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In the camps filthy with bones and skin

babboons, chimpanzees, Primates on the Tree


of families neither on the bottom or top
of branches evolutionary crawled in the dirt.
Sweet Medicine and White Calf nauseated
from a ridge hidden in a distance watched
the pewling, stinking apes in their town,
howling often and fighting with each other.
"They wander aimlessly back and forth,"
the sexy girl whispered behind the ridge,
uncertain about why she was there.
"Why do they act like that, do you know?"
Sweet Medicine disconsolate nodded to her.
"Yes. Or rather I used to think I knew.
A fiendish Mastermind and craven, it was
I thought necessary to Evil to direct
misapproximately, deformed, unfinished
Light limited as the cause of mortality;
and it was in that wretchedness substance
was lost that so drove my father to Fear.
Death, my sweet girl, it was a Child
not even Satan as an idea or Saturn
helped explain Night and Chaos to them.
He's your grandfather still loose somewhere
out there and he knows more about it than me.
He's Postponement, Injustice unrepaired.
I can see you don't understand," he sighed.
"Let's go on here with this renewal of men
your mother wanted as a possible solution."
She could only frown, and in love promise.
She waited behind out of sight as they'd
planned back at the Council on Bear Butte
while he bravely went forward to the ape camp,
a lone man clean and strong on the prairie.
They'd argued long and loud about many things
with Mother at the Black Hills sentinel
and Kit Fox societies, Dogs, came forth
with suggestions of orderly transference.
Sweet Medicine Root Standing finally
won over the day and night counsels
by proposing a "Crazy Animal Dance" ceremony
opposed to hunting unwilling "Game Meat".
He said, "We ask permission of all who die.
We do not kill; but allow to expire only
those old or infirm who're tired of life.
Extracting souls and Spirits immortal
are not the place of hunters or farmers,
or any of us unsatisfied with Nature.
Permission in a Dance ritual elaborate
so mutually consenting as to violence
transcendant will fairly make civilized
responsive, Survival ideal even to Death."
The scope of his thoughts the Queen knew
only over Aeons had been by God developed,
by Zeos reactive, Old Osiris the dream, and
it was what built Egypt's and Greek temples.
"Now today," she told her daughter yestereve
ere she allowed the calf and the bull to go,
"he's planning his salvation from mortal pain
to be offered these proto-Algonquian tribes,
in a dance of the wolves and buffalo gods.
You're my daughter and his, just remember:
it's his bones the snakes were licking at my feet.
He'll sacrifice temporarily all he's got, and
it'll be a bull's white bone a Pipe you will bring
to sing in the smoke the chant of new hope."
The girl again was uncertain what was meant.
It was like a chasm bottomless under her
she felt so alone as the Chief walked away;
and she shivered in horror as a Cobra
invoked in her mother's warning arose
in her mind - a memory of an idea long ago.
(What smoke and what "Pipe" did she mean?)
She watched him go as men watched
him approach like a myth in a mirage,
shimmering, ghost, a foot or two off the ground
like an Alien he was so clean, and unclear;
and then he faded in the mist and a song:
"Prepare ye the way for The White Goddess,
and see! hear, Her song whistled on a Pipe!"
Dancing forward, before she knew it,
The White Virgin held up and out on horns
a Mammoth leg bone as white as her fur,
whistling in its reed-holes lengthwise
a melody more sweetly than Apollonian
medicine, guiding her Dance, Music -
"With visible breath I am walking, I am."
Bug-eaten men no better than lemurs
fell superstitiously to the dirt encaked
on their knees at the sight of First Beauty
they'd forgotten. Curs whimpered in fright.
Immeasurable the Princess of all Them
thundered upon the camp a step at a time,
gracefully as a brontosaurus purity
chanted on a Pipe white as her horns,
"With visible breath I am walking, I am
walking, I am walking upon music."
Her horns (like the Crown God beheaded)
reached like antlers beyond Redwoods' treetops
whiter than the bark of Aspens in the Spring.
"I am the topmost branch of the Family Tree,"
she sang miraculously upon Her Pipe,
"civilization's royal cow and stag both,
culmination's achieved purpose on the land."
Then Her Pipe the leg-bone of Bull Black
became Sweet Root Medicine again in a blink
of an eye, in a moment of epochal science
and the Chief once again (once upon a time)
smiled easily in ordinary human size
beside the Dinosaur with the towering Crown.
"Don't worry, you miserable bug-eaters,
pathetic earthlings not worth a god-damn,
we won't hurt you. Even though we should.
We've come to save your sorry asses.
Don't ask me why. I don't know why.
Not that you want anything but food anyway,
and wretched pleasures without meaning.
At best, this Holy Lady beside me and I
will teach you how to eat and live right
whether you like it or not. Understand?
We're organizing with the dogs, kit foxes,
coyotes, and especially the white hunting wolves
a Crazy Animal Dance, the Cheyenne Massaum,
for you to invoke permission properly
to call forth Wohpe's Herd of mammoths
