Accuracy

This poem suggests that accuracy is not sufficient—maybe not even necessary?—when telling certain kinds of truth. That is an abstract way of saying that I often find myself stymied when trying to convey something meaningful to a person who keeps slowing me down to check out on the particulars.

When I told him about the buffaloleft dead on the plains, the killing of buffaloso that there would be no more Indians,about the carcasses left to beasts and weather,bones piled so high you could walk and not touch groundand about the haulers who sold the bones to burnfor refining sugar or carving into buttons,all about the wasteful cunning of it,the bones sticking in my throat as I spoke—he asked Bison or buffalo?his mind a granite impossibleto inscribe, an impervious surface,like one of those graffiti-proof subway carsgliding steely into the station.