Sitting Bull in Canada by Joseph Millar
My poetry discussion group met today and our book for the month was Overtime by Joseph Millar. I especially liked the poems about historic personages, like this one about Sitting Bull.
Sitting Bull in Canada
By Joseph Millar
It’s three years since Little Bighorn,
the Month of Blackening Cherries;
Crazy Horse has been murdered
and civilization keeps rinsing its glittering face in the dawn,
perfecting the treaties and blueprints,
while the railroad pushes its stained fangs
west through the rivers of grass.
By now, from under the whispering skirts
of the pale women who bore them,
Hawthorne and Poe have come forth, haunted.
Whitman leans over a Long Island bridge
trying to keep his shadow from frightening the fish,
and across the Atlantic,
Swinburne is paying London whores to dress up like police
and whip his bare flanks with a strap.
Sitting Bull listens to the ravens
folding their wings in the pines,
his village of women and old people turning over in its sleep.
There’s no place left, he thinks,
watching the charred thorns of autumn fly upward,
a thick-bodied man leaning back in his lodge,
its skin walls sighing in the wind.
There’s no word for “art” in his language,
though he’ll pose on the stages of Cody’s Wild West show,
the bonnet of carnival feathers flowing back
in the copper daguerreotypes.
Maybe he wonders if anything around him
means what he thought:
evening, his horses, the buffalo;
and prays for a great storm to tear it all down.
Maybe the blind flowers of Sade and Baudelaire
open their rank petals over him as he dozes,
too tired to look out at the stars,
lying on his left side,
facing away from the fire.
