WHITE BUFFALO: The Story of a Mayan Prince

Written on a bar napkin that Rudy gave me:

“All heroes become bores at last.” - Emerson

What’s a native look like? I was raised on Westerns, the Duke, Winchester,
The names of football teams, like most Americans. In college, Jim Morrison
painted an alt.portrait, and herbs varnished the [native mutable] still life -
New Mexico drew all in three-point perspective, pushing at horizons that once
lived beneath oceans, monstrous cataclysms of lava and ash, a rock
big as a fridge punched through the air all the way to Chicago from
Valle Grande cone, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore down by the Arizona
border, or across into petrified forest or painted desert, or up above
in aspen stands so fine or ponderosas, down the arroyo and the red brown
soft earth, fertile, the pueblos can grow anything, like Israel, just add water,
the vehicle for dreaming. Santa Fe was where I got taught Mercury retrograde,
doesn’t exist in West Virginia dark mountains dripping all the time, moist,
cricks and streams a-plenty, big rivers like the Kanawha, burning bright rivers
in DuPont. The Rio Grande of another clan, born high in the Pecos Wilderness,
dying in Texas and those old deserts, of mica in the sky, and a thousand martyrs
under every stone and windmill, now
when I reflect on it all, I admit I jumble the story and scramble the theme,
wondering when the trees began to grow alive again, and no car could drive me
far and fast enough to see every nook and cranny, on Blue blacktop Highways,
with the desperate ache between cigarettes or songs that attends the turning
odometer, gas and oil the theme, not ambulation, for speed permits a layering
of narratives, just as time’s winds and dust blowing between Mojave rockpile
boulders five floors high, David leaping among them, my Cyclops one-eye-at-one
time, no 3D vision, proving problematic, with each adrenal clinch of the sphincter,
not letting me leap like he does on his broken knees, a physical reaction to
not knowing, the effect of broken vision channel device, not a thing I can do
because it’s the wiring that’s wrong, I learned that on the ridge lines of Grandview,
clinging to the rocks, my friends laughing, so I in my anger outgrew their jokes
beyond the triangle dimension to the next one’s hypercube of inscrutable maps
with those rules and codes, the scale not linear, the road not straight, a sky
above, yes, but just lay down and look up with your feet perpendicular and tell
me on the orb spinning round and round 98,000 miles per second as Rudy pointed out,
on an axis not vertical exactly, hurtling through space with the rest of the galaxy,
which way is up, the stars glittering in the inky black, not the same ones as
ones in New York, which don’t even exist anymore, behind the veil of filthy progress,
cars and trucks, and factories obscuring, white cubes and street lamps burning
day and night into a single scale of gray, and walking across the high desert
trails in the evening dark, no less alive and not sleepy at all, the senses
measure the next step to the last to the shadow from a moon closer than you
could ever have imagined, scent of cedar,
now at Babe’s bar, three Indians smash an entrance
through the swinging doors, their cowboy boots clicking on the brick or tile,
drunk already by midday, shouting and cussing and swagger, they call out for
whiskey or beer and shatter the medication, I switch from coffee to Coors longnecks,
they’ve just picked up the one dude at the prison, and picked fights and got hammered,
to celebrate his release, from my notes> I mention anthropology and comedy, these
are not like the silver and turquoise humps of red Indians on the Plaza, these
not TV models, actors, the picture is out of focus, the blur is increasing as
the glands pump - my favorite drug - the little blonde artist [dewdrop? I seem to recall
was once badly married to a painter Indian and having none of this crowd’s
shenanigans “WHAT ARE YOU SCARED OF A FUCKIN INDIAN BITCH? when she won’t join their
mesa, “WHITE PEOPLE ARE SCARED OF INDIANS etc The biggest one turns to me “She doesn wann
sit wyou - no prollm, then all 3 HEY FUCK YOU COLLEGE BOY MAYBE THERE IS A PROBLEM
order more, change posture, hands on flat bar, tingling, feet rooted, stretching tight
longnecks, now
some of the guys are standing at the entrance and side door now
when did they
get here and just like that the odds flip and the Indians are not loud now
but tinny
and darkness is in the room like an ambush the girl is gone and this spaniard I know
very fast hands I know he always armed with small caliber pistol is over by the bar
someone closes the front door [locked? I seem to remember and the Indians’ options are outlined
[who told them? maybe very nervous Lou]
- don’t think so
and they leave quietly, not making noise, except for show, which no one buys
like before but I also remember now through sober perspective that nothing glamorous
accompanies such moments, it’s stupid and senseless and [not optimal social exchange,
not funny] a punch line, and hard to tell now
whether that was what happened at all
- so that is the proud Indian?

