Prairie
Elegy
Oh for the voice of a soaring sky in register high
with bass as clear as rolling thunder rocking
the prairie lit only by electric light
shot through the rising dust of the herds.
“You wish so hard you’re scaring me.”
Realize an older time deep in dream, beasts
dreaming dreamily of some perfect past
sensible only as great beasts can be.
The rulers dream relentlessly
elegiac in their insistence upon
ruthless prairies of proud imagination.
Imagine a continent roamed across and beyond
by wiser ones than we, and they
above and below our hopelessly helpless kind.
But prairie song is so awful, she complained after a few bars.
It goes on and on
and there never is
an end to the
hearing of it.
But what about Red Cloud? I thought too late to reply.
What about Crazy
Horse & the Great Bull?
So, she returns, Am I your
prairie Beatrice
come to show the true horizon from which
to view how many hundred bloodstained years?
Find your own saucy Beatrice!
I’m on to you fella, you and your kind
You and your junk mail!
I’ve had enough! I am so
out of here!
These prairies
ruined by you and yours and
ruinous of my
kind. See you in Osawatomie.
I.
By the time we got to Osawatomie
she had changed her name
to Veronica.
I thought we might be
getting somewhere
although it was a little hard
to know exactly where that was.
The lyrics rolled like prairie thunder
with the lightning of the Lord God screaming
(or was it the the Great Spirit singing?)
“So this is where Old Yellow Hair’s Ghost Dance
Begins.”
But it was only Jimmie Dale Gilmore.
Go to the
Little Big Horn O questing pilgrim
& see with your own eyes
& see with your own eyes
The innocent
ridge above the high prairie plain
Where the last
Sioux masses camped
Somewhere only
the imperial blind might not see them.
I
dreamed I saw Fort Laramie last night.
I dreamed I beheld the the wakpamni
and enjoyed the hell out of it, even if
it was only a great distribution of bribes.
I dreamed I enjoyed the great feast of boiled dog
With Belgian Jesuit Fr. De Smet, who baptized
894 Indians and 61 half-bloods
and that we drank a flagon of great Belgian ale.
I dreamed we danced together, Fr. De Smet and me,
to the mystic chords of memory
played by Red Cloud’s Bad Face Band.
Belgian ale? I don’t think
so! she sassed me back.
More likely mini waken, the “water that makes men
crazy”
a shuddering mixture of
diluted grain alcohol, molasses,
tobacco juice, and crushed
red pepper, and
if not that, maybe Taos
Lightening, surely
you’ve had your Taos
Lightening, pilgrim!
I let it go at that . . .
I dreamed I danced on Fetterman’s grave at
the Little Big Horn. Which was not where he fell.
But is where he is buried, she patiently explained.
There may be something to your dreams after all.
I dreamed I saw the Chickahominy River and that
I drank from the bloody Lakota aquifer,
watched as my elimination polluted the Oglala,
dreamed
of Nebraskas before Nebraska and Wyomings before
Wyoming, dreamed
it got played on Morning Music on Wyoming Public
Radio,
dreamed that Veronica and I wept tears bitter and
joyous
beneath the monument to Crazy Horse
and shot Mt. Rushmore full
of holes.
It was a great and joyous dream.
We dug deep for the place names.
Chivington’s slaughter at Sand Creek in the
Colorado
where innocents perished in the snow.
Oh for the spirit of Black Kettle to rise and
testify
such testimony as would draw tears even from
Rushmore let alone Crazy Horse at his monument
if they ever get it done.
This is not my doing, I protest, but
it is the reason I am here.
Veronica has her own version:
Not me, not me, I have nothing to
do
with it! I am from another world let alone dimension!
Go back and be Beatrice, then! I sternly reply.
This
is either our country or not. Still on
board,
she shrugs her shoulders in reply, hoping, I can only hope,
to
reassure my all but flagging purpose.
So we went to the Greasy Grass, Veronica and me.
So how, I think to ask, I have to wonder,
did you get to be Veronica all suddenly like that?
Read your Dante lately? She wants to know.
In fact . . . I had . . . if only by coincidence
just
before she came on the scene . . .
if in perhaps
dubious translation. Remind me,
I ask as kindly as I can.
