Reaching Yellow River
“It isn’t a game for girls,”
he said, grabbing a fifth
with his right hand,
the wind with his left.
“For six days
I raced Jack Daniels.
He cheated, told jokes.
Some weren’t even funny.
That’s how come he won.
It took a long time
to reach this Yellow River.
I’m not yet thirty,
or is it thirty-one?
Figured all my years
carried the same hard thaw.
Out here, houselights hid
deep inside the trees.
For awhile I believed this road
cut across to Spring Creek
and I was trucking home.
I could kid you now,
say I ran it clean,
gasping on one lung,
loaded by a knapsack
of distrust and hesitation.
I never got the tone
in all the talk of cure.
I sang Honor Songs, crawled
the railroad bridge to Canada.
Dizzy from the ties,
I hung between both worlds.
Clans of blackbirds circled
the nearby maple trees.
The dark heart of me said
no days more than these.
As sundown kindled the sumacs,
stunned by the river’s smile,
I had no need for heat,
no need to feel ashamed.
Inside me then the sound
of burning leaves. Tell them
I tumbled through a gap on the horizon.
No, say I stumbled through a hummock
and fell in a pit of stars.
When rain weakened my stride,
I heard them singing
in a burl of white ash,
took a few more days to rave
at them in this wood.
Then their appaloosas nickered
in the dawn and they came
riding down a close ravine.
Though the bottle was empty,
I still hung on. Foxtails beat
the grimace from my brow
until I took off my pain
like a pair of old boots.
I became a hollow horn filled
with rain, reflecting everything.
The wind in my hand
burned cold as hoarfrost
when my grandfather nudged me
and called out
my Lakota name.”
In memory of Mato Heholgeca’s grandson
Copyright Credit: Roberta Hill Whiteman, “Reaching Yellow River” from Star Quilt. Copyright © 1984 by Roberta Hill Whiteman. Used by permission of Holy Cow! Press, www.holycowpress.org.
Source: Star Quilt (Holy Cow! Press, 1984)