Sand Creek

1.

Mid-morning drive to Bent’s Fort,

founded in 1833 for the buffalo skin trade with the Cheyenne and Arapaho,

before the Kansas slavery troubles,

and before the Pike’s Peak gold rush obliterated the Plains Indian treaties.

Big friendly adobe stockade:

rooms, livestock, services, liquor storage. Checking out the gift shop,

I find The Massacre at Sand Creek Narrative Voices, 

poem by Bruce Cutler, based on letters of Silas Soule,

who refused to order his men to take part. A Woman

behind the counter gives me a direction sheet to the site: 

County 14 thirty miles to Haswell, then thirty-eight miles Highway 96,

and two miles past Eads to Chivington—

2.

few trailer homes among scattered car and truck guts, 

no public establishments. Finally, the 8-mile Chief 

White Antelope dirt road north to Sand Creek.

Most of the dead were women and children, all scalped.

General William Tecumseh Sherman toured the site in 1866 

and ordered the remains to be gathered up and sent to Washington.

Tried for murder in an army court,

Colonel Chivington would have been court-marshalled, except

his commission had expired by the time he led the attack,

so finally couldn't be prosecuted by the army. No point 

trying him in a civil court, as Governor Evans 

and nearly all the white people in Colorado supported him.

3.

After Governor Evans’s virtual 

sanctification of Indian murder—extermination by any means—

anyone who killed an Indian in Colorado was free from the law,

especially in the south-east, where troops 

armed to fight the confederates went after the Cheyenne and Arapaho,

like crusaders to Jerusalem taking detours to kill Jews.

Terrified childen 

seized, outraged, mutilated—

head-hides with black hair hanging

taken and kept for years 

in closets behind the boots and leather belts—

sewn into tit-bags for gold nuggets.

4.

Two small buildings, weathered picnic tables.

A half-mile path toward a bending line of trees. 

The guide comes out to inform me there are still

remains under the sand,

so I’m forbidden to walk to the site itself.

But from a little hill above Sand Creek

I can see the level areas where the tipis were pitched

on that hospitable ground by the water,

with those five Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs

who believed they had arranged a peaceful enclave. 

A stretch of green with tire tracks running behind it,

a little mossy earth under the cottonwoods.

Joe Hill, the Skeleton

Working people
don't defend
their rights anymore.

But it won't be long
before they'll get
their old courage back.

Villanelle: The Handkerchief

Remembering my grief,

for want of anything else to think about.
Trying to find relief.

I always play the thief,
with nothing I feel in the pink about.
Remembering my grief.

A fine aperitif
for everything I need a drink about.
Trying to find relief.

Not holding any brief
for what I ever raised a stink about.
Remembering my grief.

A mine or a massif,
a challenge to approach the brink about.
Trying to find relief.

My soul sprung into leaf.
There's nothing more to yawn and blink about.
Remembering my grief.
Trying to find relief.

I, Me, Mine

Yesterday we scrubbed

our small cedar deck with soap
and a bristly brush.

Can’t sit on it
and write,
because the chairs are all off it.

Well, I could walk out
and put a chair back on it.
The birds

keep zooming onto the feeders
on either side of the yard, hanging
from the iron clothesline poles.

OK, I’m sitting on it now,
my summer writing spot.
What do you do with the “I”

in a faux-Asian-form urban
nature poem? You send ‘em off
to buy deck finish.

Love #3

Hey, what's

the difference between my writing
and an old dried out (I’m walking over to make sure)

juniper tree—claw-like leaf fronds,
dusty blue berries—
I mean, my writing’s lines and points,

its syntactic structure, likened to a tree?
Remembering Robert Graves’s tree-letter system
(but I can’t find The White Goddess anywhere);

what I DO find (the first hit when I google
“Robert Graves juniper”):
Literagram #19: Robert Graves’s Symptoms of Love - Juniper Books:

Love is universal migraine
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.

So what’s the difference?
If you subtract my writing from a juniper tree,
the juniper tree remains.

