Zuni. Arapaho. Dakota.
The nations displayed in booths
In their dim, third-story room
Where mannikins were grouped
In poses: women weaving
Baskets and rugs, warriors in robes,
Priests in mid-rapture amid the slack
Lulled beadwork of the snakes.
Here, where time was geologic,
I’d find them at the same pursuits
As always, as though shaped
By an enormous patience.
They made you invisible.
Like the other plunder, they taught
How seeing was a way of inhabiting
Time. I know, they were clichés,
Fixed in 19th-century niches,
Stolid as though carved from wood.
They were like the movies, all wrong
Even when rightly arrayed
In breechcloths and moccasins,
The frescoed vistas against which
They were set. And yet they were also
An amplitude in the world I knew
Of swing shifts and row homes,
Smoke in pillars above the mills.
Owing them, I came to say farewell,
But the room was already closed.
Peering through a crack,
I could see worktables and coils
Of rope among the half-dismantled
Booths, that figure I’d known
Since childhood, stripped naked
On the floor, chipped leg there
Before it, like the bodies at Pine
Ridge, only so much more wreckage.
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