Starlight

“When you are in doubt, be still, and wait; when doubt no longer exists for you, then go forward with courage. So long as mists envelop you, be still; be still until the sunlight pours through and dispels the mists—as it surely will. Then act with courage.” — Chief White Eagle, Ponca

***

I climb out of the back seat, and they are momentarily awkward, as if searching for the right words for a farewell. In the end they find them.

“Get the fuck out of here, Geronimo. We see you again and it’s over for you.”

“It’s already over, and you don’t know my name, wašíču.”

They stare, both of them, eyes near icy as the lung-scouring air, then get back in and punctuate the conversation with the acrid screech of rubber. 

I’m alone and relieved and instantly frozen. 

I see a white buffalo hidden in the spill of stars on night’s great canvas, but I might be delirious. The red and blue of the only other lights blink off as they recede the way we came, freight delivered and already forgot, back toward a mirage of warmth amid vast dormant sheets of wheat. 

There is no loneliness greater than this. Discarded on a border no one can see, either with eyes or the spotlight of the past, under cold that makes the hairs crackle inside your nose and can fuse your eyelids shut with your frozen tears.

My home to the east is forbidden to me now, so I turn and gaze west, at cognate stretches of dim grassland under a black felt dome sprayed by diamonds. The pewter grey of the highway an arrow shaft pointing to an unknown country.

In my dreams, vivid as you could wish, I stumble on a remote home and the people take me in. They are Cree, Ojibwe, my own people, and they cleanse me with sage and sweetgrass and as we talk softly around a hearth fire a great warrior appears in the flames like a bird or some mythic half beast and tells me of low-built homes and carved trees and how I might find peace if I can continue west and make it there beyond the scoliotic spine of Turtle Island. Like I said, a dream. 

Whichever way I go, whether I live or die, I am but a single doomed spirit among many, like those stars I crane my neck to revere, and it matters little; a great sorrow has swept this land and continues to arrive in unheard waves and will return with boundless reinforcements someday hence, like a ghost herd of tatanka (to borrow from my Lakota brethren), agitated and restless, vengeance deferred.

At least they left me my shoes, threadbare as they are. I must get off the highway and walk to the next on-ramp, or more faceless uniforms will bring further animosity. 

It’s quiet and late and my odds are slight, but before the cold can fully wrap me in its caul I look east at approaching headlights, hoping for a gentler soul free in their heart of the rot of bigotry. Though cold assaults my bones, I am still. I hope beyond hope. My only weapon now.

What matters in the end and also matters not are the details. The pattern on a woman’s shirt that reminds you of a candy store. A girl from São Paolo whose eyes can’t hide a thing. The call of a loon at daybreak stirring tiny spirals in the mist that hovers like the breath of our ancestors over the waters. The proximate eyewatering stink of bear. A signal from deep space. Walking home alone. Walking. Alone.

When the thing comes it comes and it won’t be rescinded.

*** 

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” — Black Elk, Oglala

________________

Image © Alyssa Best