The arrow is planted.
Feathers rigid, unmoved
by mists, fog, smell of fear
in summer grass. Broken,
the sudden ecstasy
of a lifted voice,
sustained and animated
by the raucous wind.
Exiled, the words fade,
constraints vanish, one discovers
the poverty of a pale-face,
cavalier in the empire of tents.
After the epoch of storms
the sun approached the nation
from the west, signaculum
falling from the tongues of the sage.
From her saddle Luna
observed her sister,
drenched with ice.
Yesukai spoke to me,
eyes old with rage:
my people, he said,
my wives, children, herds,
whose purpose is sacred and bloody,
they cannot hide their faces
in the shadows of the prairie.
I have seen them floating downriver, butchered.
Our enemies hold their feasts on the earth,
gleaming with wasted milk and my brothers die of hunger.
And I answered, when Yesukai was gone,
why these sorrowful details?
Do the seasons bring only triumph,
continually?
Are you and your men
strangers to the night
of murder and rape?
You know it too well.
The taste of victory
drowning the bitter fire
of flight before the shafts
and cries of derision.
Broken words, am I a
PROPHET?
Dissonant voice, lost
with not even a memory to trace.
Now unapproachable.
Voice of an exiled Frankistaner
in the kingdom of yurts.
Diamonds dispersed among the leather,
diamonds among the bitter leather …
John, my name is John the Sot.
And my warrior’s exploits?
On the field of battle
the unharnessed dance.
No. I leave no traces …
Little streams do not
make great rivers if memory
is dry, parched with sentiment.
So where is the mystery?
Is it very long, the life of a clove?
It was at Siena I was abandoned by my brothers.
Clear in my youth the moment of somber study.
The somber glory of knowledge.
Like all the well-bred boys
I made the adoration with my eyes:
I saw the statue in Siena.
At the first hour
of fallen darkness
the old woman
brings a rug for my shoulders,
a pot for my gray belly.
Body grotesque and beloved
she seems to sway
beyond the pyramid of embers.
Spasm of fire and she is gone again.
I suffer:
a Christian suffering:
my breath foul, bad.
The churches of Siena,
intimate joys of my manhood.
O miracle.
Rescued from perdition
my life was borne away
on a hero’s route.
And now I wait, weary old man;
gutted like the Lama’s ghost horses,
my hair unclean until the rain falls.
And I wait
far from Siena
surrounded by a palace of shit.
I wait … but how can I say that I wait,
I’m not a dying dog!
The shadow is still
but the body moves,
attentive distinct ….
and the soft calling
hovers on my white lips.
I embrace the name of Yesukai my brother,
dead of bitterness, and to his son I offer my hand.
The world is naked;
the sons of pride are stripped
before their own battlements.
Only the prairie’s savage beauty
remains to me, the warmth
of a simple bed vanished
as the days of another man’s youth.
The Abraham of stone.
Once I saw and loved
in full daylight
Abraham father of nations
who stands in his tower
leaning forward like a warrior,
showing his face to the children
and the wild beasts,
his face radiant
and unforgiving.