your last breath
is already inside you
tucked into
a pocket of a lung

it’s the one
that entered you
when you were drawn
from your mother

that cry you bawled out then?
that was someone else’s last breath
that had been given to you to hold
until you emerged

how it got
from them to you
although a puzzle
is not your concern

focus here instead:
how sweet the sound
of energy returning
when all was thought lost

who were you
you should ask the next newborn
are you my former angel
are you someone i should know

exhale that
and your questions will settle
where they belong — on the ears of
the past becoming the present

there is a kind of prayer
crazier than most
dusted with black sugar
studded with hard knocks
soaked for hours in confessional brine
a prayer that eats false piety clean through
and drinks like a sailor on one last bender

these prayers were first written in the plague years
rode on the saddle horns of cavalry in civil wars
were breathed by the dozens on reservations and in camps
became stronger thru pogroms and holocaust
and glowed poison white when offered to the traditional god —

because you don’t pray like this
to just any god

this prayer reaches a god of gold cadillacs
a god of ptomaine diners and roundheeled hookers
a god of dropped balls and last chances
this crazy prayer
drags a true god kicking and screaming
into view
a god who loves the desperate
and allows the sword to once in a while
be mightier than the pen
the word
or mercy

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.

“hey, asshole —
don’t your feet hurt
from standing on that edge
for so long?”

although she thinks
she could have stopped him,
she lets him fall.

some people think it’s romantic
to love a suicide.
she knows better:
it’s hard work to watch one die,
and harder work
to watch one live.

at the funeral,
she plays harmonica
by the graveside
and horrifies the mourners.

she is no messiah.
she cannot raise anyone.

later,
when the crowd has gone,
she becomes so starved
that she eats dirt from the grave
and wipes her mouth
with flowers.

a man who believes he is in love
wakes up on the yellow line of a country highway.

he crawls to the side of the road just in time to avoid
a huge truck rolling past. he thinks that he might have died
if he had not been so fortunate as to awaken at that moment.

then he thinks that the truck was not that close to the center line
and he might not have died after all.

he crawls back into the road.

he lies there all afternoon while the traffic blows past him
as if he wasn’t there.

he leaves the road at dusk and tells himself
that it was possible that he was never there at all,
ever, at any time.

he decides that
if one feels no pain,
one has not been in love. perhaps if one can lie
on the yellow line and never be struck,
the road one was on was too safe. perhaps
one should stay out there as long as it takes
to be crushed by love, just to understand
that it is not a safe place to be.

i’m watching the news and it is evident
that this is you, no matter how
you deny it:

blank, though storm faced, able to leap
a premise at a word from on high,
willing to eat paste in public
if it helps the cause, willing to lick ass
and let your lips show the leftovers
if that’s what it takes to win.

man, i don’t want to know
how you sleep, or about what dreams a guy like you
must have. i recognize the shit
of the eagle on your pocket
and i think you know as well as i
what you gave in order to gain your gain.
i don’t entirely blame you.
you just do what you’ve been told to do —
but then again, that’s how we got here, isn’t it?

but let’s get back to your face that looks like rain,
soft rain but rain nonetheless; let’s get back to the fact
that you’ll be drying yourself over this one for a while.
let’s assume you’re a man at heart — let’s assume that a man
would know how not to mistake tears
for a reason to avoid sending other folks
out to kill or be killed.
what would it take to get you to cry in public
over everything you knew that got us here?
what would it take to get you to agree
to cry injustice where none is admitted?

it will take more than a moon or two
before we give up waiting for an answer.

EDIT: I DO NOT REMEMBER WRITING THIS POEM.