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Poems from a Friend
posted in Teachings on 7th Feb, 2021KEITH JAMES HAINES
Keith Haines, an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache tribe of south central New Mexico, was born in 1968 in Farmington, New Mexico to Jodee Yazza and Bruce Haines. When he was five years of age his biological mother passed away. Two years later, his father married Charlotte Hara, a Japanese American from Hawaii.
Growing up in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and spending a significant amount of time as a youth in Minnesota, Arizona, and Montana, he left home at seventeen after graduating high school to study art and literature at several universities.
Since leaving the trailer he grew up in, he has traveled extensively throughout the west and mid-west, supporting himself, among various occupations, as laborer, student, cook, pipe maker, ranch-hand, and mill worker. Keith passed away January 28, 2020; yet the legacy of his beautiful spirit through his art and poetry lives on.
Welcome. Here you will find several poems and stories I have written over the last several years, the earliest being The Dirt and the Weeds, and the latest, A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go. I am currently at work on a longer fictional piece entitled Horse of the Sun, same as the headline for this website. In addition, I have included a few pencil sketches of various subjects and plan to add several larger, more fully developed pieces when time and circumstance permit.Enjoy,Keith J. HainesPoetry
Hangover Medicine | In the Avoidance of Women | Fall Valley | The Dirt and the Weeds | On the Forest Floor | Amaranths In Dew | Poet Taking Rest | Second Note to a Past Lover | Under a Feeble Sun | This Desperate Threshhold | Nearing the Base of West Mountain | Spring Hills of Missouri | Penning Delicate Words | Summer River Wildflowers | Parched | Sweating at Meremec | Humming in the Wind | Horse Travel Through the Blues | Nectar | The Long Limbed Day | Jaguar Leaping in the Wind | Outrider
Stories
Pollen Storm Blessing | The Morning World | The Barn Where It Was Dry | A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go | Dog's Neck | Games of Chance and Get Even | Waterbug | Seven Colors of the Sun
Chap Books
The Barn Where It Was Dry, A Collection of short stories from a contemporary Native American artist
Drinking With the Women, Poems. Love, despair, and the ultimate joy of passionate living
The Dirt and the Weeds
This is my father's room.
He likes to call it his tiny box of bitter contemplation.
It rests here,
on the five hundredth and third floor
of a five hundred and three story building.
This blanket is the place where my father sits.
All but him are forbidden to rest here.
This blanket comes from the time when he lived
on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
when he held sway over the broad expanse of this area,
sitting in comfortable ease
and directing with subtle gestures of lips and fingers,
who should pull forth the sun across the sky,
who should govern the revolution of the seasons,
who should provide for the rebirth of the harvests,
and who should lead the flight of the bird across the arc of the sun
and back..It is from here
that my father once motioned for me to bend nearer his lips,
and I did so,
and he began to tell me of the time
when he lived on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
and what happened at dawn one morning
while he was preparing for the day.Long time ago, he told me,
some people who he had never seen came to him
and asked him to leave the spot where he was camped,
but he said, "No. I have been here such a long time already."
One of them then replied, "Well, old man, it is no matter.
We are a gracious people, and we have decided
that we will allow you to remain in the spot you have chosen.
But since you refuse to be displaced outward,"
he told my father,
“we shall simply displace you upward.
In addition,
we have decided that we must lay down our cement rug beneath you
and your blanket,
so if you'll step aside, please, thank you."
My father stepped aside, bewildered.
"Larry," said the man,
get your men over here and lay down a cement slab."
Turning back to my father, he said,
"As well, we have decided that we would like to
build up our walls
around you, and in so doing,
we will raise you to a place
where neither you nor your people have ever been."
"Where is that?" my father asked.
“Old man," he was told,
“prepare for your ascent into heaven. Frank?
Gather your men.
Four walls and a ceiling, please."
My father folded his blanket over the wet cement
and sat down on top of it.
"I am fine here," he said,
and the four walls and the ceiling
began to close in around him.The people who were gathered near,
becoming more and more by the minute,
then raised their hands to the sky
and summoned forth from the ground beneath my
father a powerful movement,
setting into motion the rise of a massive
four-cornered structure made of brick and steel.The tremendous rumbling caused by such an event
was said to have been felt across the plains,
where a sleeping cloud mistook the rumble for
thunder and began to pour forth its rain,
over the mountains,
where the Spine of God is said to have trembled,
through the basins,
where the fruits of the trees
were moved to fall from their branches,
and down into the sea
where the dust was shaken from the shoulder of
the land.And so began the ascension of my father
into this place called heaven.
Now,
when I sit with him,
he likes to tell me that he is still able,
when he closes his eyes,
to hear the weeds in the wind,
blowing their music close to the ground.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
On the Forest Floor
Now,
even the most gentle of female rains
brings down the early dogwood
blossoms,
once white,
now stained pink and red
as if bruised and wounded,
sent to the forest floor
to bleed quietly in the shade.The petals are dirty
are cut and bleeding,
and looking closely,
their hurt faces plead into mine.But what can I do?
I gather a handful,
six or seven,
and begin to shout around about the glory of these
fallen criers of
Spring’s army of joy,
naming the days of their bannered and heralded births,
touting the courage of first blossoms,
and going on about their short lives of timeless purity.Afterward,
I let the petals drop from my fingers,
watch them come to rest
on last Autumn’s leaves,
now dead one full season
and resting with new stories
of the Winterfor the telling to
the freshly fallen dead
of Spring’s army of joy.
Amaranths In Dew
I am a whisperer of the moment,
a piner at the edge of gardens,
a drunk gaper of endless petals,in whose curves
I see the hearts
of potential lovers,wet amaranths
in dew.
Poet Taking Rest
My lover,
I admire the length
and grace
of your well-shaped hands,
delicate wings of the butterfly
pressed tightly together
in prayer,
and in between them,
my only thin asylum
of brief repose.
Second Note to a Past Lover
I do not think of it as folly
to spend all my time dreaming
of your touch,
but I do suffer terrible embarrassment from
those who would say I am
foolishly enamoured with one
whom I am not familiar with
in the least.Nevertheless,
I will continue
to persist in this behavior,
foolish as it may appear to
those lacking in any sense
of romantic abandon, and
it would be to them that I
would simply say that I take
extreme pleasure in the
weaving of this thought of silk
through the 10,000 crests of
the waters
that separate us.
This Desperate Threshhold
At this desperate threshold,
look how white my knuckles –I can’t face wine,
not like I used to.
Not anymore.Oh,
my most admired romancer
of the most strange and terrible nights,
where will I turn
if not to your sopping invitation?You have pulled me too far apart,
at my own request –
I could not ask you
to pull me back together.I have sought out your freeing waters,
often as I could,
for more than a century,
but I have grown weary
of raising your implements to my lips.Understand,
I have loved you more
than I have loved my women.At this desperate threshold,
my friend,
look how white my knuckles,
but look how clear my eyes.
Nearing the Base of West Mountain
In the foothills to the East
there is pollen.I am coming in the pollen.
The pollen falls upon my hair
and streams across my eyes,and in my hair
there is a breeze.
Spring Hills of Missouri
Over endless lakeside hills,
unfolding forests
show spring blossoms,
white lace
airing
among the dogwood
and the plum.
Penning Delicate Words
What fine silk
moves through these trembling
fingertips
but
what an array of dusty stallions
courses through my wrist.A timeless dripping sun
labors over me,
yet
I do not sweat as I pen these delicate
words for you.
Summer River Wildflowers
At riverside,
in the waning days of summer,
I part eight blossoms
from their stems.Later,
wearing the flowers,
I stand waist-deep
in Summer River,
gathering drifting leaves
from beyond Summer River’s bluffs.
Fall Valley
Out here,
all my crushes
are on
divine
sugar maple forests.It’s Fall.
Devastated,
I roam the valley
for a
Summer flower.
Parched
These three desperate throats,
in the wake of such a malignant sun,
where
in this endless brown valley
can we find wine?(These horses are but ashy silhouettes).
What a shabby and dissolute arrangement
has been laid out for us!
Is there left a cool breast
to appeal to?Oh, our dry and tongueless bellow!
Sweating at Meremec
What is there that can restrain joy?
Not me!
These pores on my back-
with what joy they sweat!What a time this is
to radiate with expansiveness and light.
These people around me,
these fine days we are spending together,
such laughter!Under these trees,
in this universe,
we are so small,
yet with joy look how long and wide we reach,
and how deep!
Humming In the Wind
All day
Beneath the hot sun
I thought of you.Thought of how
My love for you is likeTen thousand bright blossoms
Humming in the wind.
Horse Travel Through the Blues
My blue gaze rides
toward
her breast
like dusk
moves
between mountains:deeper,
wetter,
greener,
coller,
roaming and
loping
with heavy melancholia.This
is
the nature
of horse travel through the blues,
stepping through rivers,
noting the shorelines
flowered
and
hung,
bending in the saddle
to part blossom
from stem -true and desperate acts
performed
at dusk
during a cool and
loveless
summer.
Nectar
Isn't love, too,
proclaimed to be at it's most
dangerous
when new,
like the poison of a
young snake?And which is the greater danger?
Love, leaning nearby, musky and aromatic,
or the capable length of a snake?From either tongue
drips nectar from the body
like dew
from the bud.
The Long Limbed Day
She is a lean figure
curved against the window,
a limber boiugh
hung heavy with foliage in the sun,
lithe body drawn from
the sinew and supple muscle
of the
slender
forest deer.In her bare arms
and in her naked shoulders
I witness the
heightened
and tightened
awareness of a doe's limbs, prepared
at any instant
to bound off in a tremendous
single
leap
nine feet long
perhaps,
to go stretching into the
long limbed day,
young
strong
beautiful
forever.Yes.
