This next work, The Music We Dance
To has a number of elegies in it for my father.
And I'm going to read this one because I always--
one of the first poems I wrote, that I
remember being happy with, was a Father's Day present.
It was one of those school assignments.
And usually, Father's Day is missed
because it's after the school year has ended.
But for some reason, we had a teacher
who wanted us to make Father's Day cards.
So I was quite pleased with myself
when I made this poem that went, "Bison is a buffalo.
Bully is his name.
Bully gallops up and snorts, Happy Father's Day."
[LAUGHTER]
And my father, who was a painter, one
of the first paintings he ever did
was of an Indian and a buffalo from one of my kids' books.
So in this poem, I'm always happy because it's, in a way,
as if I still have that childhood
home, even though the poem says absolutely nothing about it.
"Great Circle."
"As he aged into impassive calm, strangers
thought my father was a Navajo.
But as a child, I knew he was a buffalo.
That beast, with its puzzled stare,
bred back from the edge of extinction,
ruminating among the repetitive flowers, his shoulders
beginning to slump from emphysema,
like and unlike a calf's emerging hump.
The great circle, my picture book called it,
on one side of the page, an Indian, black brains flying
behind him, bow and arrow in hand, urged his pinto on.
On the other, a single buffalo, the muscles beneath his thick
hide rippling in a stampede of alarm.
Cracking the book's spine as he flattened the pages,
my father drew a grid over the Indian and the buffalo,
then enlarged each section onto whitewashed Masonite.
Painting for the first time, he was an ancient cartographer
who, mapping around Earth on a flat surface,
blurs the outlines of separate things.
The man's face smudged into sky, the curly hump extending
too far down the buffalo's right foreleg, dissolving into grass.
What he caught exactly was the wound.
The blood seeping around the arrow
in the bison's flank, as vivid and as distant
as the scar on my father's back.
Long before my birth, someone tried to rob him.
He walked home with a knife in his torso,
but only knew it when he glimpsed the shaft embedded
in the mirror.
What did I know of my father?
His pain lived at such a distance.
It was an imaginary line that, circling the globe,
dissected the Earth into halves.
While he brooded at the window, his black moon and injured bull
haunting the edge of his herd, I circled the house
with war crimes.
Pretending to be in Indian, I thought we were opposed.
But now, only this painting remains of my father.
I see, in the great circle of the Indian and the buffalo,
the way in which my father and I were divided and are one."