Again the Far Morning
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
N. Scott Momaday
UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS / ALBUQUERQUE
ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-4844-9
© 2011 by N. Scott Momaday
All images produced by the author
All rights reserved. Published 2011
Printed in the United States of America
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Momaday, N. Scott, 1934–
Again the far morning : new and selected poems / N. Scott Momaday.
p. cm.
isbn 978-0-8263-4842-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
I. Title.
ps3563.o47a73 2011
811´.54—dc22
2010028435
To Barbara
For the bright, unlikely world she made
Preface
I believe that the poem is the highest form of verbal expression. We most often think of the poem as a composition in writing, but it may also be spoken or sung. The earliest poems belong to what is called the oral tradition; that is, they were transmitted by the human voice. We are told that writing is about six thousand years old. The oral tradition is inestimably older, as old as language itself.
“Form” is the operative word in the first sentence above. I have written in various forms of literature—novels, plays, essays, travel—and I have written in various forms of poetry. In the strict sense poems are distinguished from prose in that they are composed in verse, iambic pentameter presumably being the normal beat and measure of the English language. But there are definitive poetic elements apart from verse. Though perhaps more tentative, a poem may be a poem by virtue of its rhythm, alliteration, imagery, precision, etc. Thus terms such as “free verse” and “prose poem,” which may appear to be contradictions in terms, are valid within their frame of reference.
The oral tradition of the American Indian is very important to me, and it has informed much of my writing. The poem, in the strict sense of the word, does not exist in that tradition, but song and story are indispensable and highly developed. Both are infused with poetic character. Moreover, the song in oral tradition is invested with a belief in the intrinsic power of language. That power is definitive, and it informs the best of poems. My Kiowa father sang and told stories to me from the Kiowa oral tradition from the time I was a young child. That tradition has been largely influential in the determination of my literary voice. My mother, who was predominately English, was a writer, and she gave me a deep love of, and respect for, the English language.
My principal objective as a poet is to write directly from my mind and heart in the traditions that are my heritage. To trade in the wonder of words and to be acquainted with those whose best expressions have sustained us, that is literature.
—N. Scott Momaday
Angle of Geese, 1974
Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion
I ponder how He died, despairing once.
I’ve heard the cry subside in vacant skies,
In clearings where no other was. Despair,
Which in the vibrant wake of utterance,
Resides in desolate calm, preoccupies.
Though it is still. There is no solace there.
That calm inhabits wilderness, the sea,
And where no peace inheres but solitude;
Near death it most impends. It was for Him,
Absurd and public in His agony,
Inscrutably itself, nor misconstrued,
Nor metaphrased in art or pseudonym:
A vague contagion. Old, the mural fades…
Reminded of the fainter sea I scanned,
I recollect: How mute in constancy!
I could not leave the wall of palisades
Till cormorants returned my eyes on land.
The mural but implies eternity.
Not death, but silence after death is change.
Judean hills, the endless afternoon,
The farther groves and arbors seasonless
But fix the mind within the moment’s range.
Where evening would obscure our sorrow soon,
There shines too much a sterile loveliness.
No imprecisions of commingled shade,
No shimmering deceptions of the sun.
Herein no semblances remark the cold
Unhindered swell of time, for time is stayed.
The Passion wanes into oblivion.
And time and timelessness confuse, I’m told.
These centuries removed from either fact
Have lain upon the critical expanse
And been of little consequence. The void
Is calendared in stone; the human act,
Outrageous, is in vain. The hours advance
Like flecks of foam borne landward and destroyed.
The Bear
What ruse of vision,
escaping the wall of leaves,
rending incision
into countless surfaces,
Would cull and color
his somnolence, whose old age
has outworn valor,
all but the fact of courage?
Seen, he does not come,
move, but seems forever there,
dimensionless, dumb,
in the windless noon’s hot glare.
More scarred than others
these years since the trap maimed him,
plain slants his withers,
drawing up the crooked limb.
Then he is gone, whole,
without urgency, from sight,
as buzzards control,
imperceptibly, their flight.
Buteo Regalis
His frailty discrete, the rodent turns, looks.
What sense first warns? The winging is unheard,
Unseen but as distant motion made whole,
Singular, slow, unbroken, in its glide.
