Free Runaway Dreams by Richard Wagamese

from
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    so I told him that this wasn’t
    really Raven country but that
    there were a lot of crows around
    if he wanted to ask
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    â€œany nesting in the sunshine?” he asked
    I asked him why and he wriggled his shoulders
    in the red-checkered shirt
    and hiked the jeans up some
    â€œalways on the lookout for a hot black chick,”
    he said and mimicked a rim shot
    and a cymbal crash
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    he was right
    he was in desperate need of schtick

Mountain Morning
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    it’s so still you can feel
    the boundaries of things shimmer
    with the effort it takes
    to hold themselves in
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    even the birds are hushed
    and in this perfect silence
    where not even a faint breeze strays
    the idea of manitous
    hovered over everything
    becomes the first wavered light
    of the sun through the clouds
    and the storm that gathers to the west
    announces itself
    in a fanfare of silence
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    small wonder, you say
    that there’s no word
    for “power” in your language
    only spirit
    only medicine
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    but then
    there’s no word for “obvious”
    either

On Battle Bluffs
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    for Jennifer and Ron Ste. Marie
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    they say that in the old days
    the scouts would come to sit and watch
    for any sign of enemies coming
    out of the purple mountains
    or across the hard iridescent platter
    of the lake
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    from this height the land
    stretches out across the territory
    of the Secwepemc, the Shuswap
    as it’s said in the settler talk
    and there’s history in the sudden flare
    of space, the country below us reduced
    to angle and a narrowing where the lake
    pulls our focus forward into the hard vee
    of its disappearing
    so that it becomes like time, really
    wending, winding, curving in upon itself
    turning into something else completely
    while we breathe the exhalations
    of the breath of those who came
    and went before
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    wind on stone
    the clock of us ticking
    relentlessly
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    I can hear the cries of battle rising
    upward on drafts of air
    just as I feel the solemn peace
    that fell over young men who sat for days here
    praying, fasting, seeking the vision
    that would lead them into manhood
    perhaps becoming one of those who fell
    beneath the hammered blows of conflict
    amidst the clumps of medicine sage
    on the sere grasslands below
    it’s a sacred place because of that
    this place of becoming and leaving
    this warrior place where the spirit of a people
    resides in wafts of air
    risen from their territory to climb beyond
    here to the place of old voices
    whose home is the wind
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    eagle wings skimming
    silently across
    this hallowed blue
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    lying against the ancient rock
    feeling the push of it on my back
    the sun bakes everything in radiant waves
    that shimmer and dance
    so that looking out across the battlefields below
    the land itself weaves into motion
    the sun dance maybe
    or another act of being
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    I don’t know why places like this
    affect me so
    only that the search for a sense
    of my own history involves many histories
    the sum of us lodged within these sheer bluffs
    so that coming here becomes a pilgrimage of sorts
    a deliberate marching, plodding, shuffling forward
    and backwards at the same time
    to reclaim a piece of me
    I didn’t know existed
    this rock a vertebrae
    in the great spine of story
    of our time here
    together
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    songs rise higher
    borne on air
    returning

Papers
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    for Debra
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    I walk by with another armload and watch you scanning
    papers for signs of life. This life that passed. It’s funny how
    something like a postcard scribbled against the gunwales of
    a sloop off Wanganui can come to mean so much. Vague
    hieroglyphics cast from the hands of an unknown people,
    place and time and distance referenced by what’s implied and
    not by what you know, a connection you feel as paper in the
    hands. Still, you plumb each line and image like a sounder
    reading the depth of unknown