[to my one quarter Cherokee beloved adopted Grandfather, Milton Barkus Young, (and legal Guardian), the only grandfather I ever knew...who, with my grandmother Lucy Young, raised me]
I saw the white buffalo pearl misted through the snows
parting the winds on either side of him, come to the forefront
through the archival blizzards: turn for a moment and stare
for that moment into the lens of my dream camera.
what can it mean I dreamed the winters away
unable to shake his hoar frosted image, blue lavender mirage startling as if all the white dwarfed stars had grown suddenly large together melting
over Bethlehem and with the snow angels
filling the entire, the entire, the universal skies
because somewhere a stable in poor outline
sketched itself where the holy one was born
even in white-out conditions:
etched on the retina, one living lingering Tear
withstands the pale
accumulation of the eidetic years
until the first green of a new spring sprouted and the
prairie winds were ruffled, warm and the clouds too
painted in pale pink.we longed for, never to leave.
Long he stared seeing past us all a something impossible
to put into words: coming from or going back into
a white eternity commensurate with
his own purpose and yet, not belonging to him finally
but to a Mind we could not fathom
though we stood there forever waiting for the mystery
to resolve itself into a whiter music;
the tribes disbanded,
streaming into the auroras
yet coming through to us, somehow from one photographic plate from the long ago perhaps flecked with too ancient starlight, transferred (but how?) to another, revealed, over Time, time lapsed to those who only heard of him
second, third hand, maybe, if at all.
how the bright suns' pall in comparison
left their astonished planets behind when
I saw the white buffalo in the great blizzards of the past shake his head and then the sound of bells and the mists enveloping- and he was gone
we drift in the after sadnesses
mary angela douglas september 16 2014
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