It veers, and veering tilts broad-surfaced wings.
Aligned, the span bends to begin the dive
And falls, alternately white and russet,
Angle and curve, gathering momentum.
Earth and I Gave You Turquoise
Earth and I gave you turquoise
When you walked singing
We lived laughing in my house
And told old stories
You grew ill when the owl cried
We will meet on Black Mountain
I will bring corn for planting
And we will make fire
Children will come to your breast
You will heal my heart
I speak your name many times
The wild cane remembers you
My young brother’s house is filled
I go there to sing
We have not spoken of you
But our songs are sad
When Moon Woman goes to you
I will follow her white way
Tonight they dance near Chinle
By the seven elms
There your loom whispered beauty
They will eat mutton
And drink coffee till morning
You and I will not be there
Simile
What did we say to each other
That now we are as the deer
Who walk in single file
With heads high
With ears forward
With eyes watchful
With hooves always placed on firm ground
In whose limbs there is latent flight
Plainview 1
There in the hollow of the hills I see,
Eleven magpies stand away from me.
Low light upon the rim; a wind informs
This distance with a gathering of storms
And drifts in silver crescents on the grass,
Configurations that appear, and pass.
A stillness on the dark, erratic air.
I do not hear the longer wind that lows
Among the magpies. Silences disclose,
Until no rhythms of unrest remain,
Eleven magpies standing in the plain.
They are illusion—wind and rain revolve—
And they recede in darkness, and dissolve.
The Fear of Bo-talee
Bo-talee rode easily among his enemies, once, twice,
Three and four times. And all who saw him were
Amazed, for he was utterly without fear; so it seemed.
But afterwards he said: Certainly I was afraid. I was
Afraid of the fear in the eyes of my enemies.
The Horse That Died of Shame
Once there was a man who owned a fine hunting horse. It was black and fast and afraid of nothing. When it was turned upon an enemy it charged in a straight line and struck at full speed; the man need have no hand upon the rein. But, you know, that man knew fear. Once during a charge he turned that animal from its course. That was a bad thing. The hunting horse died of shame.
—From The Way to Rainy Mountain
In the one color of the horse there were many colors. And that evening it wheeled, riderless, and broke away into the long distance, running at full speed. And so it does again and again in my dreaming. It seems to concentrate all color and light into the final moment of its life, until it streaks the vision plane and is indefinite, and shines vaguely like the gathering of March light to a storm.
The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee
I am a feather in the bright sky.
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain.
I am the fish that rolls, shining in the water.
I am the shadow that follows a child.
I am the evening light, the luster of meadows.
I am an eagle playing with the wind.
I am a cluster of bright beads.
I am the farthest star.
I am the cold of the dawn.
I am the roaring of the rain.
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow.
I am the long track of the moon in a lake.
I am a flame of four colors.
I am a deer standing away in the dusk.
I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche.
I am an angle of geese upon the winter sky.
I am the hunger of a young wolf.
I am the whole dream of these things.
You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth.
I stand in good relation to the gods.
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful.
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte.
You see, I am alive, I am alive.
Headwaters
Noon in the intermountain plain:
There is scant telling of the marsh—
A log, hollow and weather-stained,
An insect at the mouth, and moss—
Yet waters rise against the roots,
Stand brimming to the stalks. What moves?
What moves on this archaic force
Was wild and welling at the source.
Rainy Mountain Cemetery
Most is your name the name of this dark stone.
Deranged in death, the mind to be inheres
Forever in the nominal unknown,
The wake of nothing audible he hears
Who listens here and now to hear your name.
The early sun, red as a hunter’s moon,
Runs in the plain. The mountain burns and shine;
And silence is the long approach of noon
Upon the shadow that your name defines—
And death this cold, black density of stone.
Angle of Geese
How shall we adorn
Recognition with our speech?—
Now the dead firstborn
Will lag in the wake of words
We are civil, something more:
More than language means,
The mute presence mulls and marks.
Almost of a mind,
We take measure of the loss;
I am slow to find
The mere margin of repose.
And one November
It was longer in the watch,
As if forever,
Of the huge ancestral goose.
So much symmetry!
