Ask me about the time
my brother ran towards the sun
arms outstretched. His shadow chased him
from corner store to church
where he offered himself in pieces.

Ask me about the time
my brother disappeared. At 16,
tossed his heartstrings over telephone wire,
dangling for all the rez dogs to feed on.
Bit by bit. The world took chunks of
my brother’s flesh.

Ask me about the first time
we drowned in history. 8 years old
during communion we ate the body of Christ
with palms wide open, not expecting wine to be
poured into our mouths. The bitterness
buried itself in my tongue and my brother
never quite lost his thirst for blood or vanishing
for more days than a shadow could hold.

Ask me if I’ve ever had to use
bottle caps as breadcrumbs to help
my brother find his way back home.
He never could tell the taste between
a scar and its wounding, an angel or demon.

Ask me if I can still hear his
exhaled prayers: I am still waiting to be found.
To be found, tell me why there is nothing
more holy than becoming a ghost.

(In Memory of July 1, 1916)

Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart,
     Received when in that grand and tragic “show”
You played your part
     Two years ago,

And silver in the summer morning sun
     I see the symbol of your courage glow—
That Cross you won
     Two years ago.

Though now again you watch the shrapnel fly,
     And hear the guns that daily louder grow,
As in July
     Two years ago,

May you endure to lead the Last Advance
     And with your men pursue the flying foe
As once in France
     Two years ago.

The dead bird is a kind of song.

I think about the end of Lorca, the act of loyalty,
the incidental things.

And I wonder what we’ve really discovered,
what anyone truly knows before their exile.

Maybe just this: that both sides of a double-sided coin
can be wrong.
That anything moral is a dilemma.

According to Spanish legend, the king of crickets
steals the voices of boys,
leaving them mute.

According to you, this is why you’re here:
for the truce-making.
And for the words.

^{Written While a Soldier, at Fort Washakie, Wyo., for First Sergeant William Barnes, Troop "F," 10th Cavalry, on the Occasion of His Forthy-Fifth Birthday}

Though forty-five long years, you say, 
Have silvered o'er your head with gray, 
Your friends rejoice, to-day, that you 
Stand hale and hearty in your "blue."

Long for Old Glory you have stood
With truest sense of brotherhood; 
Long may you live a useful life—
Noble and true in peace of strife.