What about the future moments? in sweat lodges and hojoka, around the arbors of
Rosebud, Green Grass, Pine Ridge, or in homes up Taos way, along the ceremony
Road, or the bingo parlors where Eldorado came true and flipped,
for society
is dimensional too, Gold is now pointed in this other direction/
and is any heroic action necessary or possible anymore
they ask rhetoric’ly?
At Green Grass, I seen that 14 year-old boy run with the pegs and ropes
in his heaving red brown chest - he was wearing basketball trunks
under his Sun Dance skirt
[from the tree, again and again,
rope snapping taut, falling to earth like a meteor or a corpse
everyone weeping, the drums beating [his heart, for all to see
until Big John or Ivan or Gary picked him up and ran with him
tearing the pegs
from his thin now bloodstained chest, and yes there are heroes.
All wrapped
- in Pendletons and Beaver State blankets, who showed me how to go home
to Sorley
and the Cuillins, though I loved Ben More more, the tartan and the stone or bronze
rolls of honor,
[with flags and ridiculous-garbed old vets so proud on the Rez
wearing plaid shirts and jeans, baseball or cowboy hats with pins on vests
olive drab fatigues forty years-old and too skinny or fat for them, eyes hidden
behind cheap aviator sunglasses bought at the truck stop, a microphone and a
gravelly cigarette song for warriors homecomings.
Not so romantic with mosquitos
and outhouse flies, broken-down pickups, counting pennies for gallons of fuel,
bologna and WIC cheese, booze affected heirs {Marcel, shacks stitched together with tar
and used cinder blocks, giveaways of soap, socks and bandannas, stews of water
and buffalo and dessert of jello and saltines.

Doesn’t change the clouds or the rainbow circling the moon
four times on Kauai, in a jeep in the storm, wipers on fast setting
with a shaman who was a lawyer who was a soldier and a junkie, living a dream
a good life of Pacific fish and meetings, prayer-
What do you want?
- A hundred times hundred bad dream nights of blades and fangs
You can have anything.

I couldn’t say if Ama was right,
about many spokes to the wheel. I can say I don’t need no other, or none are the same,
with or without a solemn oath, and still we die and bear children,
[[ AND THIS CAME TO ME LAST NIGHT -YOU KNOW I’VE BEEN WORRIED, DARLING
ABOUT THE WORLD
ABOUT THE
while the [[needn’t worry
- PIMPS
of Davos scheme to rule the world - [[I learned about the I CHING, too
in Santa Fe]
this world will crush them and turn them to dust.
» MILO says, by fire’s light, under the swirling stars
»
They are fools and wicked, and I’ve seen something of what becomes of them,
and no matter how an honest man would hate them, I wouldn’t wish it on nobody,
but they’ll get it just the same. They’ll get it just the same, and the lies
won’t do them no good. Their robes and profane rituals will only add to the reckoning,
but there’s no pleasure on it, since it’s nothing personal and no man manages it,
but only succumbs, and once it is lost or found according to the rules, as a shade
the routes are determined and the thing it turns, it turns and no more can be told,
and in short time it is not only forgotten but erased forever.
»
And you would buy art with all that money - go ahead, do it. Yachts and feasts,
waste and suffering.
»
Fools again, fools, my brothers and sisters. [She sang, she like a Dakini
danced and made love in the fire’s light, on a million nights and a billion days,
her cup and horn and knife of bone.
[[I pick up the red hot lava stone with these
two bare hands and put it there and to prove it pushed it into the pit while
they watched, finally silent. That last I’ll tell you was hubris, scalding the skin,
though the fire dried the blisters, leaving only hot pain, which fades.
»
Now
a good story, and mine alone, with witnesses, but all in code, until the talking
planet goes straight again two weeks hence. No hero, no coward, a corpse pose
and it’s finished. If there’s a message in it, I don’t know its script, I only
am certain of how small a part one plays, but essential, each one, all related.