Horses and Drums and Stuffed Carnivores

There are two versions of the Saint-Gaudens Shaw Memorial. One is in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. . The other is in the Boston Commons--after all, Captain Shaw's black regiment was organized in Massachusetts, before going south to fight in the Civil War. Although I lived in Boston for sixteen years and visited the Commons dozens of times, I have no memory of ever actually looking at it. The Civil War is a very distant, long-forgotten rumble, if you live up north. But when we moved to Washington, D.C. in 2002, that war was with us.

On many weekends we took Simon to the National Gallery: it was free, you could bring a stroller, the cafeteria served sushi for us and fries for the stinkernoodle--a perfect outing. The Saint-Gaudens is off to the left near one of the main entrances. Often, we didn't get to see much of anything else. Simon was four. He loved that sculpture. “Horses and Drums,” he named it. Again and again, George and I would point out the soldier's caps, their bed-rolls, weapons, how young they are, how serious their sad faces—even the horse seems worried. They are going off to war. Overhead, a sleepy and not particularly reassuring angel keeps vigil.

“Don't touch!” the guard would invariably yell, not knowing what to do with this little white boy who showed up every couple of weeks and always got too close, wanting to get into the sculpture, maybe even march away with Shaw's Mighty 54th regiment .

“M'am, I cannot tell you this again--you need to get your boy to step back!”

If it was my job to guard the Saint-Gaudens, I, too, would feel protective. Sometimes, I would sit on the bench and just look at it—the scale of it alone knocks your breath out—while Simon scampered around in front of it counting bed-rolls, caps, weapons. Within two months of leaving Boston, more than half of the soldiers, including Shaw, would be dead. We didn't mention this to Simon, but George and I thought about it. Simon, in turn, thought of bed-rolls and canteens. He wanted to try sleeping on one and drinking from the other. He wished for a drum, a gun, and maybe a real horse—a pony would do. At four, war is full of thrilling danger and exciting possibilities.

Now Simon is eleven. The threatening thunder of war has been a part of our readings from the beginning of this school-year. Many of the Founding Fathers were against slavery, even Jefferson who owned many. The South, and all its representatives were for it, and for states that were strong and independent—they feared a central government that would tell them what to do, like forcing them to end slavery. In the meantime, tobacco and cotton made the South rich and reshaped the economy of the world. The pastry shops in England were full of sweet cakes made with Caribbean sugar. And all over England, rooms were so thick with tobacco smoke that many of us in the twenty-first century would have had to step outside to vomit. But back then, with a piece of cake in hand and a pipe between their lips, who was going to promote abolitionism?

Studying slavery and the Civil War is the first time Simon has had to deal with complexity in a sustained manner. No longer can he group historical figures into just “bad” and “good.” Jefferson was a slave-owner, but he wrote a great Declaration of Independence, and he was a terrific president. Andrew Jackson was a war hero, even though he owned over 400 slaves by the end of his life.

* * *

One day last week, a buddy of Simon's came to spend the afternoon with us. His mother and I had made a deal—the buddy could come over if he was willing to do some work with us.

“No biggie,” said the friend, as he stepped into my car at noon when I picked him up.

“Great,” I said. “We'll talk about the Civil War.”

“I know everything about the Civil War,” he said, buckling himself in. He just turned eleven. “You know, Ulysses S. Grant became president after the war.”

“No,” said Simon, my little historical know-it-all. “Johnson became president when Lincoln was shot. After that came that guy—Ulysses S. Grant.” Simon has been looking ahead in the president biographies we have on the shelf, and memorizing a chart of all the presidents that hangs on the wall.

“You're right,” said the friend, “but you know what? I know how Lincoln was shot.”

“How?” I ask. In the back-seat, both boys have taken our their Nintendo's and have buried their faces in the screens.

Simon's friend, not one to lift his face once a screen is in front of him, looks up and our eyes meet in the rear-view mirror: “Well, he was shot right in the ear—right inside it.” He lifts his index to his ear to show me. “First, he lost his hearing, so he couldn't hear anymore. Then the bullet moved into his brain, so he couldn't move his body. Then he couldn't talk or remember anything—not even the Civil War. It took many hours to die. He suffered, but I think he was lucky because he couldn't even feel it--that's how the brain works. That's how he died.”

“I didn't know Lincoln was shot right in the ear,” I say. (I was pretty sure he wasn't—I thought it was a shot to the back of the head—but I keep mum.) “Thank's man, for telling me.”

