Charles S. Kraszewski
(USA)
Indian Heads
My father dreamt of Indians ever since that day
When old man Stein plumped a nickel in his palm
For taking in the mail while he’d been away.
He dreamt the Yellowstone (that buffalo on the reverse);
He dreamt himself Iron Tail, and Two Moons, and Big Tree
And even Two Guns White Calf;
Blackfoot, Sioux, Kiowa
Or Cheyenne, my father dreamt himself
Gladly at cowboy-skirmishes near the collieries;
“You’re dead! I shot you!” the snuffling cowboys would protest;
Unscathed, my father heeded them not, prancing over the culm banks
On the war pony he dreamt himself
With fierce war-whoops, secure in the Ghost Dance shirt
Woven of dreams; cowboys and sheriffs and wranglers in tears
As the bullets from their cold-chapped index fingers
Bounced harmlessly from his breast and shoulders,
like hailstones, just as Jack Wilson Wovoka prophesied.
My father dreamt a bronze, lithe, pulsing body
Beneath the profile of that fierce warrior
Molded one quarter only of nickel
The rest (yet somehow fittingly) of copper;
Never dreaming that
The Indian Head nickel was the white man’s
Sympathetic magic; the Indian’s Head
Preserved as a noble curiosity,
Presciently severed from the powerful torso,
Thrilling and threatening otherwise in every limb.
Thus my father, dreaming himself a Navajo,
A Pawnee or Apache christened Redsand;
Would his dreams have been different, had he been there,
Some ninety years before, when old chief Narbona
Was shot off his horse and scalped by a New Mexican militiaman;
(He died, they say, gazing southeast toward Mount Taylor,
Tsoodził, in Diné bizaad, as if that mattered,
As if any help could be expected thence:
Resplendent in turquoise, dark mist, female rain and beasts,
O Boy Who Carries One Turquoise
O Girl Who Carries One Grain of Corn
Why have you abandoned us?)
Richard and Edward Kern, the letter tells us,
Were dashed put out at the fact
That, in all the excitement, they had failed to secure
The head of the redskin for a scientist friend.
(Some weeks later, near Zuñi,
Richard corrected the earlier mishap,
Sneaking out of camp one night
To decapitate a Navajo
Executed some days earlier
For raiding sheep).
And Mangas Coloradas, the Apache chief
Gunned down in U.S. captivity,
Gunned down on the dusty floor of his adobe cell,
Also lost his head, having no choice in the matter, of course.
When measured, it was found to be larger than Daniel Webster’s,
“And the brain of corresponding weight”
As related to us by S. M. Barrett
In his book on Geronimo.
Unlike Geronimo’s skull, desecrated at Yale
By future presidents and captains of industry,
Mangas’ cranium, boiled of its flesh and sinews
Was packed off for display at the Smithsonian (they deny it)
Or perhaps Fowler’s Phrenological Cabinet in New York.
Such things no dreams are made of;
And my father, whose lame sister dreamt of “coming back
as an Injun — they lived pure,” preserved his empty dreams,
boycotting all Olympics summer and winter
for how they treated Wa-Tho-Huk (Jim Thorpe);
falling asleep at Hoop Dance and Buffalo Dance,
reading George Catlin, supporting Indian schools
from native Arizona to Montana;
(or shall we say, from Tohono O’odham to Crow and Cheyenne);
refusing to call his hometown anything but
Shawnee,
even though the masonic town fathers,
descendants of some called with no conscious sarcasm
Nativists
renamed it during his nonage, predictably,
“Plymouth.”
The night before he died
He knew it was coming.
Tomorrow, he said, at the latest.
St. Kateri Tekakwitha came last night
and told me.
Look: on the windowsill.
A primary feather, planted defiantly in the window jamb,
Rattling angrily in the burly blue wind,
A plume from the warrior’s roach of a redtail hawk.
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Charles S. Kraszewski is a poet and translator from the Polish and Czech. His works have been published in Chaparral, The New Yorker, Red Ochre Lit, The Antaeus, Poetry South, Valley Voices, the Red River Review, OVS, the California Quarterly, and elsewhere, including on the boards of the Chicago Actors Ensemble. Newest books: Irresolute Heresiarch. Catholicism, Gnosticism and Paganism in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz (criticism); Diet of Nails (poetry, forthcoming); Beast (poetry, forthcoming); Rossetti’s Armadillo (verse translations, forthcoming).