Oh,
yes, yes, yes.
Jaguar Leaping in the Wind
My muse,
you
have liberated me from the rocks!Long reacher,
high stretcher,
you unfurl your body
a silk ribbon of skin
licking the midday wind,
and I look,oh how I look!
Woman,
it is a poet's duty,
aye,
a poet's pleasure,
to sing the tips of your fingers as claws,
the breadth of your hands as mitts,
the length of your limbs
outstretched and roaring
from your bosom,
as those of a jaguar in hunger
leaping from the rocks
toward
the hot neck of the sun.
Outrider
I unsheath
from my boot
3,000 wet tongues,
grim bladed
butterflies
sent out to riot in
the night,wing tips dark as hot razors
stained with the blood
of
a
long
haired
poet.I unsheath
these wet things,
hold them level
at sea,
one man standing
against
all comers,long haired, doublebraided,
point taken,
praying for hope against
the bellowing
sea
of
the
East.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Hangover Medicine
Coyote had been drinking too much whiskey when he left
the place where the group was camped.
He left because he wanted to go make pee.
He invited those who wished to attend
to come along.
Everybody said, "No!"
So coyote began to wander off
by himself
to go make his pee in private.
Then he turned around and told the others that
when his pee hardened,
it would become a solid lump of pure white gold,
but the others were wise to his tricks,
and so they said, "No! No way! Even we don't believe
you can turn your pee into riches.
Go along in your own peculiar way,
Coyote,
and make your pee without bothering us anymore.”So Coyote went along the tree line until
he found a nice clearing to put forth his water,
but he decided to rest
for a while before doing this,
and he passed out beneath the tree
he had been leaning on,
forgetting all about the necessity of putting out
the liquor he had poured into his belly.Next morning,
Coyote awoke with a pain in his innards.
"What is the trouble here?" he said,
"ohhh, why does my body ache so?"
He rubbed his belly all over and made several chants,
but nothing helped the aches go away.
Finally,
he got angry and grabbed hold of his member
and began to swing it around and choke it, saying,
"Look! What is wrong with me?
I feel so awful!
Help make me better!
Send the troublemaker who is giving me hell in my body
out your little hole so I can punish him!
Do it!"
Coyote flung his penis around
and threw it against some trees,he even caressed it and encouraged it to perform,
but not a thing was forthcoming.
He began to feel even worse,
but he was not worried yet.
He put some lotion on his member to heal the sores
and tucked it away in his pants.That is when he began talking to his anus.
"See here!" said Coyote to his anus,
"I have maligned and injured my own member
over this pain I feel in my body.
No matter what I do,
my penis,
my favorite,
won't even help rid me of my discomfort.
Help me, anus,
help me to expel the troublemaker at work in my body."
So saying,
Coyote dug a hole,
pulled down his trousers,
and squatted.
He began to strain with all his might.
He grunted. He waited.
He implored his anus to do its best,
and his face grew more red with each try.
Finally,
he grew tired from so much effort and rolled over onto his belly,
cursing his body for the weakness it showed
in expelling this nemesis from within him.By this time
Coyote could hardly move from the pain,
and his lower lip began to tremble,
and he could do nothing but try to cry.
He stayed that way for a while,
trying to cry,
but no tears came out either,
and he felt worse than ever.
He stayed that way for two whole days.After that,
he felt better,
and he got up and began moving around again.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
In the Avoidance of Women
I
Sidebelly had become aware of the moss on his belly
ever since the time of an early spring
twenty-six years ago when he was twenty-one years old
with a lean incisive body moving easily
through the pines,
running north,
as he had been doing without pause for water
or love
for six years in avoidance of the assumption of
responsibility
he was to take on as a man,
and what brought him down at the end of his youth
were the frequent and penetrating thrusts
of mental daggers being driven through his ear,
sharply and up to the hilt,
which upon further examination
would have proven only to have been
the thorns of wild roses fashioned into tiny darts
by the thin and nimble fingers of some
woman,
no doubt,
and he did, finally, break down smoothness of motion
of wind in hair
into fractured moments
of settling vertebrae and sharply distilled
moments of anxiety,
for he feared his people were yet on the trail
behind him.They weren't, of course,
they had failed to pursue five-and-a-half years back
after he had crossed the River of Separation,
the women moaning the loss of yet another
virile partner,
and he had come to rest slowly trembling,
driven down pointedly into supine immobility
by prayers and Wishes designed for his restraint.
By the Almighty Goddamn
they had caught up with him after all!
Hair by hair, finger by finger, toe by toe, cell by cell,
his breathing came deep
and the moss below his back gave way.
He could feel the breath of his bed exhale
near his ear telling him not to be afraid,
to rest,
that he needed rest,
and he closed his eyes and could feel the moss work
beneath his back and move up the sides of his belly,
taking over the responsibility of keeping him alive,
penetrating through his tissues,
extending through his veins, capillaries, arteries,
and enshrouding his heart
in the timeless revelatory muscle of the earth
as he slept.II
The terrifying complexity
of manufacturing a self contained internal reality
for nine still years spent while saddled motionless
to the back of the earth on a bed of soft spoken moss,
of course,
was not to be undertaken alone.But goddamn if the young Sidebelly was willing
to give up independence of strong, taut
manhood
without a fight for sole
or even partial possession of his tender mind,
no matter the teachers,
goddamn them all to hell with the
fruits and flowers they bring,
"I have been trying for six years to pound them
into dust,"
he told me, "six years to rid myself of their pursuit,
six years in avoidance of their mouths of
open and inviting tragedy,
six years spent hiding from their invasive minds,
six years working my muscles for prime
defense against their advancements,
I knew they would come too,
starting with Susie, of course,
goddamn her who kissed me first while pinning me
up against the wall
next to the garbage bin in the alley
behind the furniture store.
Six years,
six years,
goddamn them women, them witches,
them who spend the earnest moments before
the rise of the sun caressing,
oiling, and perfuming their legs and breasts
with their own juices,
combing and waiting to plait the magnificent length
of their hair under the beauty of the
polished crystal prism of mother’s making,
designed and crafted for the specific purpose
of dispersing the first rays of the morning throughout
the hair in the belief
that to hold the seven colors of the sun
was to hold the power necessary to enliven
the fibers of the hair which in turn,
when laid upon the pillow at night
and spread in imitation of the sun,
would successfully capture and blind a man
into meek submission of catering days;
days of heat and labor
spent under a malignant and difficult sun,
of strained breath spent through thin and dusty lips,
of brittle and confused moments
at the end of the day when conversation
with the woman
becomes necessary yet unavoidable and what is truly
needed is a cold beer
and an open window to the west –
a breeze would be too much for me to handle;
I would go insane in such pleasure of ease-
and goddamn
if she wouldn't then inhale the sun
into her belly at the close of the day,
swelling deeply
at the rush of performing
her daily admonition,
for she would have been stewing all day in her own
juices,
and speaking with the sun between her lips
of my failure to achieve the potency of manhood
in a dignified and respectful manner..."And of course,
it was worthless for Sidebelly to struggle,
dangerous even,
for he was being wrapped tighter to the back of
the Mother Earth
at each impulse of protest,
pulled in deeper to the Woman of all our fruits,
and he would eventually learn that to struggle
would be to relenquish an even greater part
of his masculinity,
but he succeeded in the end,
thankfully,
in securing a bit of his manhood
down and away
in a sack between his legs where they could not
get at it,
the witches.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Pollen Storm Blessing
There he spurneth dust of glittering grains;
How joyous his neigh,
There in mist of sacred pollen hidden, all hidden he;
How joyous his neigh,
There his offspring many grow and thrive forevermore;
How joyous his neigh!
-- from Song of the Horse, NavajoBahe would go to the spring hills to pray against the war. He thought he would attend the war if he had to. He wouldn’t run away from it, even though there was a new woman. With the new woman he had made a child. The child was four months old. He was called Siggy, after Sigurd, the woman’s father. Bahe called the woman Haansh’Taye, which in the Apache means “butterfly.” Her other name was Susie, but Bahe called her Haansh’Taye because he thought of her well shaped hands as delicate wings of the butterfly, and when she held his face between her hands he imagined that this was his only place of brief repose in all the world.
With the war threatening he spent as much time between there as possible. At night he would cry sometimes about having to leave his woman and son and he would ask her to hold his face between her hands and pray against the war. And she, while comforting him with her good words, would begin to cry as well. Then baby Siggy would wake up and start in too. At times like this when the small room would echo with wailing the air would suddenly become cold and it was ghostly when the air became filled with their own visible breath. The haze of their breathing turned blue like there was a neon light from outside their window shining in but there was none and neither he nor the woman knew anything about the blue haze, only that it frightened them and caused them, all three, to huddle against the terror on the corner on the bed. Everything fell away at such times, the hum of engines and the gears shifting over the streets, the sirens, the horns, the rough voices of the kids on the walk and the drunk rantings of husbands heavy on the bottle, everything, everything fell away into the heavy silence and then it was terribly lonely because they felt like they didn’t even have each other then. Bahe thought that this was the way it would be for his family if the war called him out.
There were always images that appeared in the blue haze. All the images were of men, brown men like Bahe himself, and young yet with hair like jet. The men would be stripped to the waist, their torsos lithe and tawny and shining with sweat as they danced around to old drums and sang. But neither Haansh’Taye nor Bahe could hear the drums or hear the men singing. There was just that silence. Bahe and his woman would look across that silence at each other and down at the baby like there was a wide and dark blue sea that separated them finally and completely and made communication impossible. They could only cry and watch the men dance. From the waist down they could see that the men wore fatigues and high black boots, army issue. Bahe knew the men. They were his relations, his ancestors, his uncles and great uncles, his grandfathers and his grandfathers’ brothers, all dead, all passed on in other wars. Only when Bahe and his family stopped crying would the images be gone. The haze would dissipate slowly and the room become warm again, like it ought to be on a spring evening.