Haruspications

How to name the gods—the Seeds.

Orange / Feldspar / Dhamma
Yellow / Topaz / Buddha
Amethyst / Sattva.

Then the meditator / I / the sravaka.

Then the china figure—the Goddess—
orange-robed left shoulder raised,
back to the western foothills,

right foot under crook of knee,

shining gold button on blue cap peak,
from day to day
sweeping its ray through the heavens.

1

Meditating china figure.

Red tilaka. Gold cap button pointed
south (sravaka—me—gazing always west).

Yellow Topaz Buddha scattered north.
Amethyst Sattva on belly,
Purple tip to the red right big toenail.
Orange Feldspar Dhamma the outlier, but well
within the compass fold
of the Goddess’s orange robe.

2

Amethyst Sattva on belly, slithering—
Purple crystal point toward the sravaka.
Topaz Buddha fronting—
Yellow shrouded ghost-woman.
Red right big toenail toward the Orange rock.
Ray from gold cap button splitting
Purple and Yellow (as the Goddess drops her chin).
Feldspar bulwark on the prairie.

3

Sravaka on Child elbows,
groin to the mat, big toes touching,
Bottom of the Goddess’s left foot due east,
toward the sravaka,
gold cap-button ray zooming past their right ear.
Purple by red right big toenail.
Yellow by right knee.
Milk in the topaz.
Sheer Orange butte facing.
And all the weary dogies.

4

Topaz a greenish-Yellow globule hanging
by Orange sheer rock face,
below the Goddess’s right shoulder.
Cap-button ray pricking the air.
Purple on knees and elbows
pointing at the sravaka
on knees and elbows.

5

Goddess gazing south-east
over the round earth,
Yellow advancing
along the curve of her view,
Purple pointing south-west
toward the Sangre de Cristo range.
Orange-robed left shoulder turned
toward Orange cliff face east.
The whole outfit New Mexico bound.
And sravaka in their spirit Boat,
feet and hands high.

6

Purple point by left knee,
Orange by upturned left foot,
together pacing the Goddess’s round platform
like chariot wheels
or testicles.
Yellow in front, but leaning back.
Cap button ray piercing the sky south-east,
at parsecs intersecting a ray
from the sravaka’s left middle finger.
Upraised arms a Sun Bowl.

7

Purple proboscis nosing west
toward Yellow Topaz Buddha
at the red right big toenail.
Orange afield toward Pike’s Peak—
sheer face to the rear.
Wagons toward Zion.
Adam sravaka’s right inner thigh
a pigeon roost.

8

All Seeds advancing in a triangle:
Orange in the vanguard,
Purple nose scudding northeast, opposite

shrouded ghost Buddha—
all beneath those lidded eyes.
Boats on the current,
advancing toward an event
that cannot be avoided or foreknown.

9

Purple driving to the Royal Gorge
deep in the Goddess’s shadow.
Yellow nudging her right knee.
Cap button ray slicing through Aquarius.
Orange bulwark facing
the red right big toenail
and the red tilaka spot between her eyes.

10

Mid-morning sun lighting the Goddess’s left side.
Left hand, left cheek, left eyelid,

(head turned) upper nostril.
Right foot lit up.
Red right big toenail indicating Topaz,
Amethyst point probing,
sheer Feldspar cliff facing
east. Already
the sun has shifted,
and the Seeds themselves are glowing.

God Knows

So frazzled today, wondering about transformation!

Frazzled because I’m not sure I belong in this clique.

Transformation from nervous and discontented
to satified and joyful?

Transformation from fatally compromised
to indemnified?

The original story tells of our banishment—
cast out of Paradise to live by our wits,

feeling terrible about ourselves
all the time!

If it takes God’s death and rebirth to get us
to stop beating ourselves up, so be it!

Jesus took away our sins AND we don't have to worry
we'll be scheduled into the all-white gym class!

God knows just how I come.
I'll choose my seat and sit down.