buffalo

For some months after his death his study smelt

of the locally rolled cigars he had smoked

every day since he had been a youth.

One of his favourite smoking places

was the west-facing window of the study.

He would look along the river valley

towards the point – which he could not see –

where the valley ended and the foothills

of the purple-ridged mountain range began,

and further up where the river narrowed

to a creek, and further still where it became

a spring among the rocks and the sage.

 

All of the room – but the fireplace wall,

the window casement and the door frame –

was lined with shelves from floor to ceiling.

Books, periodicals, and pamphlets – including,

his own poetry collections, once described

as ‘the poetry of the people:

of elevator men; counter clerks

in five and dimes; seamstresses in sweat shops;

waitresses in diners’ – all were placed

in the order in which they had been published.

He claimed he could find any item

at a moment’s notice, and would ask

his visitors to set him a test.

 

On the fireplace wall were photographs – mostly

of his receiving awards, laureateships,

honorary degrees for his poetry.

The exceptions – placed seemingly at random –

were seven copies of the same photograph:

buffalo skulls piled six high, ten wide,

twenty long, a mausoleum of bone

and empty eye sockets. A black man,

in overalls, skinning knife in his right hand,

stood rigidly before the front row

to suggest the scale of the ossuary.

 

The poet was a widower and childless

so bequeathed the house to the nation.

His study was preserved almost exactly

as he had left it – though there was an unsmoked

cigar in the glass ashtray on the desk.

Beside it was an unfinished manuscript,

a poem entitled The Last Passenger Pigeon Shoot:

‘In the river valley the solitary hunter waits,

his twelve gauge loaded with bird shot. He is waiting

for the thinning flock to pass one last time…’

Visitors would always question tour guides

about the empty spaces on the fire place wall.

The guides would mention restoration.

 

The last publication he had placed

on the morning of the day he died remained

unread. It  was a brief mimeograph,

The Great Migration, written and researched

by his neighbour, a local historian,

and describing how the first settlers

in the valley – stone age people,

who had migrated from the far north –

had believed the river’s mountainside source

to be one of the many mouths of God.