, yeah, it happens here while I'm writing it.
And that grandfather of Crazy Horse lived there the last.
Yeah, it happened here.
And above all that anyone ever said
Crazy Horse was too cautious.
No, I don't think anyone before me ever said that.
So that's my original documentation of something
that occurred only once in the world.
And I would like to find my way like that in writing
or thinking, conceptualizing.
Not be held to things that had already happened.