background image
68
This cold full moon of
December will be shining
on the grave of CRAZY HORSE --
which nobody can visit, neither
Oglala Sioux nor White nor anyone
else knows where it is. Knowledge
of the location went with
those who buried him. (Like the grave
of that wrathful homeless old
blind man, the once King Oedipus,
whom the gods, having ruined, summoned
at the end into the sacred grove to die:
his grave itself both sacred and secret. And
in that grove's place now a bus garage in
an industrial slum of Athens....)
And, in our age, with CRAZY HORSE
the country he and his people
had for walking on got -- let's say --
spirited away, so for them it's there
no longer, not for living in, not for being
dead in. Even so -- tonight with the radio
announcing it's clear weather all across
the northern plains, let us say
that on the grave of CRAZY HORSE
this cold full moon of
December will be shining.
I lie awake in the small hours
and think how in the heatless
mind-light of a dream I never see
a shadow. Very pale shadows
of the old pine tree are moving
hesitantly, back and forth,