Rapid City wears its patriotism like a shroud.
Corner streets are populated with less than
life-size statues of past presidents
squinting at the distant Black Hills
where the grandeur of Mt. Rushmore
casually crumbles their bronze dreams.

Wax settlers, loggers and gold miners
stake claims with souvenir hunters
touring a mine, panning for fool’s gold.

In nearby Custer, 75 breaths  from Wounded Knee,
shops hawk Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo t-shirts
proclaiming them “ The Original Founding Fathers.”
Mixed in are those in star-spangled letters and fireworks
proudly streaming “Welcome to America. Now Speak English.”

Rushmore was dynamited from a cliff
by a creator who spent the rest of his life
erecting grand Confederate gestures
out of ****** Georgia quartz monzonite—
finished and opened 100 years to the day
after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.  

Thirty minutes from Rushmore, existing in its shadow
on private land filled with dusty trails,
unfinished after seventy years,
probably still unfinished after twenty  more,
facing away from these great stone faces,
emerging from the side of great Thunderhead Mountain,

on an ivory stead with a mane of flowing river and wind,
exists the Oglala Lakota warrior Tasunke Witko
the worm of Crazy Horse the Old and Rattling Blanket Woman,
sibling of Little Hawk and Laughing One, memory of the spirit of
Black Buffalo and White Cow who walked with an Iron Cane,
all enclosed with him in this massive breath of white stone.

The history of this great Indian space stretches the land,
four times higher than the Statue of Liberty,
extending beyond the warrior frown, the pointing left arm.
The horse’s ear alone is the size of a rusty  reservation bus.
When finished it will be the largest sculpture in history,
bigger than the land, breath and all of Indian memory.

It was the Vision Quest of Chief Henry Standing Bear to show the whites that the red man had great heroes, too.
In a man named Korczak he found a kindred spirit,
a storyteller in stone, a survivor of Omaha Beach,
who when the first wife faltered, found a second
who gave him enough children to carry, sculpt the Bear Dream.  

The big chief’s face is still the only finished part.
Korczak’s wife and children toil with the rest,
struggling to capture the essence of a warrior
who never allowed his shadow to be snared
in the false glow of the white man’s light,
trusting only the rain beams that fall

onto his people, mountains, plains and buffaloes,
onto Paha Sapa, “the heart of everything that is,”
where the Lakota huddled while the world was created,
now a land of broken treaties and dying dreams,
drenched in the dust of tears underneath,
while this white face torn from red gazes East.

Each launch begins with a prayer
until I have a puncture, a rip, a tear.
Mayday!  Mayday!  Mayday!

I am always falling
either to the earth or to the stars,
falling forward to God the Father
or father to son.
  
To survive I move in the vacuum
between calm heartbeat
and silent in-breath,

hurling to my final mission
to repair a disconnection
of a mind that can
***** life with a thought
or by sniffling
a remembered tear,

knowing not whether to
****** the monstrous soul
or to hug the last, lost dead part.

I swim through
the waterfalls of mars
knowing I never really knew you
nor am I you.

“Stay where you are.
Do not proceed any further,”
you hiss in loving defiance.

In the space in between
I see that madness is
never once thinking of home,
being free of all moral doubt.

Tethered to the umbilical
I cut the insanity to the vacuum,
suffocate the space between
with love,

until I can no longer see
what is not there,
until I miss what
is right in front of me.

In the after-burn from Saturn
I am looking forward
to the day of my self return.

I will rely on what is closest to me.
I will live and love.

The lightness of paper
soft enough to crumble
to a chirping palm ball
released into the air,
an imagined perfect pitch,  
too gossamer to float
to its ultimate arch,
unfolding in the web  
of alluring sunshine

aspiring to be
in its unfolding angles
a thread of silk
caught into the patterns
of a spun handkerchief,
flapping finely down to dirt,
flagging to human desires,
a reverse puff tucked black
into a left back corner pocket.

In its extending it is
****** wood pulp
culled and hewn
from rings of fine pine,
rising in its descent
to barely glimpsed evolving
beaks, talons, feathers
caught in the spider’s web
and shook down by thundering axe.

