Boundaries, Part Three: Christmas Party on the Rez

With Benjamin Lee - Paacavi, Arizona

We stood behind the Hopis in the soup kitchen line,
Watching their children, the hope of the world,
For there will be more of the ancients.

We wanted so much, knowing just English
To converse with these people who seemed just like us
(One girl looked just like my daughter),

But everything changed when we walked in the room.
We'd been followed for miles with invisible eyes
Like cactus hiding in the golden grass.

We were for them a chore of translation,
Where spirits must form into names, and signs were needed
To repeat what the trees had already explained.

The Anglos with their hot food, heat, free teeth repair
Became, past the border, like vampires of giving,
The vapor of pathos to quaff with our eyes.

While their eyes wanted to believe the white father
Could be reasoned with by those of his own kind,
That something of what they were could be shared

With those who had come from the cold, but those eyes
Feared too for the children, that they'd become like the others,
Made servants of the empire of the liberal culture

And leave all the old ways behind -- they know what's taken
In photos and sketches and rocks -- how the highway
Was built to be overrun with anthropologists.

There's not much to say when the guests weren't invited,
And they ask how they got here, what they know, miracles
Too lowly for a people who hope things into form.

The couple from Virginia Beach bought for their scrapbook
A t-shirt that read "Don't worry, be Hopi."
That, for them, was more than enough,

It unloaded the whole cosmology, for all of us...
But it had already changed, the prophecies had altered
When we crossed that primordial edge.