Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

The Millennium: Free Him

• 131 the millennium: Free him My real name or Dakota name is Tate Wicuwa, Wind That Chases the Sun. —Leonar d PeLtier I bring into your cell Crazy Horse’s white Appaloosa. He lowers his head to get in, he allows himself to be brought in, his electric body to be held at the mouth. His back flickers like a bad connection, like coming to flames but his four hooves tap dance the cement. He allows me to unbraid his mane, to brush out with my fingers his beads to lay in the hollow between your nipples. There is so much terror I may not breathe again. He is Eros who cannot be ridden to some clear light but must be mounted here in this pit. Only here. His smell fills it. Their eyes watch us. Every one of your heartbeats all these years against the cage waits We sow the seed of the native tall prairie grass into the steel. Our tears are enough water. Your hand reaches for my right breast, the other pulls me down under the horse where we are unseen by the monitor. I pull back, wash with my tears your heavy feet and the dark wave of hair across your forehead when you are young and the wave back from your large forehead now like my father’s. The grass stems elongate over us. The crickets scrape their legs together, scrape together the majesty, my body down on yours like the sun setting over the world, the wind chasing me. Our bodies over each other like the skins of the Indians the pioneers bound their Bibles with the living flesh still in their prison museums. ...