War Dances Read Free Page B

tenured professor
    Who’s strangely thrilled
    To list all of the oppressors—
    Past, present, and future—who have killed,
    Are killing, and will kill the indigenous.
    O, he names the standard suspects—
    Rich, white, and unjust—
    And I, a red man, think he’s correct,
    But why does he have to be so humorless?
    And how can he, a white man, fondly speak
    Of the Ghost Dance, the strange and cruel
    Ceremony
    That, if performed well, would have doomed
    All white men to hell, destroyed their colonies,
    And brought every dead Indian back to life?
    The professor says, “Brown people
    From all brown tribes
    Will burn skyscrapers and steeples.
    They’ll speak Spanish and carry guns and knives.
    Sherman, can’t you see that immigration
    Is the new and improved Ghost Dance?”
    All I can do is laugh and laugh
    And say, “Damn, you’ve got some imagination.
    You should write a screenplay about this shit—
    About some fictional city,
    Grown fat and pale and pretty,
    That’s destroyed by a Chicano apocalypse.”
    The professor doesn’t speak. He shakes his head
    And assaults me with his pity.
    I wonder how he can believe
    In a ceremony that requires his death.
    I think that he thinks he’s the new Jesus.
    He’s eager to get on that cross
    And pay the ultimate cost
    Because he’s addicted to the indigenous.

Bird-watching at Night
    W HAT KIND OF BIRD is that?
    An owl.
    What kind of bird was that?
    Another owl.
    Oh, that one was too quick and small to be an owl. What was it?
    A quick and small owl.
    One night, when I was sixteen, I was driving with my girlfriend up on Little Falls Flat and this barn owl swooped down over the road, maybe fifty feet or so in front of us, and came flying straight toward our windshield. It was huge, pterodactyl-size, and my girlfriend screamed. And—well, I screamed, too, because that thing was heading straight for us, but you know what I did? I slammed on the gas and sped toward that owl. Do you know why I did that?
    Because you wanted to play chicken with the owl?
    Exactly.
    So what happened?
    When we were maybe a second from smashing into each other, that owl just flapped its wings, but barely. What’s a better word than flap ? What’s a word that still means flap, but a smaller flap ?
    How about slant?
    Oh, yes, that’s pretty good. So, like I was saying, as that owl was just about to smash into our windshield, it slanted its wings, and slanted up into the dark. And it was so friggin’ amazing, you know? I just slammed on the brakes and nearly slid into the ditch. And my girlfriend and I were sitting there in the dark with the engine tick, tick, ticking like some kind of bomb, but an existential bomb, like it was just measuring out the endless nothingness of our lives because that owl had nearly touched us but was gone forever. And I said something like, “That was magnificent,” and my girlfriend—you want to know what she said?
    She said something like, “I’m breaking up with you.”
    Damn, that’s exactly what she said. And I asked her, “Why are you breaking up with me?” And do you know what she said?
    She said, “I’m breaking up with you because you are not an owl.”
    Yes, yes, yes, and you know what? I have never stopped thinking about her. It’s been twenty-seven years, and I still miss her. Why is that?
    Brother, you don’t miss her. You miss the owl.

After Building the Lego Star Wars Ultimate Death Star
    How many planets do you want to destroy?
    Don’t worry, Daddy, this is just a big toy,
    And there is nothing more fun than making noise.
    My sons, when I was a boy, I threw dirt clods
    And snow grenades stuffed with hidden rocks, and fought
    Enemies—other Indian boys—who thought,
    Like me, that joyful war turned us into gods.

War Dances
1. My Kafka Baggage
    A FEW YEARS AGO , after I returned from a trip to Los Angeles, I unpacked my bag and found a dead cockroach, shrouded by a dirty sock, in a bottom corner. “Shit,” I thought. “We’re being