The Strange People

The antelope are strange people ... they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.

—Pretty Shield,
Medicine Woman of the Crows
transcribed and edited by
Frank Linderman (1932)

All night I am the doe, breathing

his name in a frozen field,

the small mist of the word

drifting always before me.

And again he has heard it

and I have gone burning

to meet him, the jacklight

fills my eyes with blue fire;

the heart in my chest

explodes like a hot stone.

Then slung like a sack

in the back of his pickup,

I wipe the death scum

from my mouth, sit up laughing

and shriek in my speeding grave.

Safely shut in the garage,

when he sharpens his knife

and thinks to have me, like that,

I come toward him,

a lean gray witch

through the bullets that enter and dissolve.

I sit in his house

drinking coffee till dawn

and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps,

crawling back into my shadowy body.

All day, asleep in clean grasses,

I dream of the one who could really wound me.

Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look.

Not even with his goodness.

If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.

I swear I would never leave him.

Source: Original Fire: Selected and New Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2003)