With an understratum
Of cruelty and vindictiveness
He has received many wounds,
muchas gracias amigos
In his countless fights
With the whites,
muchas gracias amigos
In each ear it was his pleasure
To wear a huge gold watchchain
When Geronimo was in Washington for the Inauguration of Roosevelt he was interviewed at the Indian Hotel by S.M. Huddleson of the Dept. of Agriculture. Geronimo signaled through Geo. Wratten that he wanted to know where Huddleson lived, and was surprised and disappointed to learn that Huddleson lived in only one house on only one street. Ugh! he said in gruff disgust and signaled that if He were to live in the city, He would live in every house in it!
Fifteen Hundred Tons of Hay @ 1¢per Pound
Gen. Crook proved to a skeptical world that even the Apaches were corruptible He put them to work in the hills at Fort Apache with small sickles & butcher knives
The Moving, Invisible Spectre of the Phratry on the Traitor Peaches
Who can tell what a traitor is?
To What? His own comfort?
Are there any traitors to that?
Those dying of discomfort
can accommodate it most
The brave arise
less often than the cowardly
yet the group must, somewhere
remember the mistakes
of low and common tendency
even when it is a mistake itself
when the cowardly are too remembered
What sets these things on their course?
What participle of this history
comes to have the label Decisive Moment?
It was known to be Peaches, caught out
who revealed the escape route
And when, above Janos
we asked permission of the women
to strangle the children
the women consented
and the suicide gripping
of the throats of our own children was done
and those delightful voices lay silenced
in absolute sacrifice
in the burrows where we hid
we slipped out through the light
from Captain Garcias raging grass fire
once more to the Sierra Madre
once more past the jaws of your hungry god
the frenzy of survival rushing from our pores
A Period Portrait of Sympathy
Captain Emmet Crawford,
Commander of Apache Scouts
is sated with German Romanticism
his eyes are sunk deep
in centuries of masturbátory introspection
on his chest two ranks of buttons
and a complicated rigging of braid
he has a dark lost look
in the style of Poe
and the scouts love his weirdness
When the Boundary Commission
following Kearneys capture
of New Mexico in eighteen fortysix
arrived at Santa Rita, trouble
arose
(because naturally the miners
(had pushed some red hot bayonets
(through the natives
and when they moved west
to get this line on paper
and out of the Membreño heart
into Chiricahua, they were surveying
a border long established by Apache force
And the Gadsden Purchase was made
to correct an error of omission
Assorted Compliments
A treacherous fiendish look (Bartlett
Some have a chinese cast of countenance (Smart
Wiederliche Physiognomien Und Gestalten (Möllhausen
More miserable looking objects I never beheld (Fremont
Coal black eyes (Peters
Physically of slighter build than any Indians I have seen (Clum
Die Lipanis haben blondes Haar, und sind schöne Leute
(Müklenpfordt
Sont des beaux hommes (Lachapelle
Geronimo is the worst Indian who ever lived (Gen. Miles
Tall, majestic in figure; muscular (Brantz-Mayer
Fine physical conformation (Foote
Crian pié menor que los otros indios (Sonora etc.
They live entirely by the chase (Delgado
Slim, very agile, features emotionless, flat, hair not unlike bristles
(Bancroft
La carne del caballo (Velasco
They are said to be more fond of the meat of the mule
than that of any other animal (Gregg
Reservations
This material yields
only insofar as the reality
was digested at the occurrence.
This material, and this
includes the famous greatness
of the B.A.E.
is the dung & piss
of Warfares invariants.
There is the Arabness
of the subject.
And it Is the supreme form
of the argument that foreign Policy
has always been an Internal policy
at the heart of the american Inability
to propagate a Central Thought.
At the base of it
One finds the Northern Europeans
marked inability
to live on Earth with other kinds
and certainly
not with kinds other than themselves.
But that this manicness
is directed like a death ray
even to their own kind
is the ultimate difference.
For instance, in our terrain,
Bandeliers wretched, derisive
reception at Fort Apache
riding on a halfass
halfhorse, or Cushing indistinguishable
among the Zuñi fruit sellers.
They are so far from home.
It now looks as if
their strategic mistake
was in not interbreeding
with the native blood
in the first days
and extensively thereafter.
Their enforcement of The
Dispersion of the slave blood
of course doesnt count, that use
is only a marriage of convenience,
derived from industrial
and technically social considerations.
And includes none of the innateness
in which the conqueror joins the conquered
Love is mistaken by Whiteye policy
throughout the hemisphere
where it is taken for necessity
and where it must contend in
a soil of distractions, always
the conqueror waiting for the spaceship
at the edge of the page
and whose biggest footnote
is an apocalypse prior to themselves.
Those who have seen in this
some higher drier destiny
of the Person
have seen it in the small alienations
of the color coded wires of the culture
but it isnt there.
In this case it is poco a poco
in the fabrications of the aer
turning back the sunlight
promoting the early return of the glacier
and it is Also possibly,
in line with our habitual craziness
absolutely nowhere.
We do not even yet
know what a crisis is.
Creation
There was a time
when nothing existed
this time was before form
Time rolled on. And space
which derives its character
from time, was not distinguished.
There now appears a spot
a thin circular disc
no larger than the hand
yellow on one s
ide
white on the other, in mid air.