The blow-by-blow is so imaginative and empathic, I find myself weaving the car through the streets of another beautiful day in Miami thinking of how deeply that dark and deadly war affects children this age. Simon's buddy had moved right into Lincoln's brain, trying to fathom what his last hours were like.

At the house, I attempt to establish how much the kids already know before I decide what I might teach them. Simon's friend has recently done a unit on the Civil War as part of his homeschooling curriculum. Simon, in turn, has spent hours looking at educational videos and listening to historical audiobooks.

To my amazement, these two pip-squeaks know everything that matters: why the war started, who the major players were, the biggest battles, complicated words and concepts like emancipation, abolitionist, the triangle trade. And they know so much more.

The friend explains to us that the war had to happen because the South needed slavery for its “economy to be profitable. They couldn't make a profit without free labor, you know.”

Simon, in turn, explains that when the war began, Abraham Lincoln asked Garibaldi to lead the Union forces. Garibaldi refused because early in the war Lincoln only “wanted to keep the states together; he was sort of a big coward in the beginning and wouldn't make the war a war to end slavery and all that stuff. Lincoln changed his mind later, but by then Garibaldi was busy.” (Simon learned about Garibaldi from George.)

“Well, you guys, ” I say, “I'm having trouble finding something you don't already know. How about the Union's balloon corps? If you were in a war and you had hot air balloons, a new technology back then, how would you use them?” So we sit on the couch and we read a story about Thaddeus Lowe and the Union Balloon Corps.

I could write a few paragraphs about how the boys know so much because they are home-educated. But the truth is both kids have an interest in history and have history geeks for parents—they would be exposed to this material whether they sat in a regular classroom or not.

They know so much about this topic because--on their own-- they've made an effort to master the material, to make sense of it, letting the facts, stories, and details marinate in their minds. They wonder how Lincoln died. They perseverate about poor decisions, and about concepts like coward and war hero. Unlike the many religious and territorial wars in Europe they've read about for world history, something real and comprehensible is at stake here. Slavery had to end.

I suggest they watch the short videos on brainpop about the Civil War. Simon knows how to access the site on his own, so I leave the guys alone for a few minutes with my lap-top. When I return to the living room, they've piled the couch full of stuffed animals. The friend is sprawled on top of them and has a stuffed shark in his arms. Sitting at the far end of the sofa is Simon, hugging his favorite polar bear in one arm and cradling the laptop in the other, turning it so his friend can see. I'm reminded that when Simon was younger, he once explained to me that when he gets sad or scared, he likes to "cuddle" with his "stuffed carnivores."

"They protect me.”

I'd been considering telling them of the 620,000 dead soldiers and the indeterminate number of civilian casulaties, more dead than in all the other wars America has fought put together. I want to tell them about the fields at Antietam, how they were covered ankle-deep in blood. I want to tell them about the Gatling gun and how it mowed down men and horses--I've been spending my evenings reading about the bloodshed. But seeing the boys on the couch, they seem so very young. And they know too much already. Time for a break. I remember I have some cones in the cabinet and ice-cream in the freezer.

I'm not much of a believer, but please, dear God, let these boys live their lives all the way through.

Over ice-cream cones, I make some decisions. We'll see the Shaw Memorial again--soon, either in Boston or D.C. We'll try to get to Gettysburg this year. Maybe next summer, when Simon is a little older, we'll open up a folding table and work our way through all the Civil War battles. We'll buy some tin or plastic soldiers, lots of them. We'll talk of military strategy. We'll talk of the dead.

Click on the link to go to the National Gallery website and learn more about the Shaw Memorial .

Potato Chips

I've never understood the appeal of those little things, a mouthful of crusty salt and oil. In the midst of the tales we read this week, stories about the gold-rush in California and some of what it wrought—the discovery of the redwood tree (tall and majestic), and the development of the Clipper sailing ship (speedy and crowned by countless cloud-white sails), allowing folks from all over the world to get to California ASAP to pan for gold—there was the story of the potato chip.

It was invented in Saratoga Springs—who knew? I thought it was bequeathed to the world by the English, one more example of their lousy cuisine, on a par with fish'n chips served up in a cone of day-old newspaper, or their mystery-meat pies. But it turns out potato chips are truly American. A cranky customer at a Saratoga eatery in the mid 1800s kept sending back his steak fries, claiming they were still raw inside. The chef, one George Crum, a somewhat touchy fellow, cooked up a dish of very thinly cut potatoes fried to a crisp, as if to say: “You wann'em cooked, you got'em.”