Like the pale angle of time
And eternity.
The great shape labored and fell.
Quit of hope and hurt,
It held a motionless gaze,
Wide of time, alert,
On the dark distant flurry.
The Gourd Dancer, 1976
The Colors of Night
1. WHITE
An old man’s son was killed far away in the Staked Plains. When the old man heard of it he went there and gathered up the bones. Thereafter, wherever the old man ventured, he led a dark hunting horse which bore the bones of his son on its back. And the old man said to whomever he saw: “You see how it is that now my son consists in his bones, that his bones are polished and so gleam like glass in the light of the sun and moon, that he is very beautiful.”
2. YELLOW
There was a boy who drowned in the river, near the grove of thirty-two bois d’arc trees. The light of the moon lay like a path on the water, and a glitter of low brilliance shone in it. The boy looked at it and was enchanted. He began to sing a song that he had never heard before; only then, once, did he hear it in his heart, and it was borne like a cloud of down upon his voice. His voice entered into the bright track of the moon, and he followed after it. For a time he made his way along the path of the moon, singing. He paddled with his arms and legs and felt his body rocking down into the swirling water. His vision ran along the path of light and reached across the wide night and took hold of the moon. And across the river, where the path led into the shadows of the bank, a black dog emerged from the river, shivering and shaking the water from its hair. All night it stood in the waves of the grass and howled the full moon down.
3. BROWN
On the night before a flood, the terrapins move to high ground. How is it that they know? Once there was a boy who took up a terrapin in his hands and looked at it for a long time, as hard as he could look. He succeeded in memorizing the terrapin’s face, but he failed to see how it was that the terrapin knew anything at all.
4. RED
There was a man who had got possession of a powerful medicine. And by means of this medicine he made a woman out of sumac leaves and lived with her for a time. Her eyes flashed, and her skin shone like pipestone. But the man abused her, and so his medicine failed. The woman was caught up in a whirlwind and blown apart. Then nothing was left of her but a thousand withered leaves scattered in the plain.
5. GREEN
A young girl awoke one night and looked out into the moonlit meadow. There appeared to be a tree; but it was only an appearance; there was a shape made of smoke; but it was only an appearance; there was a tree.
6. BLUE
One night there appeared a child in the camp. No one had ever seen it before. It was not bad-looking, and it spoke a language that was pleasant to hear, though none could understand it. The wonderful thing was that the child was perfectly unafraid, as if it were at home among its own people. The child got on well enough, but the next morning it was gone, as suddenly as it had appeared. Everyone was troubled. But then it came to be understood that the child never was, and everyone felt better. “After all,” said an old man, “how can we believe in the child? It gave us not one word of sense to hold on to. What we saw, if indeed we saw anything at all, must have been a dog from a
neighboring camp, or a bear that wandered down from the high country.”
7. PURPLE
There was a man who killed a buffalo bull to no purpose, only he wanted its blood on his hands. It was a great, old, noble beast, and it was a long time blowing its life away. On the edge of the night the people gathered themselves up in their grief and shame. Away in the west they could see the hump and spine of a huge beast which lay dying along the edge of the world. They could see its bright blood run into the sky, where it dried, darkening, and was at last flecked with flakes of light.
8. BLACK
There was a woman whose hair was long and heavy and black and beautiful. She drew it about her like a shawl and so divided herself from the world that not even Age could find her. Now and then she steals into the men’s societies and fits her voice into their holiest songs. And always, just there, is a shadow which the firelight cannot cleave.
The Monoliths
The wind lay upon me.
The monoliths were there
In the long light, standing
Cleanly apart from time.
For the Old Man for Drawing Dead at Eighty-Nine
…at ninety I shall have penetrated
To the essence of all things…
—HOKUSAI
This late drawing:
In these deft lines
A corpulent merchant reclines
Against a pillow.
Here is a fragile equation
For which there is an Asian origin.
In this and that and another stroke
There is something like possibility
Succeeding into infinity.
In another year there might have been here
Not apparently
A corpulent merchant and his pillow
But really
Three long winds converging on the dawn.
Abstract: Old Woman in a Room
For Olga Sergeevna Akhmanova
Here is no place of easy consequence
But where you come to reckon recompense;