I collect the death masks
of everyone I see,
many ready with their
mouths turned to  the earth,
eyes closed tight in hellish denial.

Except for L’Inconnue de la Siene
pulled from the river in utter peace,
lovely as Ophelia floating in the reeds,
the resuci Anne of two centuries
of death and resurrected respirations.

Her I grant the heaven she envisioned,
rescue her from the sterile pummel
of kisses and mechanical resurrections
for the body forever remembers its debt
to the devil’s dance of an aspiring life.

I am an exiled poet like Dante
finishing the Paradisio and Inferno
before the malarial last vision
and stone cold gasp reveals
the world and God as just a trick.

I witness the world pleading mercy
to the executioner before the beheading.
“No, no Madam you must die.  You must die”,
is the death mask maker’s answer before
the axe man takes his three swings.

I wonder, like Keats, before the wax
embalms his consumptive face
“How long is this posthumous
existence of mine to go on?”
The answer coming one year later.

I know the world will die, like John Dillinger
in a hale of bullets under a movie marquee,
its death mask ceremoniously displayed
next to its ***** pickled member
and the Sheep Child bleating for love.




Notes:
L’Inconnue de la Siene is a famous death mask created from a Parisian suicide.  Her death mask was a popular morbid collectible found in many French households of the late 1800’s and early 1900s. The Death Mask was also used as the face of a  popular CPR teaching mannequin known as resuci Anne.

The Sheep Child is a reference to the James Dickey poem about a creature that was the off spring of *******.

John Dillingers pickled ***** is rumored to be a part of the Smithsonian museum’s  hidden collection of oddities.

Death, I notice, often comes
with a smile and a kiss,
a tender tuck of blanket into legs,

a pull to the shoulders
making shroud complete,
a tender whispered secret.  

“Good bye” or “Good life”,
it might be saying.
But so does love.  

2

The  light of the cancer center
is so clean, clear and bright
that it makes me squint

pondering whether the jovial trucker
with the Tennessee drawl
and the St Nicholas beard and physique,

on his fifth dance with the Big C,
that started in his eye
and remission to his liver,

is a harbinger or heavenly host,
a glint from the gaze of God
or the last secret whisper of love.

3

When he is awol the next week
I assign him to the casualty list
knowing that I am the lucky survivor.

I am the thick among the thins
and he is the blessing angel
destined to return to the Lord.

I live with the ambivalence,
the hope and the guilt,
looking for dancers among the blasted.

4

I refuse to name my cancer
not granting it control
or even the idea of breath.

The drugs, however, that’s different.
Oxaliplatin is oxygen.
Leucovorin is lungs.

They pour into my port
and in the liquid air
I learn to breathe again.

I watched my house recede to the invisible
as the water rises and the slow flat boat ferries me away.

My only baggage— the wife in her angels nightgown,
my chihuahua, a revolver loaded with dusty bullets—

all collapsing in the flow, dissolving into rot and mold,
a place not all that comfortable for other people,

a belligerent child evaporating into condemnation,
a concrete overhead blocking my view of heaven.

My archive of creeping shame sheds their existence
until it fits into the reality I see, no longer see.

I can only call this invisible place, this marred space
what it originally was before the water and erasure—

I called it love.
I call it love.

I can’t walk into Walmart and not scan for shell casings,
see the bruises on the fruit and think of those who fell,
those now populating its aisles and borders
and calculate if it’s a number worth the killing
when the man in a heavy jacket with a bulge,
ramrod eyes and spine level as a concrete wall
decides to subtract brown and black from white.

I cant walk a crowded mall parking lot without scanning
for gapped car windows with no panting dogs inside,
searching for bump  stock impressions in the cloth and foam
venting the velocity of aggression in the unfolding humidity,
the rust in the panels mating with the rust in the soul,
the numbers adding to his perfect algorithm of annihilation
unaware that color is an impossible illogical subtraction.

The Aurora of the Dark Knight Rises stains every movie I see
adjusting my seating calculations towards the nearest exit,
making the ten dollar hustle two seats away a quaint fear
compared to the ****** page manifesto of nearby hands
restless for assault when the cool dark light hits every eye.
I’m safe, cuddled in the low numbers of  the matinee.
For now, I’m not worth the killing.