In the poem, many of the newer poems are biographical poems.
I haven't read-- these last two that I'm
going to read are both poems that are lives.
One of the poems in here is called "Writing Lives,"
which is a title stolen from Leon Edel,
but the poem is dedicated to Leo, and so I think it's OK.
Vasari wrote a book in the Renaissance
called Lives of the Artists, and he
wrote about the great painters of the early Renaissance.
And in some cases, all that we know is what Vasari tells us.
The title of this poem is "Lives of the Artists,"
and it's not about the Renaissance.
"It was when the school had burned down that he
started making the book.
Early in the year, at the time, the moons of snow
were beginning to wane in hollows out
on the plain he had come back to last year
as though it were home, bringing the name
they had dressed him in.
He was sleeping in the loft where all of the boys
were put after the fire.
They slept up over the horses in the house of the horses
and the horse smell.
And all night, they heard horses breathing just
below their own breath and hooves
in the dark and dry grass.
Then he began wanting to make a book of what he had seen
and how it went on.
He lay awake hearing himself want to make pictures
the right way of what was and could not be found ever again
in the day, in the steamy yard of the agency with its panes
of vacant windows rattling to their own light.
A book with no parents since he had none.
It would give for the dead no names
but might show some of the same birds
that were called differently in the true place
where he had been small, the tales like split
smoke reflected and flights of white shields,
and the buffalo would be there as they appeared to him,
the bulls thudding together like mossy rocks
so the ground shook.
But how would he make the sound of their running wake out
of the lined pages of the red ledger where he would draw them
and the rush of their breath as he kept hearing it?
His friends would help, who were older
in the time of the buffalo and still
had names from there that you could
draw with a picture, Horse-Back, Dark Cloud, Black Wolf, Hill
Man.
Whereas now for himself, how could you draw a Henderson?
What was there anywhere that looked like a Henderson?
There was only a word for him, a Henderson
in the night who had gone away in a wagon
to learn to make wagons, and who had shouted
Baldly with the others, and who could read
the new language for the children
but who nursed the tapeworm and was never content,
a bad element, always wanting to go home.
He would draw friends in the book
with their true hair braided to the ground before it was cut.
They would be talking together in their richest robes.
They would be riding off to battle leading horses.
They would be singing.
He would show the butterfly of the thunder on the white horse
with birds bringing power down and the green frogs spread
on the dream shield no bullet could pass through.
His friends would be chasing the blue soldiers off the page.
He would show the ground where they
fought at adobe walls, the guns from the houses,
the hoof prints going around.
And the fight would not be done, so his friends
would still be riding in the open with nothing
touching them.
And he would still be a boy at home,
hungry in summer, who had not heard them tell how it ended,
how they would fight no more and none of them
would have been taken yet far away to the tall fences
nowhere in the south, the waiting nowhere,
and the days there, and the nights
there, the strange moon, the new hunger they had no words for.
And he would have years before the wagons changed
him and he came back to meet Reverend Haury, who always knew
better and made him a bright Indian, teaching
with white words.
But in the drawings, he would have
the dancers who could dance everything backward.
They would dance in the book he would
send to Ms. Underwood before his 23rd year
and his death of causes no one bothered to name with so many
of them dying, whatever they died of.
And then there was only the book.
And he had never met Little Fingernail, his elder
by a few years only who had been herded south to the fences
with the rest of the Cheyennes, when the spiders had lied
to them again and had led them down nowhere in their turn,
but who had seen that he could not live there
and had said it would be better to die trying to go home
and had started north at night with the others of his mind
when the first leaves were turning.
He who was their singer, with the Singing Cloud who
would be his wife, and her dying father, and the children who
would learn to be quiet, and the mothers
and the men with bows and guns knowing that by morning, they
must be gone like a summer and that they
were leaving without the few things in the world that
might protect them, the sacred arrows, the sacred hat,
and would have only the horizon of each day to hide in.
Yet he knew they must not wait for the old power any longer
but must find their own in their going as his hand often
had drawn out of nothing, the life they could no longer see,
the horses flying and arrows flying and never coming down,
the long lances reaching ahead and not yet touching a thing,
the war feathers trailing behind and the dark stars that
were bullets.
And you could see by the shields and what
they wore who was there in the fighting,
riding into the smoke of the blue spiders all in a line.
And who rode after the spiders to shoot them off their horses
and leave them scattered on the ground?
And who took their guns, their coats and bugles?
He, Little Fingernail, could make it appear again and again
in pictures.
And after the spiders came chasing them to bring them back
and shot at the chief Little Wolf
standing there talking with them,
and when they shot a child, a girl, and in their turn were
driven back fewer and smaller than they had come,
he wanted to make a book of what he had seen
and would see on the way home so that how
they fought and went on would be there after it was gone.
But he must lose more friends to the spiders who shot them
on sight, and he must come to dream
of walking in a world all white before at a place
where one more time they had fought off the spiders.
He found waiting on the ground the book
he had been wishing for with the pages all white, blown open
and the sticks of color lying beside it for him
to make into how he saw them going.
And before they crossed the iron road and the first of the three
wide rivers, he had tied the book to his back
with strips of rawhide around him under his shirt.
So it was there as he rode ahead and as he peered out
through bear brush on the low hills,
as he circled back to coax the spiders from the trail,
as he fought, as he mourned for friends fallen,
as the horses weakened and the first snow fell
among them, as they hid without fires, as the skin grew loose
over their bones, as some crept out to turn into scouts
for the spiders, as the chiefs disagreed,
and as they all said goodbye while the snow fell
and they went two ways.
It was there as they crouched in brush huts
starving through blizzards and were betrayed, and surrounded,
and forced to lay down the 15 guns they could not hide
and the bows they had made.
It was still there as they were herded
into the fort where Crazy Horse had been
murdered after the promises.
And as they were locked in, it was there
with the few knives and the other guns
they had managed to hide.
And through the time of waiting under guard there,
he could make parts of their journey return
across the pages.
So little remaining from the whole story up until then.
And it was tied to his back again in the cold night when
they dropped the guards with the first shots,
and poured from the windows to the snow
then ran past the walls to the river keeping together
while the bullets burrowed into them,
and the horses came crashing after them through the drifts.
And those who got as far as the river
hid in the bluffs in the hard cold, the blood
freezing on their wounds.
They lay still with the dead children and women
stunned by loss.
And when morning whitened and those who were living
found each other again, it was he, Little Fingernail,
who led the last of them out of the ring of watching spiders
into the bitter white of the hills.
But there is nothing in the book except the blank pages
for the rest of it, the last hiding places, the last meat
from the snow, the last morning in the hollow
above the empty river, and the spiders
massed at the foot of the hill, the last loading of their guns
as the roar of rifles from below rolled toward them
and over the heads of the children, and of Singing Cloud,
and the others.
His voice rose, and the last singing, and some
joined him in the death song, the men not as many as 20.
'I am going to die now.
If there is anything difficult, if there is anything dangerous,
it is mine to do.'
As the spiders charged to the breastwork
to shoot down into any still moving,
and even then, he rushed out at their fire
with his knife raised.
And they found afterward under his shirt
a book tied with strips of rawhide
to his back and the holes of two Sharps rifle
bullets almost in the same place through all its pages.
It was a Colonel who took it from the body
after what would be called The Engagement.
An account book stiff with blood,
and he kept it for the pictures of which only one can
be seen now lying open under glass
beside other examples in the airless hall
of the museum, red.
Lions fly from the neck of the horse
on which the man with long braids is racing.
And in the white sky are black stars
with black tears running down from them
in delighted silence through which strangers pass.
And some of them pause there with all they know."