Publisher’s Note
Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poet’s intent, whether it’s Walt Whitman’s lines stretching to the margin like Route 66, or Robert Creeley’s lines descending the page like a string tie. The printed poem has a physical shape, one defined by the negative space that surrounds it—a space that is crafted by the broken lines of the poem. The line, as vital a formal and critical component of the form of a poem as metaphor, creates rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, tension, and so on.
Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intended—with the pressure the horizontal line brings to a poem, rather than the completion of the grammatical unit. The line, intended as a formal and critical component of the form of the poem, has been corrupted by breaking it where it was not meant to break, interrupting a number of important elements of the poetic structure—rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, and so on. It’s a little like a tightrope walker running out of rope before reaching the other side.
There are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands. On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poem’s structure.
We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indent—similar in fashion to the way Whitman’s lines were treated in books whose margins could not honor his discursive length. On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break.
This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating poetry e-books in a world that is imperfect for them—and we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised. Despite this, we’ve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them.
—Dan Halpern, Publisher
Frontispiece
Dedication
To the memory of Yvor Winters
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Publisher’s Note
Frontispiece
Dedication
Preface
Part I
Bequest
In the Forest
A Siberian Hunter, Remembrance
To the Farther Camps
A Darkness Comes
A Hero’s Burial
The Kiowa No-Face Doll
A Sloven
Alaskan Games
A Modest Boast (Toast)
A Note on Animals
Ago
Division
The Night Sky at Coppermine
Song Fragments
For Wallace Stevens
The Woman Looking In
Transparency
Spectre
The Great Fillmore Street Buffalo Drive
The Snow Mare
The Bone Strikers
Yahweh to Urset
The Essence of Belonging
To an Aged Bear
The Bear
A Benign Self-Portrait
Prayer for Words
On the Cause of a Homely Death
The Blind Astrologers
The Pursuit of Man by God
Revenant
Death Comes for Beowulf
The Mythic Harpoon
Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion
A Silence Like Frost
Angle of Geese
Birdsong
Shade
On the Neva
The Whale in Amber
The Dragon of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges
Nous avons vu la mer
A Chronicle
Before and After
The Theft of Identity
A Couplet in Tongues
Dictum
Need
Song of Longing
Stones
Poem After Lunch
Approach
English, the Language
A Story of Light
This Train
War Chronicle
The Rider of Two Gray Hills
Visitation at Amherst
Fire
First Poem
Meditation on Wilderness
Olga
The Galleries
Remembering Milosz and “Esse”
Death Song
Dichos
A Witness to Creation
Sobremesa
Appearances
Arrest
An Oasis There of Many Colors
Afterimage
The Listener
The First Day
Revision of the Plains
A Blooming of Appearances
Sweetgrass
Rustic Dream
Severance
Seasonal
Rough Rider
Almost Love
On Spring in the Alexander Gardens
This Morning the Whirling Wind
Part II
A Century of Impressions
Part III
The Death of Sitting Bear
Note (on Set-t’an Calendar Entry)
Set-t’an Calendar Entry
Susquehanna
Pigments
Linguist
Dancers on the Beach
Ultimus
The Spheres
A Presence in the Trees
On the Stair
Lines for My Daughter
There Came a Ghost
Nenets
A Measure of Rain
La tierra del encanto
To Gaye
Jornada del muerto
Octave
Yellow the Land and Sere
The Window Through Which the Light of a Candle Glowed
Torrent
Reconciliation
A Mythology of Belief
Northern Dawn
The Pilgrims
Babushka
A Woman Walking
Seams
Gamesmen
Prairie Hymn
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by N. Scott Momaday
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
The poems in this book reflect my deep respect for and appreciation of words. I consider myself especially fortunate to have been given a rich sampling of storytelling as a child. My mother was well versed in English literature, and she taught me how to discover the wealth within books. My father, who was a Native American of the Kiowa tribe and whose first language was unwritten, told me stories from the Kiowa oral tradition.
