Dignity


Remington’s almost oriental picture of the Indian
seated on a horse and looking out
across blue snowy plains to where the stars lie leveled
like coals in a campfire doused in heavy snow
may express it:  that single muted figure
half wrapped in blanket and a long doomed ride ahead.
Who would not wish, or seem to wish
such an ending for the human race, cold wind
and suffering accepted.  In the posture
he is drawn in, and his frozen stature,
it’s as if the world he lived through was entire,
he felt no shame, confusion, anguish
for being nameless in it, leaving no
explanation of the snow squall, buried grass
and dreams of heavy bison and the hawk
falling through the moonlight of a winter sky.
He probably was not much.  But for a time,
there upon that ridge we can imagine, if we wish,
not the pain to follow, not the horse gone lame,
the struggling cries of man and beast alone,
their rotting bodies sprawled against a hillside,
but the tightening of muscle to be tried,
the lifted, blood-marred head,
and in that wish, our glory
or delusion.  Either brings us down
who would imagine man is more than this
brushed figure on a horse above the plains.

                                                    
-from Flight and Pursuit, L.S.U. Press