Oh, yeah.
The write up in the Wildcat mentioned something
about my good old days in the Forest Service.
And this is one poem that I wrote thinking back on that.
I worked with a couple crews of Indians, Navajo and Hopis.
And I was always trying to talk the Hopi
Indians out the kachina dolls that they carved between fires.
Then I suppose they sold them back home
in their pueblos in the winter.
Well, as you'll see in the poem, I finally
talked this guy out of one.
But I suffered for it first.
So this is called Lies Between Fires.
Kachina dolls I think, are mostly made of cottonwoods.
"These cottonwoods strung out in winter
are what saved nobody's wild horses Al tells me.
They approach carefully, step-by-step across the snow.
Rejected lovers turned voluminous
from finding wilder lovers rush in to sink their teeth deep
into the trunks.
Are what saved his own people once, rushing in behind them,
men and women feasting on the crumbs.
And so they dance now and thanks,
a miracle of leaves growing from their ears,
from their brown inappropriate thumbs.
Or so he tells me as we jump over the tailgate, one
race covered with soot.
After the hour of gesturing through an obscene story
about a fox to his enemy, the laughing Navajo,
who won't speak English, knowing I'm as much of a liar as he is.
Knowing what I really want is kachina.
So night after night, waiting between fires,
he's got to tell me the whole story, story after story.
How covering himself with pollen he hacked this chunk
from a riverbed with an axe, as if I were
some hungry anthropologist.
His back turned, hiding the work.
Then one day down with the tool shed, performing some trick,
flashes the little god at me in his open palm.
Grinning at the universe with its wooden teeth,
a tuft of real Hopi hair in its ear, he winks.
'Take it,' he said, understanding everything.
Think the right thoughts.
Make it walk."