This poem, this next poem is called Grace.
And it's for Jim Welch, and for my friend, Sterling Wind.
And I wrote it, part of it on--
I started on a plane flying up to North Dakota
this spring, flying over Iowa City.
And when I went to school in Iowa City,
it was two of the most difficult years in my life.
And I suppose somehow, I was trying to find grace.
I suppose I still am.
Anyway, this poem is called Grace.
And Rabbit, like Coyote, is trickster of my tribe.
Grace.
I think of Wind in her wild ways,
the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway,
in the cursed country of the fox.
We still talk about that winter, how
the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snow
banks.
The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated
broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams.
And we couldn't stand it one more time.
So once again, we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked
through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts
into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search
for grace.
Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror
and clowned our way through a season of false midnights.
We had to swallow that town with laughter,
so it would go down easy as honey.
And one morning, as the sun struggled to break ice,
and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes
in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.
I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands,
or a white buffalo escaped from memory.
But in that dingy light, it was a promise of balance.
We once again understood the talk of animals,
and spring was lean and hungry with the hope
of children and corn.
I would like to say, with grace, we
picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw.
We didn't.
The next season was worse.
You went home to Leech Lake to work for the tribe,
and I went south.
And Wind, I am still crazy.
I know there is something larger than the memory
of a dispossessed people.
We have seen it.
I'm real proud.
They just published that in the Leech Lake--
the newspaper at the Leech Lake tribe.
So--