Return to the Superstitions

Could he not read, Captain Fremont, the signs?
Did he not know then that the prickly pear could manage his thirst,
the yucca sustain him? That the sage could be mingled
with the seeds and the flowers of these plush, burnished
hillsides to vanquish all disease?

Did he not realize he could hide in a hole in the side of these stones and disappear forever? To never have to reappear as some bloodthirsty Savior, some victim of Christ inscribing his name on the settlements as Moses chiseled laws onto tablets, to fill the journey with the beads of Apache tears, and dreams of gold flowing where there once were rivers?

Did he not hear the guidance of the hawk or see the sacrifice of the
lizard, or know his flintlock gun could only pierce the bear's hide,
not his spirit, that thing that offered itself to man as a gift?
Did he not find the deepest parts of the valley where even the elders'
voices are stilled, where all things can be said, in the very
throat of the universe?
Did he not see how the plants share in their sublime crowns
everything man ever sought from the stars?
Did he not realize there are no lands to discover that the stones don't
already know, and they can lead you to all you are looking for?
Dark rocks, perfectly placed, glistening with energy,
could he not even access their power?

Did he not see the stone towers at the mountain's edge, the idol spires of warning, direct carvings of the Creator's art, more rational than human's pale conceptions of God, full with heartbreaking stories of chances for redemption, of forgiveness offered but never taken, instead, wars for domination that weakened, walls of separation that bound together in chains, voices of pain and wounds complaining that only created in the Earth of the mother more pain and unsoothed wounding?

Did he not learn from these that what is hidden in plain view
holds the power to end meaningless death, rapacious questioning,
emptiness inflicted for generations to come?
Did he not know that all this gold hidden in the ground that so easily
gives way, is there so we may learn what gold is, its only purpose
to enslave and silence, and how the cries of those it has destroyed
can only be heard if it is left where it is, to mourn itself
instead of haunting lost prospectors?
Did he not think that Progress, the step back to man's own resources,
would bury him in his own grave, because these quilts of
invisible light were less to him than the temporary lamps
he could make to surround his fear of the dark—
for which the very earth must be gutted, whole races
destroyed—to atone for the look they wouldn't give him,
of unalloyed truth, what even the humblest meadow grass
gives away in its dance with the sun, always for free,
with joy to be seen, life without end, without need for amen?

Was it just silence and waste to Captain Fremont, riding a horse, barking out orders, willing a trail from the sweat of his brow, cursed with having to record in his journal the names of the flora and fauna, and wonder if there was any difference which wash he took, when what mattered was decisiveness: that's what would make him the great man he soon would become (his face defined in unyielding stone)—he could push through it all, turn every sample captured into something, map every contour like an alchemical master, find God's kingdom by domesticating the wilds...

Yet did his superior mind give a thought to why those who brought
the water here thousands of years ago decided it was best
to let it flow underground?
Did he even recognize what it meant that the rough hewn pine
he found here would become a prow to further journey,
the untilled silt would feed the endless people moving to be
free of everything but their bible, their musket, their legacy,
the sign that, because the land had let them come,
God had favored them?

How could he not have known that this instead was a curse? That letting the land be subdued is only taking back the blessing into silence, forgetting the truth of life and death, the way to end the constant wheel of need and loss, possession and remorse, gluttony and starvation?



Did he find that by taking life into his hands that it had left already,
and he was already dead, in miserable watch for dark warriors,
from whom he knew he must steal all this land, because they
mirrored his own doom, his own uncompromising stance
for slaughter in the face of the manifest plan, the notation
of the divine?