I became a poet. I believe poetry is the highest form of verbal expression. Although I have written in other forms, I find that poems are what I want and need most to read and write. They give life to my mind.
I have a recurrent dream. In it there is a child who lives hundreds of years ago in a village in Anglo-Saxon England. Early one morning the child is awakened by its parents, who whisk the child away into the forest. There, around a clearing, are gathered the people of the village. They chatter with excitement, and the child does not know what is happening. Then a little old man,
dressed in a ragged robe and hood, steps into the clearing, and a hush falls on the scene. The old man begins to speak, “Hwaet we Gar-Dena in geardagum . . .” And he recites Beowulf, the oldest poem in the English (Old English) language. It is a long recitation, of some 3,182 metrical lines, but no one turns away. It is a singular, mesmerizing occasion. It is a great story told. The child, especially, is transported. Here is indeed the discovery of wonder and delight in words. For the child it is an epiphany, a first fulfillment of the imagination. At once and forever nothing will be as it was.
It seems to me that I am that child. I too have had the profound experience of discovering the power of language and literature, first in the oral tradition, then in writing. My father would begin a story with the Kiowa word Akeah-de, “They were camping,” an ancient verbal formula that reflects the nomadism of the culture and is likely thousands of years old. I was fascinated by the Kiowa stories, and I begged my father to tell them to me over and over again until they were fixed in my mind. I have lived with them for many years and they remain a foundation of my creative expression.
Story is the marrow of literature. The story does not end with the last word. It goes on in the silence of the mind, in that region in which exists the unknown, the mysterious, and that origin of the word in which all words are contained. I profess the conviction that there is only one story, but there are many stories in the one. Literature can be likened to a rolling wheel of language. It reinvents itself with every telling of the story, and in its timeless procession it has neither beginning nor end.
A poem is a moral statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse. It is a moral statement in that it involves judgment and choice. The poet judges the validity of his subject and chooses what he considers the appropriate vehicle of its expression. The judgment is an ethical procedure, as is the reader’s (listener’s) obligation to judge the poet’s judgment. In a real sense the human condition is the universal subject of literature; arguably there is no other. Verse is measure. The basic difference between poetry and prose is that poetry is composed of predetermined measures, iambic pentameter, for example.
The poem, as such, does not exist in Native American oral tradition, for the verbal equivalent is not composed in English poetic measure. Rather, there is song and such verbal variants as oratory, spells, chants, prayers, etc., all informed with poetic or lyrical undercurrents.
In my early career as a poet I wrote out of the oral tradition, making use of the character of Native American expression that I acquired as a birthright and by way of having grown up on Indian reservations in the Southwest, specifically the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo.
In 1959 I was awarded a Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University, where I studied under the direction of the distinguished poet and critic Yvor Winters, who instructed me in the history of the lyric poem in English. Winters was my true friend, and he influenced my life as a writer in ways that I continue to discover. I am profoundly in his debt.
In my time I have seen many things, and I have traveled widely over the earth. My writing is supported by considerable experience. In Arizona I have seen the Navajo Yeibichai and heard the haunting chants of the mountain gods. In Moscow I have seen numerous commuters reading books of poetry on the Metro, and I have attended poetry readings to standing-room-only crowds in large arenas. In Siberia I have heard the Khanty songs of the bear ceremony. And in London I have heard the words of Shakespeare and Ben Johnson. I can only hope that there are soft echoes of these voices in my work. It would be a grateful satisfaction.
At Stanford I experimented with different forms of poetic composition. During my tenure there I received a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent a year on leave in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I read Emily Dickinson in manuscript. She wrote in intricate patterns and rhyme schemes, and she described brilliantly the landscape in which lived her whole life. I learned from her something about the spirit of place.
My friend and predecessor at Stanford, Thom Gunn, tried his hand with syllabic poems, poems measured solely by the number of syllables in each line; I too wrote in syllabics. The 5-7-5 syllabic form basic to haiku is one that informs the section of this collection entitled “A Century of Impressions.”
