An easier one is James Ohio Pattie,
a figure from Arizona history, James Ohio Pattie.
Now, we can think about that.
It has to do with one of the first meetings
of English speakers at least with Indians
and it involves beaver trappers.
I have to tell you that if you understand the poem,
the image at the end has to do with arthritis
and that was one of the ills that beaver trappers suffered,
because they had to stand in water while they
were trapping beaver.
When they saw us they clawed away
up a thorny hill, analysands from their therapists.
Desperate as usual we ate their mush made of grass seeds,
and tied a screaming toddler to a tree, whom we feared
would fall in his rage over a cliff.
Next day he was gone, exchanged for the shank of a deer.
In appreciation, we left the red handkerchief,
replaced in the morning by a robe of rabbit skins.
I left the pouch of rifle ball, periods
from some errant paragraphs.
And they, bits of mica glued to a patch of cardboard
with a picture of a Saint in pain
painted on it that they'd taken from a murdered Spaniard.
Where would this escalation end?
They had their murky lives to get on with,
and we bear fat to render.
The ideas of beaver stripped naked
from the floods of sunsets and turned into fortunes
before arthritis set in.