Sometimes I think all these farms & highways
& major factories are about to swallow us. I don’t mean
physically, swallow, devour, like
an enormous train
accident. I mean our identity. Myself & Marcus & Evan
& Carol.
We will have to restructure some of our patterns,
produce new national symbols,
it will be raw at first,
a little bit like those red&yellow daubed figures
on scraped buffalo skin.
It will have to be different
than the specific myths of our cousins.
We should have our own flag, don’t you think?
And our own national animal.
It can’t be a buffalo,
they didn’t come this far west of Great Slave Lake,
not very often. Perhaps a horse. Does anyone else
have the horse as a national symbol? California, Ga.,
Alberta? And.
There are other dances, where you take
off the loose black shirt & blue jeans & the Argyle socks
& walk out in the fields just because you are tired
of the brass rails & the Mies van der Rohe buildings
& you are in love or you have a bottle,
one of those 2 things, & you want to walk
naked under the moon.