So Bahe would go to the hills to pray against the war. He’d take Haansh’Taye with him, and she would place little Siggy into the cradle that Bahe was placed in when he was a baby, and she would strap this onto her back when they struck out onto the trail that led to the meadow where there was a stream and a falls that came down the hills.
One morning after crying all nigh long Bahe called into work and told them that he couldn’t make it, that he was sick. Then he rolled over and shook Haansh’Taye gently on the shoulder. “Haansh’Taye. It looks nice out there today. Let’s take a lunch and go to the hills.”
Haansh’Taye rolled over to face Bahe. Little Siggy lay between them. She stroked the baby’s face and looked up at Bahe. “Okay sweetie. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Did you call into work?”
“I called. I had to lie again, but they wouldn’t understand if I said the truth.”
“I know, sweets, I know.”
Baby didn’t wake until they were already in the truck. When he woke he began to cry. Haansh’Taye just placed a breast in his mouth. After a while he became full and yawned and was burped, then placed back into his special seat. The movement of the truck made him sleepy and pretty soon his head fell to one side.
Haansh’Taye had made for them a dinner of thick sliced cold roast beef along with some fried bread and roasted and peeled green chilis. They also had some coffee and an old percolator which was placed over the fire to heat. All this was placed into the backpack that Bahe carried, as well as a blanket and diapers for Siggy. They never ate breakfast on days they went to pray in the hills and always ate toward the evening when they were finished.
At the woods it was a warm day, and the sun was out high and strong. There was a breeze, and on the breeze there were fresh scents of pines and grasses and flowers. Bahe and Haansh’Taye got out of the truck and looked across the cab at each other and smiled. Haansh’Taye came around to where Bahe was leaning up against the hood and put her arms around him. She kissed him long and deep and their faces lingered next to each other and brought out new scents of skin against skin. This was a vital time for them, to be together like this in the morning air of the country after such a night as had passed where they each had been gripped and stifled in fear and an insurmountable loneliness that left them feeling they were 10,000 miles apart.
Bahe and Haansh’Taye had not planned to bear a child together. In fact, they had seen very little of each other after the first few times of love making, and even after Haansh’Taye was into the initial terms of her pregnancy they rarely spoke about establishing a life together. They found it difficult at first; it was a tremendous burden coming to appreciate one another. The love was not there. Only the sex and the anger and the fear. But now, they found themselves to be deeply wed, and the love had come and the baby had come and the commitment had come and then the war came and it all pressed them deeper into one another so they thought they could never be pried apart again. And then with the war came the cold blue hazes and the awful visions.
Baby Siggy let out a small gurgle from the cab of the truck. Bahe and Haansh’Taye parted with a final kiss and went about preparing for the hike into the woods. This was never a solemn affair for them. There was only joy and a deep sense of wonder and appreciation for life. With the spring there was always life renewed and this was a common bond between Bahe and Haansh’Taye and the land they walked on. Each day after every terrible night their little procession moved along the trail through the woods. They found themselves to be a part of a constant cycle of loss and coming together, of death and rebirth, and it made them feel as if nothing could touch them, that they had been make privy to an eternal secret. Even if Bahe were to go off to the war and die, maybe he wouldn’t really die after all, just go off to some other place to rest before coming back. But still, there were those terrible visions, and they came time and time again. Bahe thought that even if there were an ounce of fear left within him the visions would return again and again and perhaps he would find himself with his ancestors, dancing in the haze. So he prayed to let go of his fear. He prayed to be strong. He prayed against the war.
At the place where they make their camp near the stream there was a young and sturdy dogwood where Haansh’Taye hung baby Siggy in his cradle. The blossoms were just starting to form on the tree. Haansh’Taye stayed within earshot of the baby while she moved about the area in search of wood for the fire. Bahe went off alone towards to stream where the little waterfall was. He sat on a flat slab of granite which overlooked the small pool of water that the falls fell into. He produced a pouch which held his smoking mixture and from this rolled four cigarettes while making a song.
In times past when they had come to the hills it had been peaceful and serene but these days it was not so quiet. Fort Leonardrock was nearby and in full swing; all the troops were in heavy rotation. As Bahe smoked he could hear the heavy trucks rattle and heave over the washboard roads that criss-crossed the area they were camped in. The jets screamed around overhead and the explosions went off constantly. Bahe smoked and prayed while all this was going on, almost expecting to see from over the crest of the hill a movement of troops hupping doubletime through the woods. These things didn’t sit well with Bahe, but he felt it important that he place himself there in the midst of wartime preparations where his fear was at its strongest, thereby confronting the greatest looming cloud of his life at the place where it resided.
At pool’s edge beneath and across the way from where Bahe sat grew a wide ring of cattails. Beyond the cattails at the far edge was the meadow. The meadow sloped gently uphill from the stream bed and there on the hill the grasses waved in the breeze drawing Bahe’s attention gently and slowly and rhythmically so that everything, everything fell away like in the cold blue haze. The trucks, gone. The jets, gone. The explosions, gone. The troops, gone. Everything, gone. But this was no cold blue haze in a tiny room in a corner of the city. Here the canopy rose up high and spread out beneath the sky like a green wing, the tip of which brushed up against the meadow and rested there on the downstroke like the gesture of a mother protecting her young. From here Bahe peered out onto the meadow. He smoked his fourth cigarette. The grasses waved. The wildflowers nodded beneath the fat yellow glory of the afternoon sun and from the spaces between the leaves of the canopy shone the fat glory in wide bright angular beams down onto the edge of the stream on the forest floor. On the beams on the sun there came the pollen from the meadow. Slow, heavy, steady, a pollen storm blessing. Bahe breathed it in, and he breathed it out, smoking.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
The Barn Where It Was Dry
Spring was an awful time to be sick about losing a girl, especially after you let yourself get all caught up in it and gave yourself away by letting her get too close inside you where it started to matter what she said or did. It was something that couldn’t be gone back over and fixed so you were there on the edge of the land in the rain sleeping alone in a goddamned barn with the poison hurt of it. But in your pocket there was some money and a ticket back to the reservation at Mescalero even though it made you feel less of a man to be running away from it. The only token from the whole mess of the situation was the scar you carried away that showed you were capable of an emotional investment in somebody other than yourself. Up until then you were too chickenshit to bring anything up from within you that might lay you open to slaughter and yes, you were a fool to open up but you did it because you finally could and you wanted to be loved but were cut down and gored through instead.
Sometimes when it rained the horses would come up the hill across the meadow to be in the barn where it was dry. You could smell the oats and see the hay spread across the floor of the barn and underfoot the ground was clumpy and uneven with excrement. You hoped the horses would come but they didn’t come. Maybe the rain was not heavy enough. But the rain kept on. The rain kept on and didn’t let up. The horses stayed away.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go
After the snows on the next warm day there were the solo hikes along the old logging trails with a lunch of cheese and crackers and ham stuffed into a satchel slung over the shoulder. Where the trails go on the sides of the hills the snow melts and runs down like a clear brook and if you pause to bend down to it you can hear the water going over the rocks and falling onto itself. It’s wet going and sloppy at the low parts but the low parts are where the sun doesn’t come so it’s cooler and the air feels heavier because of the smell of earth and pines.
Up high along a ridge there is a pond where it’s hot in the afternoon and nice to lay about without a shirt and feel the wind across your chest like it was summer. There are tracks everywhere at the water and you’d even think you heard fish jumping but it would only be snow dropping from the young pines bowed over the edge of the pool. After a while everything would get lazy and hot and sleepy after eating and sketching or writing, and laying down on your back in the grass sleep would come and from way off a shrill whistled note and maybe you dreampt it and maybe you didn’t but it was there in your head and out over the high pines you’d feel something soaring and looking up through the pines you’d know the sky was a pure blue flame where the hawks go.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Dog’s Neck
The rain intensified around a quarter after five, switching from a light moving vertical mist to a steady heavy drizzle, thus disallowing our pre-dinner stroll down to Lower Lake. Instead, we began in on the wine, noting we were more thirsty than hungry, the three of us admiring in each other our shared propensity for excess. Smiling thinly, but pink with anticipation, Bennet produced a corkscrew, flipped it open, and drove it in slowly, all the while eyeing Stadler and myself.
“My Uncle Hank had this stuff flown in from Chile for Sarah’s wedding. But of course, we all know she won’t be needing it now. I’ve a whole case of it here behind me.” Bennet handed each of us a cold bottle.
“If anybody would be in need of a bit,” offered Stadler, fingering the corkscrew, “it would be Slakely.” He looked around for our responses.
“Slakely shouldn’t touch the stuff,” I said. “Not anymore. Of course, I’m no one to talk, but then I’ve never taken a life due to drink.” Stadler handed me the corkscrew. I centered the corkscrew over the cork and began to turn it.
“It was purely accidental,” said Bennet, looking up from pouring his wine and breaking in. “He was just playing a bit too rough. One of us should’ve stepped in after Sarah said something. She was practically screaming.”
“I know,” I said. “I know. She absolutely had a right to, but I have a hard time accepting responsibility for the death, beyond what you said, Bennet, about one of us stepping in.”
“Say,” asked Stadler, “how long did your sister have Gus, anyway?”
“Seven years. His whole life,” said Bennet. “Until Slakely broke his neck. Everybody heard it, too.”
Stadler nodded over his cup. “It’s not doing Slakely any good to keep on denying it, saying that Gus died of a heart attack.”
