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13thWR
OGLALA
Not even the snake
she'd had tattooed on her left leg
years ago --
tail commencing
just below her ankle bone
and through a kind of viny
tattooed foliage winding red
and blue round and round
her calf and knee --
then thigh --
and ending up fork-tongued
not far below her waist --
could hold him--
because he
was authentic Native American
Indian and she wasn't --
even
though
when her
father died,
between hymns she shook
an eagle feather at the seated
congregation and did a kind
of non-Episcopalian dance
that may have been a little
Indian.
I don't
know.
JULY 4
Very much for God
and some for a country he'd only read about in school
he was ready to say no
to her --
even though
before he saw her recumbent on a hand-worked quilt
beneath a Winesap tree
that was surely near the center
of her husband's orchard
he smelled the jasmine-scented lotion he'd learned at night
she rubbed into her loins
to cool them.
- Reid Bush