Traverse des Sioux

LITTLE CROW

Down by the Minnesota River

choked with fertilizer –

shallow brown water of

Traverse des Sioux.  It was here

the white man stole the territory

with treaty signed in smoke

(fake handshake, mock

friendship).  We didn’t mean it – sorry.

Eleven years later (1862)

starved, dispossessed

the scar broke open (led

by blue, reluctant Little Crow).

Extermination of the buffalo

echoed the reservation

camp.  To build a nation

all these savages must go.

The lightweight arc of birch canoe

is like an eyebrow (wingbone

frame, sutured to one

Rose Island – lamp of Manitou).

We’re limping back to Providence.

The whole grotesquerie

of violence & perfidy

to be forgone (washed in the silence

of the sea).  Down Mississippi way

you feel a salty shell wash

through fingers... an eyelash

leach one tear, slowly.  Hey ey.

12.11.17