The three of us silently drank the wine, wine that was meant to be drunk at a wedding, at a celebration. Instead it was being drunk here at Bennet’s cabin on the lake. It was creek cold at least. Bennet had placed it in a pool in Rose Creek, a thin stream that ran down the mountain from Boulder Lake. Boulder Lake, where we planned to fish and camp the next day, was so named for the seven massive boulders that rimmed its rocky edge. A small lake, only half a mile wide and three-quarter mile long, it was deep and clear and cold, fed by the glaciers above.
It had been an early Spring tradition for the four of us , including Slakely, to do the climb to Boulder Lake. We’d get roaring drunk there, casting our flies about for trout in the morning after having stayed up around the fire the whole night through. Now it was different. Slakely wasn’t here. It was as if he had been silently and wordlessly banished by the group after having killed Sarah’s dog. Sarah said it was the last straw, that she could no longer stomach Slakely’s drinking and the antics it would bring on. They were going to get married, her and Slakely, but she called it off after the killing. We all felt it was accidental, although we were all well aware of the growing violent streak which marked Slakely’s character, this being the main reason, I felt, why each of us was reluctant to part dog and human, not for fear of an angry dog but a vicious man. Indeed, as we sat around the dimly lit cabin, without Slakely around, things felt awfully good, less tense and edgy.
Slakely had only fallen in with us a couple years ago, after meeting Bennet’s sister, Sarah, at a political rally. He was quite gung-ho, that one, always flailing his arms around and talking loudly, striking his fist into his palm. He provided a great burst of energy, true, but in the two years we had come to know him, he had come to behave quite strangely. Slakely would often stick out his chest and thump it, saying, “Who’s the mountain? Who’s the mountain?” He became careless with his strength after drinking too much, and he had come to be a constant threat to each of our safety, nearly breaking all our arms in wrestling matches. It had occurred to all of us that this behavior would lead to injury, but when, and to whom? Bennet had often expressed concern for his sister’s safety, but she didn’t let on if there was anything happening, for she was always cheery about their relationship. Perhaps it was better that it was the neck of a dog that was broken, not one of ours, with all that worry going on. Now, there was hard and tangible evidence that Slakely had gone too far, and none of us were slow to acknowledge this.
Each of us, then, had come to the personal conclusion that we were better off without him, and we were happy to have a reason to spurn him. None of us had had that chance, though, because we never saw him after the killing. He had left the party, still maintaining that no, it had been a heart attack that had killed that dog, not him.
Bennet broke the silence. “So what do you guys think of the wine?”
“Damn good,” I said, rising, eager to be in a happier mood. “Now here’s a toast – to the long march of the vine from the coast of South America to the bottoms of our gullets! Here’s to the Chilean grape! Gentlemen, here’s to the three of us! Heads and shoulders bent now, into your cups!”
After this happy pronouncement, we began to drink without regard, the three of us beginning to feel a bit better, better about ourselves, better about the safety of our little group, better about the hard Montana rain and the cold deep of the high glacial lake, the chill of our wine, and better about the guilt we shared, the truth that not one of us was strong enough to have raised a hand to saved a wrecked life, not Gus’s life, not Sarah’s life, not Slakely’s life, and most preciously, not the life they could have shared together.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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Poems from a Friend
posted in Teachings on 7th Feb, 2021KEITH JAMES HAINES
Keith Haines, an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache tribe of south central New Mexico, was born in 1968 in Farmington, New Mexico to Jodee Yazza and Bruce Haines. When he was five years of age his biological mother passed away. Two years later, his father married Charlotte Hara, a Japanese American from Hawaii.
Growing up in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and spending a significant amount of time as a youth in Minnesota, Arizona, and Montana, he left home at seventeen after graduating high school to study art and literature at several universities.
Since leaving the trailer he grew up in, he has traveled extensively throughout the west and mid-west, supporting himself, among various occupations, as laborer, student, cook, pipe maker, ranch-hand, and mill worker. Keith passed away January 28, 2020; yet the legacy of his beautiful spirit through his art and poetry lives on.
Welcome. Here you will find several poems and stories I have written over the last several years, the earliest being The Dirt and the Weeds, and the latest, A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go. I am currently at work on a longer fictional piece entitled Horse of the Sun, same as the headline for this website. In addition, I have included a few pencil sketches of various subjects and plan to add several larger, more fully developed pieces when time and circumstance permit.Enjoy,Keith J. HainesPoetry
Hangover Medicine | In the Avoidance of Women | Fall Valley | The Dirt and the Weeds | On the Forest Floor | Amaranths In Dew | Poet Taking Rest | Second Note to a Past Lover | Under a Feeble Sun | This Desperate Threshhold | Nearing the Base of West Mountain | Spring Hills of Missouri | Penning Delicate Words | Summer River Wildflowers | Parched | Sweating at Meremec | Humming in the Wind | Horse Travel Through the Blues | Nectar | The Long Limbed Day | Jaguar Leaping in the Wind | Outrider
Stories
Pollen Storm Blessing | The Morning World | The Barn Where It Was Dry | A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go | Dog's Neck | Games of Chance and Get Even | Waterbug | Seven Colors of the Sun
Chap Books
The Barn Where It Was Dry, A Collection of short stories from a contemporary Native American artist
Drinking With the Women, Poems. Love, despair, and the ultimate joy of passionate living
The Dirt and the Weeds
This is my father's room.
He likes to call it his tiny box of bitter contemplation.
It rests here,
on the five hundredth and third floor
of a five hundred and three story building.
This blanket is the place where my father sits.
All but him are forbidden to rest here.
This blanket comes from the time when he lived
on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
when he held sway over the broad expanse of this area,
sitting in comfortable ease
and directing with subtle gestures of lips and fingers,
who should pull forth the sun across the sky,
who should govern the revolution of the seasons,
who should provide for the rebirth of the harvests,
and who should lead the flight of the bird across the arc of the sun
and back..It is from here
that my father once motioned for me to bend nearer his lips,
and I did so,
and he began to tell me of the time
when he lived on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
and what happened at dawn one morning
while he was preparing for the day.Long time ago, he told me,
some people who he had never seen came to him
and asked him to leave the spot where he was camped,
but he said, "No. I have been here such a long time already."
One of them then replied, "Well, old man, it is no matter.
We are a gracious people, and we have decided
that we will allow you to remain in the spot you have chosen.
But since you refuse to be displaced outward,"
he told my father,
“we shall simply displace you upward.
In addition,
we have decided that we must lay down our cement rug beneath you
and your blanket,
so if you'll step aside, please, thank you."
My father stepped aside, bewildered.
"Larry," said the man,
get your men over here and lay down a cement slab."
Turning back to my father, he said,
"As well, we have decided that we would like to
build up our walls
around you, and in so doing,
we will raise you to a place
where neither you nor your people have ever been."
"Where is that?" my father asked.
“Old man," he was told,
“prepare for your ascent into heaven. Frank?
Gather your men.
Four walls and a ceiling, please."
My father folded his blanket over the wet cement
and sat down on top of it.
"I am fine here," he said,
and the four walls and the ceiling
began to close in around him.The people who were gathered near,
becoming more and more by the minute,
then raised their hands to the sky
and summoned forth from the ground beneath my
father a powerful movement,
setting into motion the rise of a massive
four-cornered structure made of brick and steel.The tremendous rumbling caused by such an event
was said to have been felt across the plains,
where a sleeping cloud mistook the rumble for
thunder and began to pour forth its rain,
over the mountains,
where the Spine of God is said to have trembled,
through the basins,
where the fruits of the trees
were moved to fall from their branches,
and down into the sea
where the dust was shaken from the shoulder of
the land.And so began the ascension of my father
into this place called heaven.
Now,
when I sit with him,
he likes to tell me that he is still able,
when he closes his eyes,
to hear the weeds in the wind,
blowing their music close to the ground.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
On the Forest Floor
Now,
even the most gentle of female rains
brings down the early dogwood
blossoms,
once white,
now stained pink and red
as if bruised and wounded,
sent to the forest floor
to bleed quietly in the shade.The petals are dirty
are cut and bleeding,
and looking closely,
their hurt faces plead into mine.But what can I do?
I gather a handful,
six or seven,
and begin to shout around about the glory of these
fallen criers of
Spring’s army of joy,
naming the days of their bannered and heralded births,
touting the courage of first blossoms,
and going on about their short lives of timeless purity.Afterward,
I let the petals drop from my fingers,
watch them come to rest
on last Autumn’s leaves,
now dead one full season
and resting with new stories
of the Winterfor the telling to
the freshly fallen dead
of Spring’s army of joy.
Amaranths In Dew
I am a whisperer of the moment,
a piner at the edge of gardens,
a drunk gaper of endless petals,in whose curves
I see the hearts
of potential lovers,wet amaranths
in dew.
Poet Taking Rest
My lover,
I admire the length
and grace
of your well-shaped hands,
delicate wings of the butterfly
pressed tightly together
in prayer,
and in between them,
my only thin asylum
of brief repose.
Second Note to a Past Lover
I do not think of it as folly
to spend all my time dreaming
of your touch,
but I do suffer terrible embarrassment from
those who would say I am
foolishly enamoured with one
whom I am not familiar with
in the least.Nevertheless,
I will continue
to persist in this behavior,
foolish as it may appear to
those lacking in any sense
of romantic abandon, and
it would be to them that I
would simply say that I take
extreme pleasure in the
weaving of this thought of silk
through the 10,000 crests of
the waters
that separate us.
This Desperate Threshhold
At this desperate threshold,
look how white my knuckles –I can’t face wine,
not like I used to.