To everyone's amazement, they were a hit. Every joint in Saratoga started serving Saratoga chips—that's what they called them at first.

Simon's good for three or four, if there's absolutely nothing else to eat. I've tried to like them all my life. I've wanted to fit in and embrace various--if not all--things American. I love food, and all things that have to do with food. But Simon echoed how I felt about potato chips when I suggested we make some from scratch: “Why?”

* * *

My mother is a wonderful cook. As a child, I wondered if the girls who wanted to come over after school, came to hang out with me, or to eat my mother's goulash and her chocolate pudding.

In my parents' home, we ate at a set table, all together, for every meal. In Peru, and later in Brazil, the local German school started early and was over by one-fifteen. However bored I was while diagramming German sentences, there was always lunch to look forward to; however endless my homework, dinner was only a few hours away. And once at the table, we sat there for maybe an hour, or more, eating and chatting, nibbling on more dessert, while my parents drank coffee.

I started cooking early--I was eleven--making pancakes for girlfriends as an afternoon snack, served with butter and jam. By the time I went to college, I could roast a chicken and a leg of lamb. In my twenties and thirties, I had a weakness for men whose life centered around a kitchen and shared meals. Unemployed, decades older, burdened by a history of suicide attempts, married, or residing two continents way—if he cooked, I was interested. On the other hand, if he had nothing in his fridge, ate off paper plates, and had no dining room, that affair went nowhere, no matter that he was a doctor, drove a Benz, and was a hit with my parents. On our first date, George, all professorial shabby tweed and scuffed loafers, made a three course Chinese meal from scratch and served it with cold Tsingtao.

What I find hardest about living in America is that food so often occupies a trivial place in people's lives. Little effort is put into procuring, preparing, presenting, sharing, enjoying every meal of every day. The press has been full about all the reasons why—no need to repeat.

Still, I don't get it. I think of the dining room table as the center of my marriage and our family life. All special events turn around food. So-and-so is coming—what shall we make? Birthdays, holidays, weekends, anniversaries—salmon? asparagus? Prosecco? Most of my dearest friends have lives that turn around meals. Our affection for each other is expressed with food, the sharing of a few hours over bread and wine. Other ways of living seem sad to me. Something crucial--for me--is lacking. And I find myself pushing that sadness away, not letting people very close who do not share my gastronomic obsessions. Friendships without good food are like love affairs without sex—they end quicker than most, and if they last, they lack the same intensity, generosity, delight, loyalty, joy. All this to say, I feel like a very odd duck in this country, and my life in America has meant I have only a few friends.

But I began with the potato chip. Early in my first marriage, we went to spend Christmas with his parents. They were interesting and talented people, living in Maine in a home that had once been a tavern in the 1800s. From a drafty hallway, I called my parents in sunny Brazil to wish them a happy holiday. I had intended to keep it together and very brief—international calls were pricey back then. But hearing their voices, I began to cry. I complained about the food. No one had baked anything special; we had meat-loaf made with onion soup mix, I think, and English muffins. And in between sobs: “And, and, Mother, guess what they served as an appetizer on Christmas Eve?” I was so upset, I could barely get the words out: “Potato chips!”

To be fair, my first husband was deeply disturbed by my own parents upon first meeting them. “All they talk about is food!” he sputtered. “At the end of breakfast, they talk about lunch—who will buy it, cook it, serve it. At the end of lunch, they go on about dinner. For God's sake, we're people of the 20th century—not cannibals!”

I have so little control over most aspects of my life—jobs, friends, husbands, countries, children, youth, parents, health, wealth, even happiness—everything comes and goes. But meals—those I can control. I can set a table and around it gather the people I love. I can make something ever so simple--a casserole, a salad, a berry crisp. I can invite everyone to sit and eat. Whatever losses I've suffered, I forget. All that truly matters is right in front of me.

Servitude

(Picture: Claudia's first communion--with her brother Peter, some friends, and Dionisia. Lima, Peru, 1969.)