Canto 31
she tells me as kindly as she can: The part
about the Croatian pilgrim mopping the brow of the Christ.[1]
But I don’t believe in that Christ, I protest, not kindly at
all,
despising the very
notion . . .
But those guys did! She has the nerve to remind me.
And if he didn’t believe it either, Red Cloud
was known to spout bits of Christian doctrine.
So what about Taos Lightening? I had finally to ask.
And she would not explain that,
I only later to learn:
“cheap laudanum-laced wheat liquor.”
[1] As some Croatian pilgrim who is shown,
In Rome, the Veronica (the handkerchief
That once, when Christ climbed his last hill alone,
A woman used to bring him some relief,
Mopping his brow), will say, within his mind,
“Lord Jesus Christ, true God, was this you? . . .
II.
It was only then that our
true journey could begin.
It was clear as a crystal
dawn. It was not a pretty picture.
Nor a story of true
romance, nor any other, for that matter.
Monroe, Hopedale, any
number of place names rolling off how many tongues?
West Point, a name
redolent of murderous chivalry
fit to inspire any heart
pointed west.
Bull Run? Gettysburg, as far as that goes. Brandie Station. Aldie. Chancellorsville,
and Bull Run. Prophecy of an
encounter with another bull of another sort
known more for his sitting
than running?
I dreamed I saw the
Michigan Brigade last night.
I dreamed I saw the
Bozeman Trail. I dreamed
I circled high as Raven
above Lewis and Clark. I dreamed I was
Tom Jefferson whose vision would
not let him rest
between bouts of intestinal disease
and great sex with Sally Hemmings.
between bouts of intestinal disease
and great sex with Sally Hemmings.
You
have a dirty mind. She shot me down.
And
besides, how come you never dream about me?
She
was high above me
like Raven above all others.
Fat Chance! she scoffed. What would
Laura Ellen think of you?
And
what would Red Cloud think of my Veronica?
What excuse for her
or any of our relentless need to efface
the facts of the matter?
Not
guilty your respective honors! Not
me! Not my Veronica! We
didn’t punch those doggies! We just wanted to see them get along, along
to
where those buffalo roam, or at least used to!
GULDURNIT!
This
time I really am out of here! she threatens.
I’m not your Veronica, I’m not anyone’s
I’m
not even my own and I want
back to my roots! So get your Buster Brown shoes
and
brains out of my way! I am leaving now!
We
parted company near the Bison paddock in Golden Gate Park.
She
was in a lot better shape than the buffalo there, I in a little worse.
We
both missed Laura Ellen but her music still rings in my ears.
Any day now, any way now, we shall all be
released.
III.
I dreamed I saw another
Veronica, last night, alive
as in any comic book with
Archie, Jughead, and Scooby Doo entwined.
Alive as Emily Dickinson
in her Amherst redoubt.
Alive as any of those five
sisters, forming
a loose aggregation of
who the fuck knows what?
Are we men? No, we are Buddha
& if that isn’t enough for
Jughead the Jarhead then for all
he can hope is a jar into which
he may piss, piss his dreams and
hopes for sacred space on which
the eye might graze and remember
nothing but the whole soaring indelible
blaze of the morning star.
I see we’re back to the
Little Big Horn.
The voice came as though from
nowhere.
I thought you had left, we tell each other as
one.
No, the two of us entwined
as his avatar . . .
the avatar of Crazy Horse. Together we dream
the Battle of Red Buttes (aka
Bridge Station)
Together we can provoke
Red Cloud’s war.
Together, Red Cloud, with
our help, can win it.
IV.
The rest, sadly, did not
go quite so well
despite a promising start .
. .
Bare serviceberry trees
formed a windbreak
as we slithered through
the Saltbrush
like the little snakes the
Chippewa called the Sioux
slithering for the
briefest of glimpses of
The Heart of Everything
that Is.
And finding only fool’s
gold.
Touched the pen to our own
Horse Creek Treaty
promising peace on the
prairie forevermore,
just like Millard
Fillmore.
Lay awake on our backs at
night
watching the Carrier
convey the souls
of the dead to the Road of
Spirits.
Listening for even the
muted whisper of
any of the four winds born
of the goddess Ite
who conspired with the
trickster Inktomi
to create the Buffalo
Nation and deliver
the people from below
through the Wind Cave
choosing for their
deliverance (and for ours?)
