In Memory of a Day Nobody Remembers: 28 September 1874, and: Autobiography, Chapter X: Circus in the Blood, and: The Sentence

224Rocky Mountain Review In Memory of a Day Nobody Remembers: 28 September 1874* Who is left to recall the sacred earth where Poor Buffalo bit the dust? The dance of days is the only dance; town Indians drunk on Chock and Thunderbird can never know they were born of a hollow log or the ritual of the sacred sun dance doll. Nobody can recall the massacre of men, and horses dead in Tule Creek. The racial memory fades. O, son of man, what anvil hand forged your soul and skin? Isatai, who promised to vomit bullets at Adobe Walls, would have you dance again. Or Maman-ti, who willed the death of white-tongued Tay-nay-angopte. Exploded bones fuse with sand. No grass grows; of the Chinaberry trees, just one or two. Palo Duro Canyon: echoes also fade. K'ya-been's bones lie buried in the bluff. Dance, ghosts, among the yellow leaves before they turn to dust. *Col. MacKenzie's massacre of the last holdouts among the Kiowas, along with over 1,000 horses and mules, in Palo Duro Canyon. Jim Barnes Northeast Missouri State University 225 Autobiography, Chapter X: Circus in the Blood My father's blood is strong: my bones grow hard with stakes of things and my veins pulse with a lively red from his nomadic ways. There's a circus in my blood I've waited forty years to know, my father's hollow glance weighing on my shoulders like a sledge, his eyes gone blank under the sagging tent in dog days. So here in this nonesuch bigtop, in slow August, I surprise myself into a certain knowing. This thing is in the blood: a lust forever to move from place to place perfecting the one best act. Henceforth I swear I will delight when I can name the earth new under my feet, keep my eyes clowned on where I am, and juggle my thoughts fast enough not to bore my ears. And I will try to know the dancing in my blood, how it reels, steps, stops, and how on occasion it swings me out of tune, a dizzy fool whose brains are slower than his feet. And I will praise my father for his shifting the shape of ways, for letting me know the permanence only of road; will praise my father and swing my heavy hammer to guy this my own ephemeral sky. Jim Barnes 226Rocky Mountain Review The Sentence On my desk is a cup which is empty. I drank the last of the tea only a few moments back. The cup is empty I say. I want the cup full. There is nothing to do with an empty cup. I look for a tea bag. There is none. So strong is desire that my eyes water. No tea in the world. All cups empty. I have died for the want of lesser things. Jim Barnes ...