Anasazi, Ancient Enemies

I rubbed wax crayon against blowing paper.

From the rock face footed a dancer white through red.

My family gave me over

to it, gone for the river.

Were I a peasant harvesting grapes near Beaune

in the last century, even, I might have dreamed

a saint lifting off for Arles,

Les Saintes Maries de la Mer,

and knowing about cannon in that long peace,

might have been troubled therefore that my flier

hauled a magnum of the best

and bloodied the west sky with it

and vanished. My fisting that loose sheet in place

was secretarial, not visionary!

Already in that decade

small tribes entered the void

like windows on a skyscraper when the bent

janitor makes his way. But those flick back on

each night, costly difference.

It is not only portents

in dream or flapping images of the gone

or the soon-to-be-going or the tremblingly poised

that catch like undertow

the foot in tide-rip toeing

down the singing or remembered beach.

We study populations in the forests,

we hold the paper flat,

mark, note, warn—the dictated

prophecies do their work, we do some work—

cut horn from rhinos so they won’t be poached.

But, to go on from there,

one needs to stand in the doorway

some evening and feel the air as if it were fire

pulling illusionlessly, letting the draw

of one fact heat its chain

of links, such as, Japan

clear-cutting forests in Siberia

where tigers not already harvested

lope their dwindling range,

two hundred as the hinge

for their growled arc of existence, bones of the others

ground to powders for old men’s potencies.

One needs to feel the tug

of the draft on skin, the drag

of process utterly anciently itself.

Faster, now, the pull is from birth through dwelling through

dissolution, along lines

streaming through us, ageless winds.

Source: M and other poems (TriQuarterly Books, 1996)