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Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Dakotah A Cousin from California Shows Up at My House, The First Time in Thirty Years At ten he obeyed the laws of gravity on raw ponies heading for the open road, pandered to a doting gramma’s cultured silence and held his breath when border town cops in slow motion stopped his father’s weaving car. Flashing lights. Lyric beauty frame by frame. Grim passages of deadly games became the telltale snare of tantalizing curiosity. At twenty-something, in crisp wartime whites he watched a blonde girl running with her dog in the streets of one of those base cities and thought of kids running in all directions, like himself; he left on a ship for hostile waters, every echo in the fog a reminder that he was far from home. At middle age now he wants to read what he might have written, the words of a woman cousin who believes herself to be a poet. She reminds him of how it was at Bowed Head’s Place where they both grew up, hardly speaking, neither confiding in the other. All afternoon he turns the pages. The twilight sounds of summer birds seem to mirror the sounds of stories untold and real. He didn’t know. He didn’t know. How to talk of precious moments. There are still Dakotahs growing up tribal on the Crow Creek not forgetting anything; They go about their lives on the theory that the world is exactly as it is perceived. 67 ...

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