Kaity’s Kindle Notes & Highlights for The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems

Story is the marrow of literature. The story does not end with the last word. It goes on in the silence of the mind, in that region in which exists the unknown, the mysterious, and that origin of the word in which all words are contained.

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I profess the conviction that there is only one story, but there are many stories in the one. Literature can be likened to a rolling wheel of language. It reinvents itself with every telling of the story, and in its timeless procession it has neither beginning nor end.

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The Kiowa No-Face Doll Kiowa Boarding School, Anadarko They see how you hold your doll With love and desperation. Are they to imagine expression On the bare, impenetrable mask? There is nothing to reflect The face of a child, glad or sad, Who see upon this sere surface Anonymity only, a random Fetish of precise uniformity. For those who brought you here, You are the image of your doll. For those who relegated you To military sameness, you bear The visage of a faceless race.

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A Modest Boast (Toast) My mind is sharpened by this sip of mead, Philosophers attend my wit indeed; Do not encourage me; there is no need.

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Ago My children, when they were very young, Played in a great landscape, windy and wild, Near “the place of the bridge” on the Rio Puerco. In the middle distance were gullies and dunes, And a train moved slowly eastward As if stitching patches of color to the earth. Rabbits ran from the brown and yellow brush. My children knew the goodness of that place. Now when I go by, they are there. Something Of their delight remains among the rocks, Tsegi, the place of origin. Their laughter slips On the ripples of sand, and I look after them.

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Division There is a depth of darkness In the wild country, days of evening And the silence of the moon. I have crept upon the bare ground Where animals have left their tracks, And faint cries carry on the summits, Or sink to silence in the muffled leaves. Here is the world of wolves and bears And of old, instinctive being, So noble and indifferent as to be remote To human knowing. The scales upon which We seek a balance measure only a divide.

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The Night Sky at Coppermine At Coppermine we landed in order to take on fuel. We had come down from Holman Island and were on our way to Yellowknife. It was the middle of the night. The plane seated ten or twelve passengers, as I recall, but there were only five on board. We had been buffeted about in the wind and snow, and I was feeling the effects. I did not feel like moving from my seat, but at the same time I thought that a blast of cold fresh air might do me good, and I could at least stretch my legs. When I came to the door, the wind was rushing in with such force that I was nearly ...more

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Transparency I make you this gift with love, An expression of my spirit In clean strokes and bright colors. Seen for the composition it is, A road curves out to an edge of time, There is the burn of the setting sun And twisted brads in the foreground. Beneath these pigments an abstraction: Beheld in its deeper meaning, In the pure aspect of imagining, There is a muted evening looming In the ocher of orchards and autumn fields, And in the lambent flurry of leaves, You, intrinsic on the plane of desire.

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Yahweh to Urset I pray that you are kept safe throughout this day, that you live as wholly as you can, that you see things that you have not seen before and that more of them are beautiful than not, more of them delightful than not. I pray that you hold easily in your hands the balance of the earth and sky, that you laugh and cry, know freedom and restraint, some joy and some sorrow, pleasure and pain, much of life and a little of death. I pray that you are grateful for the gift of your being, and I pray that you celebrate your life in the proper way, with grace and humility, wonder and ...more

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And to the crowded habitation of the mind You bring a solitude, a mere and sensual silence In which the essence of belonging belongs.

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To an Aged Bear Hold hard this infirmity. It defines you. You are old. Now fix yourself in summer, In thickets of ripe berries, And venture toward the ridge Where you were born. Await there The setting sun. Be alive To that old conflagration One more time. Mortality Is your shadow and your shade. Translate yourself to spirit; Be present on your journey. Keep to the trees and waters. Be the singing of the soil.

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There is a stillness on this perfect world, And I am content to settle in its hold. I turn inward on a wall of books. They are old friends, even those that Have dislodged my dreams. One by one They have shaped the thing I am.

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They lead us, dead reckoning By the suns they cannot see. We regard them with wonder, Fear, and sorrow. They mutter And cry with voices like ours; They mime a human anguish. When they take their leave they fade Through planes and prisms of rain Into the drifts of story, Into calendars and names.

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All of life is but the flutter of wings Barely trembling on the walls of the high hall.

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Birdsong Her voice was ever alive. When first I heard it I thought it was birdsong. Even now her words trip And ripple on the air. There is A warbler in the meadow.

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Shade You are present in the past And appear in memory, A braid of smoke, a vapor, And silence is your substance. You are nothing. Yet you are. You wend along the long way To a perfect destiny On a whisper of the wind.

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Nous avons vu la mer We have been lovers, you and I. We have been alive in the clear mornings of Genesis; in the afternoons, among the prisms of the air, our hands have shaped perfect silences. We have seen the sea; wonder is well known to us.

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A Chronicle Now they are gone who told me what I know, And I shall follow though my pace be slow. God grant me tenure and a time to go.

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Before and After In the window The dim rear view Of a naked woman, And beyond her a man Transparent as the rain, Standing at an easel And stroking color To a canvas plane. Her nape and shoulders Shimmer in soft light; A symmetry flares from The dimple of her spine. The artist, concentrated, Sees what is before him, The poet sees what is not. It is an equitable equation.

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A Couplet in Tongues She spoke a language known only to God. God gave a nod. Nothing to God is odd.

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Dictum If language is the instrument of thought And one relies on reason as one ought, Then words hold surely what is seen and sought.

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Will you come to me now You must know that in the firelight I wait for you with longing You are there in the range Of my desire

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Poem After Lunch Cheeses, fruit, exotic tea, A simple repast, gardenside, Under a yellow umbrella. Bright sampler of the afternoon. Not only that. I tasted of That entity that was the two Of us, that composition Of conjoined being In the clarity of autumn.

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A Story of Light When the leaves turn And the light of the forest deepens, I will remember a thousand words between us. Those that enclosed us, as in the pattern Of shadows that shiver with the turning leaves, Recount a story that was told about us by those Who told stories in the caves. We danced To the music of the words. On our tongues Were shaped the names of our original being. This is what the storyteller said: The leaves turn, And in the light that emanates from the leaves There is enchantment. There is wonder.

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She was several decades older than I, but she had kept two remarkable things throughout her life, in spite of the hard times she had endured, a keen sense of humor and a childlike delight in the world. She loved to have people around her, and she seemed to find every one of them interesting.

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Death Song In the crescent formed They are fearful in their stance, Their sashes impaled, The arrows throb to the song: The sun and the moon Will live forever, but we Kaitsenko die. And each soldier holds his place And the field is won Or given up to the dead. Away in the camps There is bright water running Between banks of reeds And prairie turnips. The drone Of bees a music On sagebrush and bluebonnets, Women and children Frolic among butterflies, And hawks in the sky Circle and sail on the wind. On the trail of time It is a good day to die.

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The First Day The fading moon and the vanguard of the sun Alchemy The immensity of mountains rising black from the underworld I behold Creation In this mindless moment I am intensely alive There is again the birth of my soul I am who never was It is the first day

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Almost Love You answer the door laughing; It is the laughter of welcome. You take my hand and lead me As if my hand were a gift. You make me think I know you, That I have known you in childhood And in the winters of war, that I have lain with you on silver sands And braided sweetgrass in your hair. I imagine moonlight on your breasts And green lightning in your eyes. It is almost love, almost a story to tell.