Gan (“Mountain Spirits”)

note: i’ve been trying to write a poem about the Gan for years. this probably isn’t it.

this picture was taken on the Mescalero Reservation at a midsummer celebration some years ago. i just found it in a file i’d forgotten about.

i can’t tell you all the stories
my father used to raise me.
i don’t know if any are true
but they were truly his, and are now mine.

he said once that he recalled
the Gan dancing late at night
and that he watched from beyond the fire ring
as they stepped among the people,

matching the stars
turn for turn. then, he said, the next
memory was of the whites taking him to
the residential school.

there he had his name stolen and a new one tacked on,
got a haircut, learned to sing of God
at the drop of a whip, and practiced
the conquest tongue until he forgot his own.

he forgot everything else there too
except the Gan.
when the preacher/teacher
called them “devil dancers” he swung on him

and took the backhand slap as a warrior’s due.
this is what he told me, and i have no reason
to doubt him, having picked myself up off the floor
more than once when he swung at me.

one day i swung back
and he never tried again.
i guess warriors are made, not born,
he said.

somewhere below Sierra Blanca
the Gan gather and begin to turn.
i can feel them from here
every time i look at my father, or at myself,

with our masks firmly in place, feet struggling to dance,
hands longing for the wands, thin voices inside us
singing the fast shrill song — two warriors too far from home
to do anything except fight among themselves.