In our learning about America, we have now reached the mid-1800s. From the emotional workout that were the Indian Wars, we've marched straight into the searing whip-lash of slavery. No happy slaves singing contentedly on the grand plantation—the textbook we use did not include such a story. Instead, this week we read about Henry Brown, a slave whose wife and children had been sold and taken away from him. In 1849, bereft and hopeless, he mailed himself to freedom in a box. Tightly confined in a large package, he went from Richmond, Virginia to Philadelphia, to an address manned by the Anti-Slavery Society.

There are many details to this story: what kind of box was used; how Henry survived inside the box; the length of the trip; the mismanagement of the postal service which ignored signs on the box that read: “Handle With Care. This Side Up.” Henry Brown wasn't “handled” with anything that resembled “care,” but he did make it.

The happy ending is irrelevant to Simon. He cannot be bamboozled by an upbeat twist in the plot. He doesn't care about Henry Brown, the grown-up, celebrating his freedom in Philadelphia.

“What about his children? How many did Henry Brown have? What were their names? How old were they? Who purchased them? Who took care of them? Did the kids miss their mother and father? They must have been so sad. What about the mom? Her heart was broken. Why don't they tell us how many children Henry Brown had? Just saying he had “children” is not fair. How many? Two? Eight? The author is not so smart. We need to know. Who bought the kids? What happened to them?”

In case I didn't hear him in his first barrage of questions, Simon asks again: “Mom, what happened to the kids?”

“Sweetie, I don't know. Let's hope their new owners were kind to them. Let's hope they got food and shelter. Let's hope they did not have to work too hard.”

“Yeah,” says Simon.

We lie there, on the day-bed, for a few minutes completely silent. I wrap my arm around him.

Although he's eleven, Simon has recently taken to bringing a stuffed rabbit to the day-bed, especially to our readings in American history. The word regression has crossed my mind.

Simon lifts the rabbit to my neck and makes kissing sounds. “Do you like my rabbit?” he asks.

“He's a very cute rabbit,” I say.

“You wouldn't really cook him with mustard--would you? Or give him away?”

I have been threatening to cook the pesky bunny rabbit aux moutarde and serve him up for dinner, or give him to my younger sister's small children.

“Of course not.” I say, “We'll take good care of him.”

* * *

After his schooling in America, my father moved back to Germany. Unable to get an immigration visa to America, my parents, who'd met while working in Cologne, decided to emigrate to Lima, Peru. In the early fifties, jobs and housing were still scarce in Germany; if you were lucky enough to have a job, the pay was very low. At twenty-two, Father landed a job working for a tin baron operating out of Peru and Bolivia; father was supposed to oversee the tin ore shipments going out of the port of Callao. In time, my father became a metal trader in Peru, and later in Canada and Brazil, working for an American company.

In Peru, I grew up with maids. The houses and apartments came with at least one maid's room, or a little beehive of tiny rooms the size of closets, sometimes with no windows, only ventilation slits going out to a hallway. The maid's bathroom was often the size of a small shower stall. To shower, you had to sit or kneel on the toilet. There was a drain at the bottom of the bathroom floor. My parents, unused to colonial ways, would give a maid two of the tiny rooms, or later, when they were flush, move walls to make the maid's room livable.

Various women worked for us over the years in South America. Usually just one at a time. They were a constant of my childhood, always in the background. They cleaned, served, cooked, washed, ironed. They tended to my brother Peter and me, and later my little sister Andrea, when my parents went out, or when they traveled abroad.

However, with the exception of one, I cannot remember the names, or the faces, of any of the women who worked for us in Lima. I know Dionisia's name (in the picture above) because she's the only one that appears in the dozens and dozens of annotated photo-albums my father made of our years in Peru.

But there was one maid I think of often. She worked for us in the early seventies, in the years before we left Peru. In 1968 there had been a nationalist revolution. I was eight. After that, foreigners were no longer welcome. It took my parents until 1974 to give up and leave Peru, a country they'd come to call home.

What I remember about this one maid is that her room smelled of starched and ironed laundry, and hair that had not been washed in a few days; she listened to soap-operas on the radio while she ironed; she would knit herself a sweater and then, after a few weeks or months, unravel it onto an empty toilet paper roll, to then begin a new and different sweater; she made great fried egg sandwiches—two pieces of white toast, one egg fried in oil with salt and pepper.

I began going to her room because of my assignments for my home-economics class—ten centimeters worth of knitting. Could she help me? If she could knit for me, I would iron. So I ironed items I couldn't mess up, like underpants, while she did my knitting.

