noblesse sauvage

  














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Speak the Great Names:  Fort Qu'Appelle
St Isidore de Bellevue, Grand Coteau,

Batoche, Fort Walsh, Frog Lake and Cut Knife Hill,

Seven Oaks and the rest of Rupert's land

and say what lies there between: bones

the wind gives back, bones of buffalo, bones

of the hunters bones of Blackfeet,  Cree and Blood

the prairie piled white with hunts, all

bone brothers under sun. Name

me,  Gabriel king of this bare kingdom

of bones, riding and riding through white remains.

Name me, Gabriel, hero of the Wild

West of Buffalo Bill, hero of the great

Staten Island shoot out,  me and Le

Petit killers of little blue balls

riding and riding through pictures of sage brush and sky,

fighting with clocks beneath the electric sun,

never as we used to fight, waiting,

talking, never arriving though miles and miles

of coulee and plain .  And now where the prairie was

Sitting Bull and I and faces in the dark

square off, Chief of the great Hunkpapa Lakota,

dazed in the painted flats, and I, calling,

calling: God, will they find us, lost in faces,

before we stop forever, smiling in a glass

cage, where rivers stop, and birds hang

on the sky never moving? My smile is glass.

Everything lies inside me: buffalo run

to ground, streets I never saw where the elms

line faces singing white, singing

"The Stars and the Stripes Forever"  waiting for wars

and other shows at the town's end. They see

me, Gabriel, and see a war that hardly

was, a circus war so put off we almost

missed the last call. Dummies I gave

them to save my friends, men stuffed like the great

chief and I who drift slowly through places

and then through names where hundreds walk to gaze

and conjure us. Speak the names -- me, Gabriel,

a clock ticking to an abandoned house.




                                       E.D. Blodgett

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