Not anymore.Oh,
my most admired romancer
of the most strange and terrible nights,
where will I turn
if not to your sopping invitation?You have pulled me too far apart,
at my own request –
I could not ask you
to pull me back together.I have sought out your freeing waters,
often as I could,
for more than a century,
but I have grown weary
of raising your implements to my lips.Understand,
I have loved you more
than I have loved my women.At this desperate threshold,
my friend,
look how white my knuckles,
but look how clear my eyes.
Nearing the Base of West Mountain
In the foothills to the East
there is pollen.I am coming in the pollen.
The pollen falls upon my hair
and streams across my eyes,and in my hair
there is a breeze.
Spring Hills of Missouri
Over endless lakeside hills,
unfolding forests
show spring blossoms,
white lace
airing
among the dogwood
and the plum.
Penning Delicate Words
What fine silk
moves through these trembling
fingertips
but
what an array of dusty stallions
courses through my wrist.A timeless dripping sun
labors over me,
yet
I do not sweat as I pen these delicate
words for you.
Summer River Wildflowers
At riverside,
in the waning days of summer,
I part eight blossoms
from their stems.Later,
wearing the flowers,
I stand waist-deep
in Summer River,
gathering drifting leaves
from beyond Summer River’s bluffs.
Fall Valley
Out here,
all my crushes
are on
divine
sugar maple forests.It’s Fall.
Devastated,
I roam the valley
for a
Summer flower.
Parched
These three desperate throats,
in the wake of such a malignant sun,
where
in this endless brown valley
can we find wine?(These horses are but ashy silhouettes).
What a shabby and dissolute arrangement
has been laid out for us!
Is there left a cool breast
to appeal to?Oh, our dry and tongueless bellow!
Sweating at Meremec
What is there that can restrain joy?
Not me!
These pores on my back-
with what joy they sweat!What a time this is
to radiate with expansiveness and light.
These people around me,
these fine days we are spending together,
such laughter!Under these trees,
in this universe,
we are so small,
yet with joy look how long and wide we reach,
and how deep!
Humming In the Wind
All day
Beneath the hot sun
I thought of you.Thought of how
My love for you is likeTen thousand bright blossoms
Humming in the wind.
Horse Travel Through the Blues
My blue gaze rides
toward
her breast
like dusk
moves
between mountains:deeper,
wetter,
greener,
coller,
roaming and
loping
with heavy melancholia.This
is
the nature
of horse travel through the blues,
stepping through rivers,
noting the shorelines
flowered
and
hung,
bending in the saddle
to part blossom
from stem -true and desperate acts
performed
at dusk
during a cool and
loveless
summer.
Nectar
Isn't love, too,
proclaimed to be at it's most
dangerous
when new,
like the poison of a
young snake?And which is the greater danger?
Love, leaning nearby, musky and aromatic,
or the capable length of a snake?From either tongue
drips nectar from the body
like dew
from the bud.
The Long Limbed Day
She is a lean figure
curved against the window,
a limber boiugh
hung heavy with foliage in the sun,
lithe body drawn from
the sinew and supple muscle
of the
slender
forest deer.In her bare arms
and in her naked shoulders
I witness the
heightened
and tightened
awareness of a doe's limbs, prepared
at any instant
to bound off in a tremendous
single
leap
nine feet long
perhaps,
to go stretching into the
long limbed day,
young
strong
beautiful
forever.Yes.
Oh,
yes, yes, yes.
Jaguar Leaping in the Wind
My muse,
you
have liberated me from the rocks!Long reacher,
high stretcher,
you unfurl your body
a silk ribbon of skin
licking the midday wind,
and I look,oh how I look!
Woman,
it is a poet's duty,
aye,
a poet's pleasure,
to sing the tips of your fingers as claws,
the breadth of your hands as mitts,
the length of your limbs
outstretched and roaring
from your bosom,
as those of a jaguar in hunger
leaping from the rocks
toward
the hot neck of the sun.
Outrider
I unsheath
from my boot
3,000 wet tongues,
grim bladed
butterflies
sent out to riot in
the night,wing tips dark as hot razors
stained with the blood
of
a
long
haired
poet.I unsheath
these wet things,
hold them level
at sea,
one man standing
against
all comers,long haired, doublebraided,
point taken,
praying for hope against
the bellowing
sea
of
the
East.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Hangover Medicine
Coyote had been drinking too much whiskey when he left
the place where the group was camped.
He left because he wanted to go make pee.
He invited those who wished to attend
to come along.
Everybody said, "No!"
So coyote began to wander off
by himself
to go make his pee in private.
Then he turned around and told the others that
when his pee hardened,
it would become a solid lump of pure white gold,
but the others were wise to his tricks,
and so they said, "No! No way! Even we don't believe
you can turn your pee into riches.
Go along in your own peculiar way,
Coyote,
and make your pee without bothering us anymore.”So Coyote went along the tree line until
he found a nice clearing to put forth his water,
but he decided to rest
for a while before doing this,
and he passed out beneath the tree
he had been leaning on,
forgetting all about the necessity of putting out
the liquor he had poured into his belly.Next morning,
Coyote awoke with a pain in his innards.
"What is the trouble here?" he said,
"ohhh, why does my body ache so?"
He rubbed his belly all over and made several chants,
but nothing helped the aches go away.
Finally,
he got angry and grabbed hold of his member
and began to swing it around and choke it, saying,
"Look! What is wrong with me?
I feel so awful!
Help make me better!
Send the troublemaker who is giving me hell in my body
out your little hole so I can punish him!
Do it!"
Coyote flung his penis around
and threw it against some trees,he even caressed it and encouraged it to perform,
but not a thing was forthcoming.
He began to feel even worse,
but he was not worried yet.
He put some lotion on his member to heal the sores
and tucked it away in his pants.That is when he began talking to his anus.
"See here!" said Coyote to his anus,
"I have maligned and injured my own member
over this pain I feel in my body.
No matter what I do,
my penis,
my favorite,
won't even help rid me of my discomfort.
Help me, anus,
help me to expel the troublemaker at work in my body."
So saying,
Coyote dug a hole,
pulled down his trousers,
and squatted.
He began to strain with all his might.
He grunted. He waited.
He implored his anus to do its best,
and his face grew more red with each try.
Finally,
he grew tired from so much effort and rolled over onto his belly,
cursing his body for the weakness it showed
in expelling this nemesis from within him.By this time
Coyote could hardly move from the pain,
and his lower lip began to tremble,
and he could do nothing but try to cry.
He stayed that way for a while,
trying to cry,
but no tears came out either,
and he felt worse than ever.
He stayed that way for two whole days.After that,
he felt better,
and he got up and began moving around again.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
In the Avoidance of Women
I
Sidebelly had become aware of the moss on his belly
ever since the time of an early spring
twenty-six years ago when he was twenty-one years old
with a lean incisive body moving easily
through the pines,
running north,
as he had been doing without pause for water
or love
for six years in avoidance of the assumption of
responsibility
he was to take on as a man,
and what brought him down at the end of his youth
were the frequent and penetrating thrusts
of mental daggers being driven through his ear,
sharply and up to the hilt,
which upon further examination
would have proven only to have been
the thorns of wild roses fashioned into tiny darts
by the thin and nimble fingers of some
woman,
no doubt,
and he did, finally, break down smoothness of motion
of wind in hair
into fractured moments
of settling vertebrae and sharply distilled
moments of anxiety,
for he feared his people were yet on the trail
behind him.They weren't, of course,
they had failed to pursue five-and-a-half years back
after he had crossed the River of Separation,
the women moaning the loss of yet another
virile partner,
and he had come to rest slowly trembling,
driven down pointedly into supine immobility
by prayers and Wishes designed for his restraint.
By the Almighty Goddamn
they had caught up with him after all!
Hair by hair, finger by finger, toe by toe, cell by cell,
his breathing came deep
and the moss below his back gave way.
He could feel the breath of his bed exhale
near his ear telling him not to be afraid,
to rest,
that he needed rest,
and he closed his eyes and could feel the moss work
beneath his back and move up the sides of his belly,
taking over the responsibility of keeping him alive,
penetrating through his tissues,
extending through his veins, capillaries, arteries,
and enshrouding his heart
in the timeless revelatory muscle of the earth
as he slept.II
The terrifying complexity
of manufacturing a self contained internal reality
for nine still years spent while saddled motionless
to the back of the earth on a bed of soft spoken moss,
of course,
was not to be undertaken alone.But goddamn if the young Sidebelly was willing
to give up independence of strong, taut
manhood
without a fight for sole
or even partial possession of his tender mind,
no matter the teachers,
goddamn them all to hell with the
fruits and flowers they bring,
"I have been trying for six years to pound them
into dust,"
he told me, "six years to rid myself of their pursuit,
six years in avoidance of their mouths of
open and inviting tragedy,
six years spent hiding from their invasive minds,
six years working my muscles for prime
defense against their advancements,
I knew they would come too,
starting with Susie, of course,
goddamn her who kissed me first while pinning me
up against the wall
next to the garbage bin in the alley
behind the furniture store.