She didn't say much. Neither did I. I never asked her about herself. We never looked at one another. She ironed or knitted. The radio played soap-operas. When I wasn't ironing, I sat cross-legged on her bed. She made me take off my shoes.

And then I started coming to her room all the time, to do my homework, to read, just to hang out. And she let me in every time. Her room was bare. A calendar, I think, hung on the wall. My parents were stressed, fighting. You couldn't buy chicken, or gas, certain days of the week. There were tanks in the streets. Father had a job offer in Teheran; then he had one in Manila. Who wanted to go there? The maid's room was far away from all of that.

I don't know if we got her address when we left for Canada. Maybe. I never wrote. We didn't take a picture of her. I don't remember her name, and her face is a blur.

She was kind to me. I missed her and her room when we first arrived in Montreal.

Decades later, I found myself at a Buddhist retreat in Elmhust, New York, trying to learn how to meditate. I wasn't any good at it. I couldn't count to three without a tsunami of worries rushing in.

When I met with the abbot, an old bony Taiwanese man, he said: “Think of smell, smell that help you settle your very silly worry mind.”

In that cold room—it was a snowy January-- I remembered the maid's room: clean starched laundry and unwashed hair. And how the sunlight hit her bare walls. And the low whisper of the radio.

I've thought of her often since. I know life can't have been good to her. I know that. I do. She was in my life—and then she was not. She was an Indian who had come down from the hills for a life of servitude in the city. My family hired her to do the work we did not want to do. And then we left for a new life in Canada, where we hired an imperious, fat woman called Madame Genarde to clean our house once a week. For a half-day's work, we paid Madame Genarde, whose name I do remember, as much as we paid in a month to our maids in Peru.

The Wounds of the Past

(The illustration: Andrew Jackson by Simon)
We've been learning about the Indian Wars and the presidents who won them--to Simon's great delight. But all week my mind drifts away from bloody battles and the Trail of Tears; instead, I find myself thinking about the afternoon I saw my first John James Audubon—about whom we also read recently. It was over twenty-five years ago. My college sweetheart and I had a friend who was renting a room near Harvard Square in someone's private home, and one day we went to pick him up to go for kebabs, or a beer. The Audubon hung in the entrance of that home, over the stairwell, luminous and playful and exact.

Peter was the friend's name. Peter had been our pal in college. He had moved to Boston to study law. Peter, a child of missionaries, was, unlike some of us, not only thoughtful but also single-minded and ambitious. At that time, I was working at an arts bookstore and my sweetheart, Mark, was trying to figure out how to paint in his own style, as opposed to all the painters he admired. Mark and I dallied in the arts and the book business. But Peter had bigger plans. Last I checked, he has spent his life prosecuting white collar criminals in Texas.

We were let into the entrance and asked to wait. It was one of those well-appointed homes to which I, at that time, had no access: fleur de lis wallpaper, wainscoting, Queen Anne couches and Persian rugs, portraits and paintings illuminated by their own individual light. Through a double-doorway, I could see a wall of books and a group of older women in dresses drinking tea.

Waiting for Peter to come down the stairs, I found myself drawn to the Audubon. Which Audubon? No idea--birds of some sort. What I do remember is feeling deeply content to be living in Boston, even though the rent-controlled apartment we called home looked nothing like this one, and within a year Mark and I would split, and the gay men I worked with at the bookstore had AIDS, or their lovers and friends had AIDS, and before long most of them would be dead.

There were many moments of my life in Boston that were perfect and uncomplicated, like gazing at that Audubon: Saturday mornings at the Museum of Fine Arts when you could get in for free; listening to the Messiah at the Emmanuel Church; playing hooky just to spend the day perched over books in the vast and stately Reading Rooms of the Boston Public Library on Copley Square; wandering through the haunted hallways of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and coming upon a John Singer Sargent; or better still--a poorly illuminated Vermeer. It was so easy back then--I was twenty-three or four--to love this country.

“That's an original Audubon,” Peter said, when he finally skipped down the stairs. “Beautiful, isn't it?”

* * *

I read Simon about John James Audubon and show him images on my laptop. I point out the elegant compositions, the clean lines.

“They're just birds, Mom. What's the big deal? Birds are soooo lame.”