The first distinction
is naturally given.
It is to be as pure conception
not genetically argued.
Included in the disc
there is a bearded man
the size of a hand
He is the Sky Man
the agency of the metaphor
the One, who lives above.
He wakes as from a long sleep.
He rubs his face & eyes
with both hands, and where
his eyes light, light appears
Everywhere
Above and below
a sea of light.
light associated with black
the South the full spectrum
the West saffron
the North blue.
The One then cast out
a ball, rolled from the sweat of the brow
and up sprung the Parentless Girl
Woman created first
out of a direct act of labor
not from some spare part
Night Girl is the nucleus of the universe.
Some other One then asked
Where is the Earth
and the One replied
to this voice of the story
I am Thinking, Thinking
Thinking, Thinking
I am Thinking Earth.
And then he thought
a Little Boy
and poco a poco
the whole phylum
was brought into being
There was great laughter
in the beginning
when all creatures could talk.
The Whole European Distinction
The longest continuous run
of external resistance:
the Apache Wars.
Without significant intermission
from the Seventeenth Century onward
can only be attributed to
the superiority of Native
over Alien Thinking.
Yet they had not invented Mind
and as we know
their domain was by Mind over-ridden
In all the treaties
the Native assented
to the Thinking
And never, and
have not yet discovered
the predictive Mind.
Personum
The women circle the men in conference
they speak like a loud annotation
to every advance of Thought
They are theologically overheard
Those who overhear them
log each nuance of the record
A clinic attention to the future
is not to their nature, they ask more
Of the immediate utterance
They have no mechanic of the future
And
They are prepared to meet the animate
If now they lie dormant
They were by Mind overcome,
I have a mind
is the highest mutation of force
The original monuments of perception
are the play of light
through the wall’s membrane
Out of the Sunset movement
Out of the Sunrise invasion
So The infant is bound
hand & foot
to the cradle board
a platform with roof
balcony onto the World
shield to the sunnelance
They began life in this manner
devoted to pure observation
from head to nock
And of course without
the petty distraction of their fingers
waving pathologically at the future
Because, it is from witness,
they made no natural cause
to fear the future
Their art was
of cosmic physical proportion
the scale proposed for everything
and reflected in their landform
Their leading ideas
come directly from the landform
By the time they are let out
they have seen it first
from the frantic jog of escape
to the just plausible image
of the desert floor
and what is before them
invites them to get ready
They were sentenced to observe
the destruction of their World
The revolutionary implications
are interesting
They embody a state
which our still encircled world
looks toward from the past
Gen. Miles imagined
That Geronimo
Didn’t know
The function of the heliograph
Immured in Florida
La Máquina a Houston
The train has come to rest and ceased its creaking
We hear the heavy breathing of the máquina
A relic in its own time
Like all the manifestations of technical art
And without real gender
And hidden from direct appeal
By the particulates of the English language
Itself the agent of frag mentation
And lonely accuser of the generic lines
The heavy breathing of the lonely máquina
Stopped in its tracks waiting for the photograph.
The Apache are prodded out into the light
Remember, there are still dark places then
Even in the solar monopoly of Arizona and Tejas
We are with the man with the camera
They step off the train and wait among the weeds
They never take their eyes off of us, wise practice
We motioned the way with our shotguns
They are almost incredibly beautiful
We are struck and thrilled
With the completeness of their smell
To them we are weird while to us
They are not weird, to them we are undeniable
And they stop only before that, they are like us
Yet we are not like them
Since we dont recognize that. We say:
One cannot have a piece of what is indivisible
Is natural Apache policy
Where for us, that is a philosophical implication
We are alike, but we see things
From behind dis-simular costumes,
The first principle of warfare
Where All of Us is the Army, and they are the people
Precisely they step off the train
And this is an important terminal moment
In the Rush Hour begun in this hemisphere
This is the moment before the leg irons
They look Good. They look better than we do.
They will look better than we look forever
We will never really look very good
We are too far gone on thought, and its rejections
The two actions of a Noos
Natches sits alone in the center
Because he is the elegant one among them
Hereditary, proper as a dealer
He is inherent and most summary of themselves
Supple, graceful, flexible hands
Goodnatured, fond of women
As the train moves off at the first turn of the wheel
With its cargo of florida bound exiles
Most all of whom had been put bodily
Into the coaches, their 3000 dogs,
Who had followed them like a grand party
To the railhead at Holbrook
began to cry
When they saw the smoking creature resonate
With their masters,
And as the máquina acquired speed they howled and moaned
A frightening noise from their great mass
And some of them followed the cars
For forty miles
Before they fell away in exhaustion
FROM HELLO, LA JOLLA
Shifting an Interference with Nature to a Scientific Obstruction
Humming birds are close to junkies anyway
All that keeps them straight is the flower
And her control of plenitude in their cause
Curbing their overweening gluttony
And their insatiable singlemindedness
Yes, as the books say, they are pugnacious
But in them it is a quality absolutely without wit.
So when this normality is disturbed
And they go for sugar in water and acid red #271
They do get vicious as the supply gets low.
At this point Harmonics drive these hovercrafters
Crazier still, as it punctuates their slavery2
And their birdbrained anger spreads
Throughout their frenzied holding patterns
Sugar, sugar.