Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Notes

• 163 noteS from Hard Country Love Song for a man whose mother killed herself after Adrienne Rich from visions of a daughter of albion This is of course an allusion—actually an answer—to William Blake’s rather astounding poem (about sexual love, jealousy, and “the soft soul of America”). I was living on Albion Ridge in Albion, California, a part of a writers’ group, The Daughters of Albion, when I began this poem, the first of what eventually became Hard Country. “ . . . what is this place to me if you are lost?” from “The Islands,” H. D. “My soul can find / no well of clear water,” from “For the Union Dead in “Alabama,” Ed Dorn crazy horse Crazy Horse’s story, as told in the extraordinary biography by Mari Sandoz, is that of a mystic, a hereditary medicine man who because of the times in which he lived became a warrior and leader of his people. His story is equally a great love story and a story of the psychological effects of genocide. In my poem I am struck by a number of “dream adaptations” from Sandoz’s book which I was reading March 25, 1979. The ominous presence of the black marriage robe (a dominant article throughout the book): due to the political circumstances of the Plains tribes at the time, Crazy Horse was unable to marry the woman of his choice, Black Buffalo Woman; he married instead Black Shawl Woman, to whom he was a devoted husband. “I braid grass stems into his light hair”: though full-blooded Oglala (for seven generations anyway) Crazy Horse had blond hair; his childhood name was Curly (this was one of the reasons he was called Strange). “I will grieve through seven generations” The oral tradition of the Oglalas, their history and stories and genealogy are brought forth seven generations. “I pull him on the back of my horse”: In the last great battles, Crazy Horse was rescued twice by Cheyenne women warriors. “On the Holy Road”: The Holy Road was the first white man’s road through the North Platte Territory of the Sioux. “I am careful not to hold his arms down”: Crazy Horse’s warrior vision was that he was invincible, indeed invisible, unless one of his own people held down • 164 his arms. Needless to say, when he was stabbed to death in 1876, in a betrayal most likely instigated by No Water, the jealous husband of Black Buffalo Woman, Little Big Man, was holding down his arms. appalachian Song “see a road inside myself / and on it I am running,” from “The Edge of “Wisdom,” Gerald Malanga “Call my name in the act of love,” from poem of the same title, Michael Larrain from PsyCHe drives tHe Coast Ground Zero Section 8 from Lightning East and West, Jim Douglas from soutH ameriCa mi HijA Epigraphs: “I have a small daughter . . . ” The Sappho translation is from Mary Barnard. The third language here is Quechua, the second official language of Peru and Ecuador, the language of the Incas. Yo hatch katchkani Manan yo hatch katchkani Chaimita tapukui To be Or not to be That is the question from vii. the heights of macchu Picchu The Spanish throughout, and my English translation allusions and uses, are from Pablo Neruda, mainly Alturas de Macchu Picchu. from epilogue: the dawn, amor amerrique “The Return of the Goddess”: title from The Return of the Goddess, Robert Graves “There Is a New Eve Who Comes,” from “Tribute to the Angels,” H. D. • 165 from Body and soul keintpoos Keintpoos is the Modoc chief more commonly known as Captain Jack. The Modoc Wars took place in the northeastern corner of California in 1873 along the Oregon-Applegate Trail. In a tragedy-riddled episode involving the demand for a statement of tribal solidarity due to looming genocide, Keintpoos killed General Canby at a peace conference, making Canby the only regular Army general killed in any Indian war. Keintpoos and three of his subchiefs were hanged at Fort Klamath, October 3, 1873, and the Modoc people sent as prisoners to northeastern Oklahoma, where most of them died. The few who survived were eventually returned to the Klamath Agency. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1960), generally acknowledged as the initiator of the modern environmentalist movement, tells the twentiethcentury story of the Modoc’s land, the Tule of California and the Upper Klamath Lake of Oregon: DDT...