Audubons don't grab his interest, but Andrew Jackson surely does. Simon carries the biography around the house. To my amazement, he offers to read it to me all over again. Jackson used expletives and fought in the Revolutionary War as a thirteen-year old; he had a scar down his cheek, a gift from a British officer whose boots he refused to polish; he conquered Florida; he won the Battle of New Orleans; he was born in a one-room cabin but he ended up with a big plantation and hundreds of slaves; he was tough, rough and very popular.

“But what about the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears?” I ask. “After Jackson conquered Florida, he relocated the Seminoles to Oklahoma. He made them walk--thousands died.”

“That wasn't so good,” he says after a moment of silence. “I'm glad I'm not a Seminole.”

Simon is eleven. He wants to like what everyone else likes. He wants to fit in. The biography Simon read told him that, unlike John Quincy Adams, Jackson was immensely popular, that he was a war hero. Moreover, Jackson conquered Florida from the Spanish for the United States. In Simon's mind, if Jackson hadn't done that, Florida might never have become part of the United States. If that were the case, how would he access Cartoon Network from our living room in Miami?

“And Simon, remember he also had a huge plantation with hundreds of slaves.”

“Well, I'm glad I'm not a slave.”

This is how a kid's mind works. It takes information that is hard to process, that it cannot accommodate comfortably, and it finds a way to live with that knowledge. It was terrible, but at least it wouldn't have happened to him.

My mind, in turn, wants to wander away from that knowledge altogether and think only about Audubon, walking around in gorgeous Kentucky, drawing birds. For me, the stories of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and William Henry Harrison are fascinating—and repulsive. Land was needed for all the new immigrants coming to America; canals were built to connect rivers and lakes to ease transportation, settlement, and trade; peace was necessary to ensure the well-being and prosperity of immigrants, commerce and transportation. So the land was cleared—cleared of Creek, Choctaw, Blackhawk, Sauk, Seminole, Cherokee, Shawnee, etc. The Indian Removal Act was enacted, and battle after bloody battle after bloody battle was fought and won. From these deadly encounters the likes of Jackson and Harrison emerged as heroes--while whole nations vanished.

Unscrupulous despotism, tyrannical chauvinism—these are words I want to teach Simon. I want to tell him how much I hate this ugly side of the American character. I want to let him know it frightens me that there are Americans to this day, millions of them, who are certain they are better than others--a chosen people. These same folks are full of a zealous and aggressive patriotism, and a blind enthusiasm for military glory. I want to tell him that part of this country's complex heritage is made of stark inequalities and a ground soaked in innocent blood.

But I don't. I've rocked the boat enough as is. I need to let Simon make sense of these stories on his own. There are many ways to view Jackson. He won the Battle of New Orleans, killing two thousand British, suffering only a couple of dozen casualties. They called him “Old Hickory,” because hickory wood is tough.

From Jackson we move onto Van Buren and then William Henry Harrison. Harrison won various battles against Tecumseh and the Shawnee. Eventually, Tecumseh was killed by Harrison's men at the Battle of the Thames River.

Simon gazes at all the battle paintings in the Harrison biography and says: “War is horrible.”

Learning about Tecumseh, how he'd organized a large Indian confederacy that opposed the United States army, I remember that long ago I read a poem by Mary Oliver called “Tecumseh.” I pull my ragged copy off the shelf. I bought that little collection, American Primitive, back in Boston all those years ago. I wonder what Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison would make of a lesbian poet. Would they find a place for her in their America? And I think again of Peter-- has he ever read Oliver? Does he remember the lovely Audubon? We lost touch decades ago. Maybe I should drop him a line.

“Tecumseh”

by Mary Oliver

I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from the crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's
forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here.
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags among the yellow branches,
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.

Where are the Shawnee now?
Do you know? Or would you have to
write to Washington, and even then,
whatever they said,
would you believe it? Sometimes

I would like to paint my body red and go out into
the glittering snow
to die.

His name meant Shooting Star.
From Mad River country north to the border
he gathered the tribes
and armed them one more time. He vowed
to keep Ohio and it took him
over twenty years to fail.

After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,
it was over, except
his body could not be found,
and you can do whatever you want with that, say

his people came in the black leaves of the night
and hauled him to a secret grave, or that
he turned into a little boy again, and leaped
into a birch canoe and went
rowing home down the rivers. Anyway,
this much I'm sure of: if we ever meet him, we'll know it,
he will still be
so angry.

from American Primitive