Six years,
six years,
goddamn them women, them witches,
them who spend the earnest moments before
the rise of the sun caressing,
oiling, and perfuming their legs and breasts
with their own juices,
combing and waiting to plait the magnificent length
of their hair under the beauty of the
polished crystal prism of mother’s making,
designed and crafted for the specific purpose
of dispersing the first rays of the morning throughout
the hair in the belief
that to hold the seven colors of the sun
was to hold the power necessary to enliven
the fibers of the hair which in turn,
when laid upon the pillow at night
and spread in imitation of the sun,
would successfully capture and blind a man
into meek submission of catering days;
days of heat and labor
spent under a malignant and difficult sun,
of strained breath spent through thin and dusty lips,
of brittle and confused moments
at the end of the day when conversation
with the woman
becomes necessary yet unavoidable and what is truly
needed is a cold beer
and an open window to the west –
a breeze would be too much for me to handle;
I would go insane in such pleasure of ease-
and goddamn
if she wouldn't then inhale the sun
into her belly at the close of the day,
swelling deeply
at the rush of performing
her daily admonition,
for she would have been stewing all day in her own
juices,
and speaking with the sun between her lips
of my failure to achieve the potency of manhood
in a dignified and respectful manner..."And of course,
it was worthless for Sidebelly to struggle,
dangerous even,
for he was being wrapped tighter to the back of
the Mother Earth
at each impulse of protest,
pulled in deeper to the Woman of all our fruits,
and he would eventually learn that to struggle
would be to relenquish an even greater part
of his masculinity,
but he succeeded in the end,
thankfully,
in securing a bit of his manhood
down and away
in a sack between his legs where they could not
get at it,
the witches.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Pollen Storm Blessing
There he spurneth dust of glittering grains;
How joyous his neigh,
There in mist of sacred pollen hidden, all hidden he;
How joyous his neigh,
There his offspring many grow and thrive forevermore;
How joyous his neigh!
-- from Song of the Horse, NavajoBahe would go to the spring hills to pray against the war. He thought he would attend the war if he had to. He wouldn’t run away from it, even though there was a new woman. With the new woman he had made a child. The child was four months old. He was called Siggy, after Sigurd, the woman’s father. Bahe called the woman Haansh’Taye, which in the Apache means “butterfly.” Her other name was Susie, but Bahe called her Haansh’Taye because he thought of her well shaped hands as delicate wings of the butterfly, and when she held his face between her hands he imagined that this was his only place of brief repose in all the world.
With the war threatening he spent as much time between there as possible. At night he would cry sometimes about having to leave his woman and son and he would ask her to hold his face between her hands and pray against the war. And she, while comforting him with her good words, would begin to cry as well. Then baby Siggy would wake up and start in too. At times like this when the small room would echo with wailing the air would suddenly become cold and it was ghostly when the air became filled with their own visible breath. The haze of their breathing turned blue like there was a neon light from outside their window shining in but there was none and neither he nor the woman knew anything about the blue haze, only that it frightened them and caused them, all three, to huddle against the terror on the corner on the bed. Everything fell away at such times, the hum of engines and the gears shifting over the streets, the sirens, the horns, the rough voices of the kids on the walk and the drunk rantings of husbands heavy on the bottle, everything, everything fell away into the heavy silence and then it was terribly lonely because they felt like they didn’t even have each other then. Bahe thought that this was the way it would be for his family if the war called him out.
There were always images that appeared in the blue haze. All the images were of men, brown men like Bahe himself, and young yet with hair like jet. The men would be stripped to the waist, their torsos lithe and tawny and shining with sweat as they danced around to old drums and sang. But neither Haansh’Taye nor Bahe could hear the drums or hear the men singing. There was just that silence. Bahe and his woman would look across that silence at each other and down at the baby like there was a wide and dark blue sea that separated them finally and completely and made communication impossible. They could only cry and watch the men dance. From the waist down they could see that the men wore fatigues and high black boots, army issue. Bahe knew the men. They were his relations, his ancestors, his uncles and great uncles, his grandfathers and his grandfathers’ brothers, all dead, all passed on in other wars. Only when Bahe and his family stopped crying would the images be gone. The haze would dissipate slowly and the room become warm again, like it ought to be on a spring evening.
So Bahe would go to the hills to pray against the war. He’d take Haansh’Taye with him, and she would place little Siggy into the cradle that Bahe was placed in when he was a baby, and she would strap this onto her back when they struck out onto the trail that led to the meadow where there was a stream and a falls that came down the hills.
One morning after crying all nigh long Bahe called into work and told them that he couldn’t make it, that he was sick. Then he rolled over and shook Haansh’Taye gently on the shoulder. “Haansh’Taye. It looks nice out there today. Let’s take a lunch and go to the hills.”
Haansh’Taye rolled over to face Bahe. Little Siggy lay between them. She stroked the baby’s face and looked up at Bahe. “Okay sweetie. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Did you call into work?”
“I called. I had to lie again, but they wouldn’t understand if I said the truth.”
“I know, sweets, I know.”
Baby didn’t wake until they were already in the truck. When he woke he began to cry. Haansh’Taye just placed a breast in his mouth. After a while he became full and yawned and was burped, then placed back into his special seat. The movement of the truck made him sleepy and pretty soon his head fell to one side.
Haansh’Taye had made for them a dinner of thick sliced cold roast beef along with some fried bread and roasted and peeled green chilis. They also had some coffee and an old percolator which was placed over the fire to heat. All this was placed into the backpack that Bahe carried, as well as a blanket and diapers for Siggy. They never ate breakfast on days they went to pray in the hills and always ate toward the evening when they were finished.
At the woods it was a warm day, and the sun was out high and strong. There was a breeze, and on the breeze there were fresh scents of pines and grasses and flowers. Bahe and Haansh’Taye got out of the truck and looked across the cab at each other and smiled. Haansh’Taye came around to where Bahe was leaning up against the hood and put her arms around him. She kissed him long and deep and their faces lingered next to each other and brought out new scents of skin against skin. This was a vital time for them, to be together like this in the morning air of the country after such a night as had passed where they each had been gripped and stifled in fear and an insurmountable loneliness that left them feeling they were 10,000 miles apart.
Bahe and Haansh’Taye had not planned to bear a child together. In fact, they had seen very little of each other after the first few times of love making, and even after Haansh’Taye was into the initial terms of her pregnancy they rarely spoke about establishing a life together. They found it difficult at first; it was a tremendous burden coming to appreciate one another. The love was not there. Only the sex and the anger and the fear. But now, they found themselves to be deeply wed, and the love had come and the baby had come and the commitment had come and then the war came and it all pressed them deeper into one another so they thought they could never be pried apart again. And then with the war came the cold blue hazes and the awful visions.
Baby Siggy let out a small gurgle from the cab of the truck. Bahe and Haansh’Taye parted with a final kiss and went about preparing for the hike into the woods. This was never a solemn affair for them. There was only joy and a deep sense of wonder and appreciation for life. With the spring there was always life renewed and this was a common bond between Bahe and Haansh’Taye and the land they walked on. Each day after every terrible night their little procession moved along the trail through the woods. They found themselves to be a part of a constant cycle of loss and coming together, of death and rebirth, and it made them feel as if nothing could touch them, that they had been make privy to an eternal secret. Even if Bahe were to go off to the war and die, maybe he wouldn’t really die after all, just go off to some other place to rest before coming back. But still, there were those terrible visions, and they came time and time again. Bahe thought that even if there were an ounce of fear left within him the visions would return again and again and perhaps he would find himself with his ancestors, dancing in the haze. So he prayed to let go of his fear. He prayed to be strong. He prayed against the war.
At the place where they make their camp near the stream there was a young and sturdy dogwood where Haansh’Taye hung baby Siggy in his cradle. The blossoms were just starting to form on the tree. Haansh’Taye stayed within earshot of the baby while she moved about the area in search of wood for the fire. Bahe went off alone towards to stream where the little waterfall was. He sat on a flat slab of granite which overlooked the small pool of water that the falls fell into. He produced a pouch which held his smoking mixture and from this rolled four cigarettes while making a song.
In times past when they had come to the hills it had been peaceful and serene but these days it was not so quiet. Fort Leonardrock was nearby and in full swing; all the troops were in heavy rotation. As Bahe smoked he could hear the heavy trucks rattle and heave over the washboard roads that criss-crossed the area they were camped in. The jets screamed around overhead and the explosions went off constantly. Bahe smoked and prayed while all this was going on, almost expecting to see from over the crest of the hill a movement of troops hupping doubletime through the woods. These things didn’t sit well with Bahe, but he felt it important that he place himself there in the midst of wartime preparations where his fear was at its strongest, thereby confronting the greatest looming cloud of his life at the place where it resided.
At pool’s edge beneath and across the way from where Bahe sat grew a wide ring of cattails. Beyond the cattails at the far edge was the meadow. The meadow sloped gently uphill from the stream bed and there on the hill the grasses waved in the breeze drawing Bahe’s attention gently and slowly and rhythmically so that everything, everything fell away like in the cold blue haze. The trucks, gone. The jets, gone. The explosions, gone. The troops, gone. Everything, gone. But this was no cold blue haze in a tiny room in a corner of the city. Here the canopy rose up high and spread out beneath the sky like a green wing, the tip of which brushed up against the meadow and rested there on the downstroke like the gesture of a mother protecting her young. From here Bahe peered out onto the meadow. He smoked his fourth cigarette. The grasses waved. The wildflowers nodded beneath the fat yellow glory of the afternoon sun and from the spaces between the leaves of the canopy shone the fat glory in wide bright angular beams down onto the edge of the stream on the forest floor. On the beams on the sun there came the pollen from the meadow. Slow, heavy, steady, a pollen storm blessing. Bahe breathed it in, and he breathed it out, smoking.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
The Barn Where It Was Dry
Spring was an awful time to be sick about losing a girl, especially after you let yourself get all caught up in it and gave yourself away by letting her get too close inside you where it started to matter what she said or did. It was something that couldn’t be gone back over and fixed so you were there on the edge of the land in the rain sleeping alone in a goddamned barn with the poison hurt of it. But in your pocket there was some money and a ticket back to the reservation at Mescalero even though it made you feel less of a man to be running away from it. The only token from the whole mess of the situation was the scar you carried away that showed you were capable of an emotional investment in somebody other than yourself. Up until then you were too chickenshit to bring anything up from within you that might lay you open to slaughter and yes, you were a fool to open up but you did it because you finally could and you wanted to be loved but were cut down and gored through instead.
