Coyote’s Bones by Jaime de Angulo (review)

254 Western American Literature Coyote’s Bones. By Jaime de Angulo. (Turtle Island Foundation, 2845 Buena Vista Way, Berkeley, California.) Coyote’s Bones begins with Jaime’s recollections of his father. Titled “Don Gregorio Sketches,” de Angulo details his father’s singularity, as well as his mother’s convention, expressed most perfectly in the opening sketch by her refusal to be seen in the company of her husband while he is wearing a gardener’s hat. The most interesting piece included in this section is a letter from de Angulo to Ezra and Dorothy Pound, detailing his work as an eighteen year old night hawk cattleherder in Northern Colorado and Wyoming, wrangling for the Two Bar outfit while cogitating the function of the pineal gland, and his discovery of a sheepherder suffering from a Burroughsian case of echolalia. The Lorca translations are pure and simple — “The ellipse of a cry / like a rainbow black / in the blue of night” — and the second section of poems, de Angulo’s own (“Coyote’s Bones”), is a treasure. “In the desert / two snakes came out of my loins / the long one headed for the sunset / with the little one / viciously biting at his tail.” They are unusual poems — some haiku-like: “fog coming up in streams / from the sea / In the pasture the old black mare stands / with her head bent.” Others more wistful and melancholic: “They tell me about this and that / They tell me about their wives / and their husbands. / 1 look at the sea.” The most personally revealing, my own favorite from the collection, has obvious debt to Pacific Northwest myths & tales: “I a seal lie on the rocks warm in the sun. / I remember the Esselen, the Mukne, / the Saklan, all the tribes that lived / From the Sur to San Francisco Bay. / I dive in the water, and my head looks like a man / swimming to the shore in the dusk. / I like to wander along the bright streets / at night in the crowd.” “Indios,” the second prose section, makes clear the California Indian view of the invader— “The whites understand nothing. They think the sun is just a shining plate. They are cold and cruel. They kill everything they can. They think only with their heads. They have lost their hearts. That is why all the animals are hiding in the mountains. It is because they don’t like the smell of the whites.” De Angulo is different from most white men, but, as Tony, a Pit River, says: “I like him very much . . . but he makes my head ache.” “For five thousand years the Indians looked into the fire — then they knew” — So did de Angulo. BARRY GIFFORD, Berkeley ...