Paha Sapa, the Heart of Everything That Is.
Next stop, Fort Phil
Kearny.
There’s no here here, I found
myself in protest.
You just wait! Veronica
abjured all such remonstrance.
There was, and there will be.
And it’s about
time we get the women’s point of view. Don’t dare
imagine you have any sense of that
just because I keep an eye on you. You don’t
really think you’re in charge here, do you?
You foolish, foolish, simply foolish one.
I dreamed I saw Walks as
She Thinks
give birth to Makhpiya-luta
on a brushed deerskin blanket spread
over a bed of sand at Blue Water Creek
beneath a red meteor shower
I dreamed I saw Jim
Bridger, old Gabe himself,
marry a Snake
I dreamed I saw Margaret
Carrington
alive as you or me or Veronica.
First wife to the
proprietor of
Carrington’s Overland
Circus
who built Ft. Phil Kearny
and put up
signs: Keep
Off the Grass
I dreamed I saw the
bigamist Grummond
perish, enveloped by warriors,
no one escaped to tell the tale
and the woe of his widow
the beautiful Frances, there within the Fort
disconsolate even with Margaret’s merciful ministrations
I dreamed I danced at Ft.
Laramie’s
full dress Christmas Ball of ’66
rudely interrupted by half-dead Portugee Phillip
at the conclusion of his four-day ride
of 236 miles through raging blizzard, with his news
from the Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands.
His mount, Carrington’s Kentucky charger,
fallen fully dead on the parade ground.
And then I dreamed I
danced at the wedding,
Col Carrington’s marriage
to the beautiful Frances,
Margaret
herself having succumbed to
the
rigors of military life on the lone prairie.
And still have a
photograph of the Col. &
the beautiful Frances at the
erection
of the memorial to
Fetterman and his Fight in 1908
at the sight of
burned-to-the-ground by
(guess who?) Ft. Phil K.,
roughly
the site of present day
Cheyenne.
So somebody did get out of
there alive.
Including Red Cloud,
promised one beautiful
reservation on the Platte
as reward for a ceasing of
his warlike labors, sufficiently
bribed to
sit out Sitting Bull’s
subsequent losing cause.
V. Postscript, South Dakota
Red Cloud eventually (was)
traded down to
a second beautiful reserve
on the White,
and then reassigned to
Pine Ridge.
You can drive through the
Rez today
on highway US 18 and if you
approach from
Nebraska 87, right before
it turns to
SD 407 you could stop to
buy beer
in White Clay, and cross
that line
to find a grateful
recipient, or two . . .
or some vigilante First
Nations dude
who thinks you bringing
that as wampum
is not such a great idea
after all.
You also might not. In that
case, drink
it yourself, Pilgrim, it
will do you no great harm.
They ran out of mini waken, let alone Taos Lightening
long ago. Or try highway 18, or even old 18, that’s
pretty interesting, or any
of those BIA roads:
2, 41, 33, Allen Rd.,
Hisle Rd.,
SD 2 or 44, something the
sentient
need to figure out for their
own selves.
You are sentient, right?
So you go figure it out.
Understanding you could
very well be wrong.
Are in fact likely to be. Lots of wrong got done
in that whole sad
Self-Destructive Zone.
I know that song, I told
Veronica.
Laura Ellen used to play
it, she reminded me.
“They turned what was into
something so disgusting
even wild dogs would
disregard the bones.”
It was the last time she
told me what to do
as far as I recall.
I wouldn’t mind hearing
from her
with other orders
some other time.
It might even turn out
better
the next time around.
Although I doubt it.
*
* *
Prairie Elegy
Discography
James McMurtry, It Had to Happen, Sugar Hill Records,
1997
Jimmie Dale Gilmore, One Endless Night, Rounder, 2000
Country Joe McDonald, Thinking of Woody Guthrie, Vanguard, 1969
The Band, Music
from Big Pink, Capitol, 1968
Joan Baez, Woodstock
Soundtrack, Atlantic, 1970
Devo, Q: Are
We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, Warner Brothers, 1978
Ian & Sylvia, Four Strong Winds, Vanguard, 1963
Laurie Anderson, United States Live, Warner Brothers, 1984
Johnny Cash, Mean
as Hell, Columbia, 1965
Drive-By Truckers, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, 2008
