My lands are where my dead lie buried.
~Crazy Horse

*

That last lowland summer sticks to my skin,
its sun too brilliant and its sky emaciated.
I thought then that no power on earth
could save me from the same starvation.

*

At the airport the blue-uniformed guards
asked too many questions,
leapt for my hands – for my hair –
the knives with which I unbound my cry:
Noli me tangere. And no one did, and
I came back to the southwest,
to the lands where my blood lay buried.

*
*
*

Before the day was done
I walked up to the Cross, there to learn
that he whom I meant to make immortal
had lately gone to God.

*
*
*

When you come back to climb the canyons with me,
I will bake braided bread again
and untether myself from the fifteenth century.

*

We were possessed of the best intentions
but we were nouveau riche
and like barbarians we let love and wine
flow through our fingers.

*

Dust settles down
on those years of greatness and megalomania.
Now neither will the earth shake
nor the heavens fall.

For R.

*

Today
I went where the monks once walked –
where the rain cannot come,
and on the stones of a thousand years
I remembered a morning
when the world was raining
but for you.

*

You know, too recently I’ve been dreaming
of Sitka spruce and snow in the mountain’s shadow:
twelve hundred days since I have seen
the elf-candle light the Abendland.

*

In the days of youth and yore I worried
that we had not sought truth in the right direction,
but you only laughed, and said the blind
would lead the blind to paradise.

*

Tomorrow I will take the whale-road
and the vows of our childhood will pass away.
In the days that come, you will love your woman well.
The colour of sunset will fade from your curls.
You will grow old on the polders;
your will martyr our memories

until a hush falls over the hearth
and you tell your grandchildren
that once you knew a girl from the south,
where poppies bleed in winter.