Sometimes when it rained the horses would come up the hill across the meadow to be in the barn where it was dry. You could smell the oats and see the hay spread across the floor of the barn and underfoot the ground was clumpy and uneven with excrement. You hoped the horses would come but they didn’t come. Maybe the rain was not heavy enough. But the rain kept on. The rain kept on and didn’t let up. The horses stayed away.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go
After the snows on the next warm day there were the solo hikes along the old logging trails with a lunch of cheese and crackers and ham stuffed into a satchel slung over the shoulder. Where the trails go on the sides of the hills the snow melts and runs down like a clear brook and if you pause to bend down to it you can hear the water going over the rocks and falling onto itself. It’s wet going and sloppy at the low parts but the low parts are where the sun doesn’t come so it’s cooler and the air feels heavier because of the smell of earth and pines.
Up high along a ridge there is a pond where it’s hot in the afternoon and nice to lay about without a shirt and feel the wind across your chest like it was summer. There are tracks everywhere at the water and you’d even think you heard fish jumping but it would only be snow dropping from the young pines bowed over the edge of the pool. After a while everything would get lazy and hot and sleepy after eating and sketching or writing, and laying down on your back in the grass sleep would come and from way off a shrill whistled note and maybe you dreampt it and maybe you didn’t but it was there in your head and out over the high pines you’d feel something soaring and looking up through the pines you’d know the sky was a pure blue flame where the hawks go.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Dog’s Neck
The rain intensified around a quarter after five, switching from a light moving vertical mist to a steady heavy drizzle, thus disallowing our pre-dinner stroll down to Lower Lake. Instead, we began in on the wine, noting we were more thirsty than hungry, the three of us admiring in each other our shared propensity for excess. Smiling thinly, but pink with anticipation, Bennet produced a corkscrew, flipped it open, and drove it in slowly, all the while eyeing Stadler and myself.
“My Uncle Hank had this stuff flown in from Chile for Sarah’s wedding. But of course, we all know she won’t be needing it now. I’ve a whole case of it here behind me.” Bennet handed each of us a cold bottle.
“If anybody would be in need of a bit,” offered Stadler, fingering the corkscrew, “it would be Slakely.” He looked around for our responses.
“Slakely shouldn’t touch the stuff,” I said. “Not anymore. Of course, I’m no one to talk, but then I’ve never taken a life due to drink.” Stadler handed me the corkscrew. I centered the corkscrew over the cork and began to turn it.
“It was purely accidental,” said Bennet, looking up from pouring his wine and breaking in. “He was just playing a bit too rough. One of us should’ve stepped in after Sarah said something. She was practically screaming.”
“I know,” I said. “I know. She absolutely had a right to, but I have a hard time accepting responsibility for the death, beyond what you said, Bennet, about one of us stepping in.”
“Say,” asked Stadler, “how long did your sister have Gus, anyway?”
“Seven years. His whole life,” said Bennet. “Until Slakely broke his neck. Everybody heard it, too.”
Stadler nodded over his cup. “It’s not doing Slakely any good to keep on denying it, saying that Gus died of a heart attack.”
The three of us silently drank the wine, wine that was meant to be drunk at a wedding, at a celebration. Instead it was being drunk here at Bennet’s cabin on the lake. It was creek cold at least. Bennet had placed it in a pool in Rose Creek, a thin stream that ran down the mountain from Boulder Lake. Boulder Lake, where we planned to fish and camp the next day, was so named for the seven massive boulders that rimmed its rocky edge. A small lake, only half a mile wide and three-quarter mile long, it was deep and clear and cold, fed by the glaciers above.
It had been an early Spring tradition for the four of us , including Slakely, to do the climb to Boulder Lake. We’d get roaring drunk there, casting our flies about for trout in the morning after having stayed up around the fire the whole night through. Now it was different. Slakely wasn’t here. It was as if he had been silently and wordlessly banished by the group after having killed Sarah’s dog. Sarah said it was the last straw, that she could no longer stomach Slakely’s drinking and the antics it would bring on. They were going to get married, her and Slakely, but she called it off after the killing. We all felt it was accidental, although we were all well aware of the growing violent streak which marked Slakely’s character, this being the main reason, I felt, why each of us was reluctant to part dog and human, not for fear of an angry dog but a vicious man. Indeed, as we sat around the dimly lit cabin, without Slakely around, things felt awfully good, less tense and edgy.
Slakely had only fallen in with us a couple years ago, after meeting Bennet’s sister, Sarah, at a political rally. He was quite gung-ho, that one, always flailing his arms around and talking loudly, striking his fist into his palm. He provided a great burst of energy, true, but in the two years we had come to know him, he had come to behave quite strangely. Slakely would often stick out his chest and thump it, saying, “Who’s the mountain? Who’s the mountain?” He became careless with his strength after drinking too much, and he had come to be a constant threat to each of our safety, nearly breaking all our arms in wrestling matches. It had occurred to all of us that this behavior would lead to injury, but when, and to whom? Bennet had often expressed concern for his sister’s safety, but she didn’t let on if there was anything happening, for she was always cheery about their relationship. Perhaps it was better that it was the neck of a dog that was broken, not one of ours, with all that worry going on. Now, there was hard and tangible evidence that Slakely had gone too far, and none of us were slow to acknowledge this.
Each of us, then, had come to the personal conclusion that we were better off without him, and we were happy to have a reason to spurn him. None of us had had that chance, though, because we never saw him after the killing. He had left the party, still maintaining that no, it had been a heart attack that had killed that dog, not him.
Bennet broke the silence. “So what do you guys think of the wine?”
“Damn good,” I said, rising, eager to be in a happier mood. “Now here’s a toast – to the long march of the vine from the coast of South America to the bottoms of our gullets! Here’s to the Chilean grape! Gentlemen, here’s to the three of us! Heads and shoulders bent now, into your cups!”
After this happy pronouncement, we began to drink without regard, the three of us beginning to feel a bit better, better about ourselves, better about the safety of our little group, better about the hard Montana rain and the cold deep of the high glacial lake, the chill of our wine, and better about the guilt we shared, the truth that not one of us was strong enough to have raised a hand to saved a wrecked life, not Gus’s life, not Sarah’s life, not Slakely’s life, and most preciously, not the life they could have shared together.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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Poems from a Friend
posted in Teachings on 7th Feb, 2021KEITH JAMES HAINES
Keith Haines, an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache tribe of south central New Mexico, was born in 1968 in Farmington, New Mexico to Jodee Yazza and Bruce Haines. When he was five years of age his biological mother passed away. Two years later, his father married Charlotte Hara, a Japanese American from Hawaii.
Growing up in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and spending a significant amount of time as a youth in Minnesota, Arizona, and Montana, he left home at seventeen after graduating high school to study art and literature at several universities.
Since leaving the trailer he grew up in, he has traveled extensively throughout the west and mid-west, supporting himself, among various occupations, as laborer, student, cook, pipe maker, ranch-hand, and mill worker. Keith passed away January 28, 2020; yet the legacy of his beautiful spirit through his art and poetry lives on.
Welcome. Here you will find several poems and stories I have written over the last several years, the earliest being The Dirt and the Weeds, and the latest, A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go. I am currently at work on a longer fictional piece entitled Horse of the Sun, same as the headline for this website. In addition, I have included a few pencil sketches of various subjects and plan to add several larger, more fully developed pieces when time and circumstance permit.Enjoy,Keith J. HainesPoetry
Hangover Medicine | In the Avoidance of Women | Fall Valley | The Dirt and the Weeds | On the Forest Floor | Amaranths In Dew | Poet Taking Rest | Second Note to a Past Lover | Under a Feeble Sun | This Desperate Threshhold | Nearing the Base of West Mountain | Spring Hills of Missouri | Penning Delicate Words | Summer River Wildflowers | Parched | Sweating at Meremec | Humming in the Wind | Horse Travel Through the Blues | Nectar | The Long Limbed Day | Jaguar Leaping in the Wind | Outrider
Stories
Pollen Storm Blessing | The Morning World | The Barn Where It Was Dry | A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go | Dog's Neck | Games of Chance and Get Even | Waterbug | Seven Colors of the Sun
Chap Books
The Barn Where It Was Dry, A Collection of short stories from a contemporary Native American artist
Drinking With the Women, Poems. Love, despair, and the ultimate joy of passionate living
The Dirt and the Weeds
This is my father's room.
He likes to call it his tiny box of bitter contemplation.
It rests here,
on the five hundredth and third floor
of a five hundred and three story building.
This blanket is the place where my father sits.
All but him are forbidden to rest here.
This blanket comes from the time when he lived
on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
when he held sway over the broad expanse of this area,
sitting in comfortable ease
and directing with subtle gestures of lips and fingers,
who should pull forth the sun across the sky,
who should govern the revolution of the seasons,
who should provide for the rebirth of the harvests,
and who should lead the flight of the bird across the arc of the sun
and back..It is from here
that my father once motioned for me to bend nearer his lips,
and I did so,
and he began to tell me of the time
when he lived on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
and what happened at dawn one morning
while he was preparing for the day.Long time ago, he told me,
some people who he had never seen came to him
and asked him to leave the spot where he was camped,
but he said, "No. I have been here such a long time already."
One of them then replied, "Well, old man, it is no matter.
We are a gracious people, and we have decided
that we will allow you to remain in the spot you have chosen.
But since you refuse to be displaced outward,"
he told my father,
“we shall simply displace you upward.
In addition,
we have decided that we must lay down our cement rug beneath you
and your blanket,
so if you'll step aside, please, thank you."
