the poetrysheet

whimsy, subversion, bowling

Number 449, Jan. 1, 2004

Happy New Year

 

“The wild creatures of the open spaces, of water and green northern wilds, of gold prairie and huge sky, embody a human longing no less civilized for being primitive, not less real for being felt rather than thought.”

—Peter Matthiessen, Wildlife in America

 

 

From the notebook, On the Missouri Above the Marias River, July 30, 1995

 

Around Evans Bend, the wind picked up, and the waves grew into whitecaps that blew upstream. I stayed close to the shore, looking for a place to exit if things got too rough. For a long time, I was able to stay in the wind shadow, the calm water in shielded by they bank.

 

But about sixteen miles in, fierce wind howled off the flat plain above and straight down the valley. The waves stretched up over the bow. I took a break on the bank. Once in a while, the wind would calm between heavy gusts and sound like whispers. It made me look about and sent chills up my spine. There no one around, just bank, water, willows and sagebrush, and the grassy hills.

 

The whispers made me remember the people who had been here before. And I had to laugh when such thinking brought to mind a passage I had read in Lewis and Clark's journals. When the Corps of Discovery met friendly Indians, there was often a parlay and some recreation—which included sexual congress with the democratic Indians. I wished for a few friendly Indians, or friendly anybodies, myself. Having had no human contact in more than a week, I could use a parlay, some recreation, and maybe even a little congress.

 

While the men of the Corps were the first white men many of the Indians had ever seen was curiosity enough, William Clark's slave York was a real attraction. As Steven Ambrose wrote in Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, "York was a sensation. His size was impressive enough, but the Arikaras had never seen a black man and couldn't make out if he was man, beast, or spirit being. One warrior invited York to his lodge, offered him to his wife, and guarded the entrance during the act. York was said to be 'the big Medison.'"

 

Many the Indians believed, in the end, that Big Medison was a spirit being. Through procreation, he would give them powers over their rivals that they never before enjoyed. Whether they received any powers was unclear. The sure thing was, as Ambrose points out, the Corps of Discovery—and York—gave Native Americans the gift of venereal disease.

 

I leaned back against the fragrant sagebrush and wondered about children of York, how they might have fared in the years between the visit of the Corps of Discovery and the arrival of the white men. I wondered if they had been revered, what positions the might have enjoyed in the Osage, Kanza, Omaha, Arikara, Minot, Mandan, Nez Perce, Chinook, Lakota and Tetonnais Sioux, Blackfoot, Flathead tribal hierarchies. Tracking the children, of course, would be impossible. It was good enough to know that through the Indian Wars, the disease, the reservation, allotments, and assimilations, York’s genes were still out there.

 

I was only sure that when the Lewis and Clark's men returned, they received hefty bonuses for their two and some years in the new lands of Louisiana. York, however, though he was often credited for having done as much or more work than some of the other men, received nothing. When he appealed for his freedom as reward for his participation in the Corps, Clark beat him for it.

Today’s poem:

 

Sacrifice

 

Heat conjures treacherous miasmas from the victim,

whose tire-skewed jaws smile skyward,

flattened claws splay across yellow line.

 

In the sun on a country road,

amid forest tangled roots,

trickles and mirrored streams,

being demise vivacity mortality;

sons daughters mothers fathers

friends acquaintances self—

processions through streets,

mounds of earth, carved stones—

damnation salvation ruination redemption.

 

In the rearview,

a flock of attendants in black

strut over their treasure,

pick tufts of fur from pavement.

 

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