for Ingrid Washinawatok
This is not poetry. Poetry cannot exist here
in the field where they killed her.
There are no flowers though there appear to be flowers.
There is a splatter of blood, there is a pool of blood
there is a raining of blood.
When the soldiers were done with the killing they wiped her
off their hands with gritty rags and a slap of water.
They left the bodies in that field
to the flying, stinging creatures, to damp butterflies of sadness
and pain, to the eyes of the everlasting who
catalogues the cruelties of humans
from one nation to another
from one ragged scar
to another.
And the soldiers went on with their living, ate
their dinner that night around a small fire,
their arsenal stacked against a tree.
They relished cervezas, sucked pig bones.
They called their mothers, their sons, their daughters
from their cell phones.
They remembered birthdays, mourned their dying,
sang love songs for their wives and mistresses waiting
for them in the city, in the countryside.
“We walked 30 kilometers today
through this damned unforgiving country.
We had orders. And we fulfilled them,” they said.
And they were given their rations, and money
to send home while they fought this war
that was not officially a war.
Nor were these officially soldiers and any allusion to killing
was just an allusion to killing.
And according to official documents
the sun is not the sun.
There is no gunpowder
for addition and subtraction.
No not, no nothing.
And the moon is not the moon
watching everything
that happens in the dark.
Nor was I dreaming when I saw this in a dream:
I was out of my mind. I would rather be out of mind
in this field of betrayal and useless killing.
A hummingbird who poised urgently
at the screen door
was out of my mind.
It traveled on pure nerve and singing
from the thread of the spirit
of all that makes beauty
before turning into a breaking sky
into a river of blood.
And back to the trap of reason
of argument. I must
be out of my mind.
No killing. Did you ever see her walk toward you?
That sad love song you are singing to the moon
moved her to dance, close, so close to the stars
to the man she loved. And here is a dress
that still smells of her sweetness
like purple flowers raining.
Her moccasins of deerskin cured by smoke, so she will know
the way to maples and rivers,
to a nation that is out of its mind
with grief for losing her.
Nothing seems to change—said the message
unwound by the hummingbird.
But there was a light by which I could
see the soldiers through the wings.
It’s dawn. They are coughing with cigarettes,
drinking coffee, picking their teeth of meat.
A half day over the mountain are travelers
they will kill because it has become easy to kill.
Because there is a reason to kill.
And reason kills reason.
The wound in the earth where they took her
is being tended by rain
and flowers.
Oil companies will soon dig crude there,
with their machinery, their money,
and instant cities of missionaries and soldiers
will beget a countryside
of children of missionaries and soldiers.
This is the story of the new world, revealed
in the songline gleaming in the dark. It is thin, breakable.
It can be broken into the smallest chips of bone and tears.
It can be put back together with sunrise and flint.