and hairy buffaloes from underground, with me.
You see, are you listening? To the music
ceremonials I'll teach you magic spells
from the stars, on Four Sacred Medicine Arrows
to heal fear and hunger, to feed your children.
Without the gods men cannot survive, at all.
Already after only a few years, look at you:
sick, crazy, starving, lying, murderous fools.
A mouse has more sense than you neanderthals.
Bodily existence is not the be-all or
end-all of all that you do, I guarantee it,
and rotten waste's not meaningless loss
next to those Orions and Pleiades you see
above, in patterns, like bows and arrows.
They're not to kill or be eaten in caves,
and neither are elk, deer, rabbits, and mice.
No. Those are the brothers of the stars too,
and my sisters. So don't cross me, Kids.
Obey the commands of this Lady and I
or else you'll go the way of hominids here;
back down in the muck lower than worms,
and then gone, gone, truly bodies only,
rotten, wasted, worthless, empty Shells.
Before, in Ages and Aeons extinct now,,
devils extracted your souls and you died.
Oblivion. Black and white, godless, hulks.
Then the Snake Ophion, Argus the Set
shed his skin and grew more powerful
to irrigate another day with his drool.
Invulnerable, invincible, he still fumigates
the deep ecology somewhere almost in Hell
and eats your hearts if you don't listen to us.
Decay from your idiocy and He'll suck out
your soul. I guarantee it. I know him well.
I know you have and are more than Body.
I know this Calf and I are not fantasy.
Myth is not a lie but grammar poetic.
Listen to me and live, or don't and die.
The Massaum Ceremony's to conquer the Enemy
Death, in the knowledge of good and evil;
the Dance of animals crazily around the Tree
of the Moon, dance of the Sun, epic song.
In the Pipe and the Arrows now we'll begin,
and heed the traditions, oral, magic sounds."
Faintly, the hearts of men and their eyes
looked up to see dazzling visions from caves
visibly breathing, like mists and fogs,
with black wolves and red, foxes dressed
elegantly better than men or field pheasants,
prairie chickens, quail, red-breasted falcons
marching in step and flying formations
ritually in circles, according to stars,
around the mountainous cone of Bear Butte
in the paradisial Black Hills and islands.
Once, they'd learned, it'd once been underseas,
under water, as vast as oceanic beds
where dolphin-men and Amphibians wise
played like sea lions and fish-like birds.
The whole flat vista around the Islands
surrounded the Black Hills homes of the gods;
fit only for gods for the seas were too vast.
When it dried when Gaia in turmoil with Sky
sloshed impurely against the Moon's will
the poles and all the equators reversed.
Sweet Medicine wanted to explain that too,
as he on his Hill wondered the Ceremony
fuller; watching everyone jump to the task.
White Calf grazing laid down by his side
demurely tucking her forelegs beneath her.
People worshipped them all around the Green
glimpsing at him first black as a bull
then red as a man, depending on the light.
Patiently they all ate more abundantly the more
they worked together to clean up their camp;
preparing tipis, woolen robes, beads, seashells
to decorate leggins and with porcupine quills,
gardens were planted and beans, squash;
corn especially was Sweet Root's favorite.
Blackberry puddings and wild cherries sour
were sweetened by the children with honey
donated, after asking permission, by the bees;
and women invented flour from wheat
growing wild to make pie crusts and bread.
Irrigating family and communal orchards
turned muddy work into happier play
as everyone enjoyed the cooler soft mud
on a hot summer's prairie's sundancing day;
and harvesting apples, pears, walnuts,
before the long winter's coldest long nights.
Chopping wood, with permission from logs
fallen from pines of their own accord,
stacked, insurance, to stay warm in snows
and contemplate quietly their Chief's direction.
It took two years of such daily travail
to get ready for the First, promising, Beauty.
Remembering, barely, their savage days
old before their time when other tribes
far worse than the proto-Cheyennes
murdered them and cannibalized red meat,
it hadn't seemed possible life was fair
as it was now with protective spirits,
gods, they were called in cultures sublime
teaching wolves teaching men to be as good.
Sweet Medicine stood up on the mid-Spring
and said, "Okay, let the worshipful task
begin, in the sacred Maheonox cave
the Ceremonial Lodge deep in Bear Butte,
in the center of the rocky Middle World
where entwining animal forms and the plants
signify a powerful new universe."
Walking away from the Calf for a moment
he went inside a shallow hollow
that opened for him into a wide cavern
on the north side of the unerupted cone;
granite spires as great as a Cathedral's
moved impossibly to open a hole for him!
Down into the Abyss the First Chief
disappeared as calmly as a man on a stroll
hiking a trail on a modest gray Hill.
Bears in hibernation and Ponderosa roots
were even afraid to go down with him
there into unknown, icy, crystal doom;
and hesitating they, bedecked in finery,
stood outside in the warm sunny rays
of the cooling late, Spring light of the day.

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