He was there—
before the rising action rose to meet this acre cornered by thirst;
before birds swallowed bathwater and exploded in mid-sentence;
before they began sipping the blood of ravens from the Sun’s knotted atlas.
He was there,
sleeping with one eye clamped tighter than the other,
he looked, when he shouldn’t have.
He said, “you are worth the wait”
in the waiting room of the resurrection of another Reservation
and continued to dig for water, her hands (a road map)
in the bucket of white shells outside its north gate.
He threw a blanket over the denouement slithering onto shoreand saw Indians,
leaning into the beginning,
slip out of turtle shells
and slide down bottle necks
aiming for the first pocket of air in the final paragraph.
He saw anthropologists hook a land bridge with their curved spines,
and raised the hunters a full minute above its toll-booth
Saying: Fire ahead, fire.
When they pointed,
he leapt into the blue dark
on that side of fence,
it was that simple:
sap drying in the tear ducts of the cut worm,
his ignition switched on—
blue horses grazing northward in the pre-dawn.
Sherwin Bitsui ( Baaʼoogeedí, Arizona, EEUU, 1975). Poeta.