The title poem, “The Death of Sitting Bear,” is the memorial to a Kiowa kinsman of extraordinary stature as a warrior and a chief. He inspired fear, wonder, and admiration in large measure, and his death was a self-orchestrated act of extreme bravery, loyalty, and the determination to be free. I feel his presence close by in my blood and imagination, and I sing him an honor song.
Under the title of my poem “Prairie Hymn,” the final poem in this collection, is a concise formula from the Chippewa oral tradition:
As my eyes search the prairie
I feel the summer in the spring.
These few words, in the precision, perception, and beauty they express, seem to me to embody the essence of poetry. When I was a boy, waking to the pristine sunrise and seeing the bright land rolling away to the horizon, the seed of poetry was invested in me. I felt the summer in the spring.
N. SCOTT MOMADAY
I
Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around.
From HOUSE MADE OF DAWN
Bequest
Oh, my holy and unholy thoughts
Will lie scattered on these pages.
They will do to make a modest book,
Not something for the ages,
But leavings for a lonely child, perhaps,
Or for an old man dreaming.
In the Forest
For my brother, Yuri Vaella
Oh my brother, I hear your footsteps
In the forest. They are strong and even;
They sound the rhythm of your great heart.
You go among the tracks of the bear.
Always the bear will guide you.
You will come to an open space among the trees,
And there you will dance. You will sing the songs
Of the elders, those who have made sacred the earth.
I hear your footsteps and your songs.
Oh my brother, I will dance with you.
Together we will celebrate our bear being.
We will keep alive the holy fires.
Aiyee!
A Siberian Hunter, Remembrance
In taiga I have gone a solemn way.
A Nenets man I found. He had me say
His name, Yuri Vaella, hunter and friend.
His heart is one with mine beyond his end.
To the Farther Camps
In the making of my song
There is a crystal wind
And the burnished dark of dusk
There is the memory of elders dancing
In firelight at Two Meadows
Where the reeds bend eastward
I sing, and there is elation in it
And laughter like the play of spinning leaves
I sing, and I am gone from sorrow
To the farther camps
A Darkness Comes
And I have seen the raging of the skies,
The beating of fields in the raucous night,
And waited for the searing dawn and light,
The soaring sun, the swollen earth that dries.
The rutted roads run away to nowhere.
The mind is hardened and the will is lost.
I wish for something in between. And mostly
The wind burns my wishes on the air.
Old men and women gather at the graves
Of pioneers, and broken windmills mark
Distances of despair and, scattered, stark,
The bones of cattle and en
crusted staves.
I look across the plain. The weather hums
At dusk. I stiffen, and a darkness comes.
A Hero’s Burial
The hours are at hand, the scene is set;
In readiness the grave.
The dignitaries on the lawn are met
In solemn stance, and brave.
The hero is interred beneath the flag
With stark facility.
And now the stately interval will lag
Into eternity.
Rifles are fired as one, a bugle blown.
The scent of glory weaves
Among the final notes. And left alone,
The mound and drifting leaves.
The Kiowa No-Face Doll
Kiowa Boarding School, Anadarko
They see how you hold your doll
With love and desperation.
Are they to imagine expression
On the bare, impenetrable mask?
There is nothing to reflect
The face of a child, glad or sad,
Who see upon this sere surface
Anonymity only, a random
Fetish of precise uniformity.
For those who brought you here,
You are the image of your doll.
For those who relegated you
To military sameness, you bear
The visage of a faceless race.
A Sloven
A sloven entered the parade,
Was out of step and wanted aid
To fashion well a bold charade.
“I am the Emperor Norton.”
His cry was heard by everyone,
From Candlestick to Tiburon.
None questioned his high majesty
Nor did gainsay his sovereignty.
His subjects set his spirit free.
The sloven tarried and held sway
Until at last he passed away
And into legend by the bay.
Alaskan Games
A young fox scampers
At the near wall of a pine wood,
Just full of himself.
A raven comes at dusk to play
Hide-and-seek.
She rides on runners