My father stepped aside, bewildered.
"Larry," said the man,
get your men over here and lay down a cement slab."
Turning back to my father, he said,
"As well, we have decided that we would like to
build up our walls
around you, and in so doing,
we will raise you to a place
where neither you nor your people have ever been."
"Where is that?" my father asked.
“Old man," he was told,
“prepare for your ascent into heaven. Frank?
Gather your men.
Four walls and a ceiling, please."
My father folded his blanket over the wet cement
and sat down on top of it.
"I am fine here," he said,
and the four walls and the ceiling
began to close in around him.The people who were gathered near,
becoming more and more by the minute,
then raised their hands to the sky
and summoned forth from the ground beneath my
father a powerful movement,
setting into motion the rise of a massive
four-cornered structure made of brick and steel.The tremendous rumbling caused by such an event
was said to have been felt across the plains,
where a sleeping cloud mistook the rumble for
thunder and began to pour forth its rain,
over the mountains,
where the Spine of God is said to have trembled,
through the basins,
where the fruits of the trees
were moved to fall from their branches,
and down into the sea
where the dust was shaken from the shoulder of
the land.And so began the ascension of my father
into this place called heaven.
Now,
when I sit with him,
he likes to tell me that he is still able,
when he closes his eyes,
to hear the weeds in the wind,
blowing their music close to the ground.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
On the Forest Floor
Now,
even the most gentle of female rains
brings down the early dogwood
blossoms,
once white,
now stained pink and red
as if bruised and wounded,
sent to the forest floor
to bleed quietly in the shade.The petals are dirty
are cut and bleeding,
and looking closely,
their hurt faces plead into mine.But what can I do?
I gather a handful,
six or seven,
and begin to shout around about the glory of these
fallen criers of
Spring’s army of joy,
naming the days of their bannered and heralded births,
touting the courage of first blossoms,
and going on about their short lives of timeless purity.Afterward,
I let the petals drop from my fingers,
watch them come to rest
on last Autumn’s leaves,
now dead one full season
and resting with new stories
of the Winterfor the telling to
the freshly fallen dead
of Spring’s army of joy.
Amaranths In Dew
I am a whisperer of the moment,
a piner at the edge of gardens,
a drunk gaper of endless petals,in whose curves
I see the hearts
of potential lovers,wet amaranths
in dew.
Poet Taking Rest
My lover,
I admire the length
and grace
of your well-shaped hands,
delicate wings of the butterfly
pressed tightly together
in prayer,
and in between them,
my only thin asylum
of brief repose.
Second Note to a Past Lover
I do not think of it as folly
to spend all my time dreaming
of your touch,
but I do suffer terrible embarrassment from
those who would say I am
foolishly enamoured with one
whom I am not familiar with
in the least.Nevertheless,
I will continue
to persist in this behavior,
foolish as it may appear to
those lacking in any sense
of romantic abandon, and
it would be to them that I
would simply say that I take
extreme pleasure in the
weaving of this thought of silk
through the 10,000 crests of
the waters
that separate us.
This Desperate Threshhold
At this desperate threshold,
look how white my knuckles –I can’t face wine,
not like I used to.
Not anymore.Oh,
my most admired romancer
of the most strange and terrible nights,
where will I turn
if not to your sopping invitation?You have pulled me too far apart,
at my own request –
I could not ask you
to pull me back together.I have sought out your freeing waters,
often as I could,
for more than a century,
but I have grown weary
of raising your implements to my lips.Understand,
I have loved you more
than I have loved my women.At this desperate threshold,
my friend,
look how white my knuckles,
but look how clear my eyes.
Nearing the Base of West Mountain
In the foothills to the East
there is pollen.I am coming in the pollen.
The pollen falls upon my hair
and streams across my eyes,and in my hair
there is a breeze.
Spring Hills of Missouri
Over endless lakeside hills,
unfolding forests
show spring blossoms,
white lace
airing
among the dogwood
and the plum.
Penning Delicate Words
What fine silk
moves through these trembling
fingertips
but
what an array of dusty stallions
courses through my wrist.A timeless dripping sun
labors over me,
yet
I do not sweat as I pen these delicate
words for you.
Summer River Wildflowers
At riverside,
in the waning days of summer,
I part eight blossoms
from their stems.Later,
wearing the flowers,
I stand waist-deep
in Summer River,
gathering drifting leaves
from beyond Summer River’s bluffs.
Fall Valley
Out here,
all my crushes
are on
divine
sugar maple forests.It’s Fall.
Devastated,
I roam the valley
for a
Summer flower.
Parched
These three desperate throats,
in the wake of such a malignant sun,
where
in this endless brown valley
can we find wine?(These horses are but ashy silhouettes).
What a shabby and dissolute arrangement
has been laid out for us!
Is there left a cool breast
to appeal to?Oh, our dry and tongueless bellow!
Sweating at Meremec
What is there that can restrain joy?
Not me!
These pores on my back-
with what joy they sweat!What a time this is
to radiate with expansiveness and light.
These people around me,
these fine days we are spending together,
such laughter!Under these trees,
in this universe,
we are so small,
yet with joy look how long and wide we reach,
and how deep!
Humming In the Wind
All day
Beneath the hot sun
I thought of you.Thought of how
My love for you is likeTen thousand bright blossoms
Humming in the wind.
Horse Travel Through the Blues
My blue gaze rides
toward
her breast
like dusk
moves
between mountains:deeper,
wetter,
greener,
coller,
roaming and
loping
with heavy melancholia.This
is
the nature
of horse travel through the blues,
stepping through rivers,
noting the shorelines
flowered
and
hung,
bending in the saddle
to part blossom
from stem -true and desperate acts
performed
at dusk
during a cool and
loveless
summer.
Nectar
Isn't love, too,
proclaimed to be at it's most
dangerous
when new,
like the poison of a
young snake?And which is the greater danger?
Love, leaning nearby, musky and aromatic,
or the capable length of a snake?From either tongue
drips nectar from the body
like dew
from the bud.
The Long Limbed Day
She is a lean figure
curved against the window,
a limber boiugh
hung heavy with foliage in the sun,
lithe body drawn from
the sinew and supple muscle
of the
slender
forest deer.In her bare arms
and in her naked shoulders
I witness the
heightened
and tightened
awareness of a doe's limbs, prepared
at any instant
to bound off in a tremendous
single
leap
nine feet long
perhaps,
to go stretching into the
long limbed day,
young
strong
beautiful
forever.Yes.
Oh,
yes, yes, yes.
Jaguar Leaping in the Wind
My muse,
you
have liberated me from the rocks!Long reacher,
high stretcher,
you unfurl your body
a silk ribbon of skin
licking the midday wind,
and I look,oh how I look!
Woman,
it is a poet's duty,
aye,
a poet's pleasure,
to sing the tips of your fingers as claws,
the breadth of your hands as mitts,
the length of your limbs
outstretched and roaring
from your bosom,
as those of a jaguar in hunger
leaping from the rocks
toward
the hot neck of the sun.
Outrider
I unsheath
from my boot
3,000 wet tongues,
grim bladed
butterflies
sent out to riot in
the night,wing tips dark as hot razors
stained with the blood
of
a
long
haired
poet.I unsheath
these wet things,
hold them level
at sea,
one man standing
against
all comers,long haired, doublebraided,
point taken,
praying for hope against
the bellowing
sea
of
the
East.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Hangover Medicine
Coyote had been drinking too much whiskey when he left
the place where the group was camped.
He left because he wanted to go make pee.
He invited those who wished to attend
to come along.
Everybody said, "No!"
So coyote began to wander off
by himself
to go make his pee in private.
Then he turned around and told the others that
when his pee hardened,
it would become a solid lump of pure white gold,
but the others were wise to his tricks,
and so they said, "No! No way! Even we don't believe
you can turn your pee into riches.
Go along in your own peculiar way,
Coyote,
and make your pee without bothering us anymore.”So Coyote went along the tree line until
he found a nice clearing to put forth his water,
but he decided to rest
for a while before doing this,
and he passed out beneath the tree
he had been leaning on,
forgetting all about the necessity of putting out
the liquor he had poured into his belly.Next morning,
Coyote awoke with a pain in his innards.
"What is the trouble here?" he said,
"ohhh, why does my body ache so?"
He rubbed his belly all over and made several chants,
but nothing helped the aches go away.
Finally,
he got angry and grabbed hold of his member
and began to swing it around and choke it, saying,
"Look! What is wrong with me?
I feel so awful!
Help make me better!
Send the troublemaker who is giving me hell in my body
out your little hole so I can punish him!
Do it!"
Coyote flung his penis around
and threw it against some trees,he even caressed it and encouraged it to perform,
but not a thing was forthcoming.
He began to feel even worse,
but he was not worried yet.
He put some lotion on his member to heal the sores
and tucked it away in his pants.That is when he began talking to his anus.
"See here!" said Coyote to his anus,
"I have maligned and injured my own member
over this pain I feel in my body.
No matter what I do,
my penis,
my favorite,
won't even help rid me of my discomfort.
Help me, anus,
help me to expel the troublemaker at work in my body."
So saying,
Coyote dug a hole,
pulled down his trousers,
and squatted.
He began to strain with all his might.
He grunted. He waited.
He implored his anus to do its best,
and his face grew more red with each try.
Finally,
he grew tired from so much effort and rolled over onto his belly,
cursing his body for the weakness it showed
in expelling this nemesis from within him.By this time
Coyote could hardly move from the pain,
and his lower lip began to tremble,
and he could do nothing but try to cry.
He stayed that way for a while,
trying to cry,
but no tears came out either,
and he felt worse than ever.
He stayed that way for two whole days.After that,
he felt better,
and he got up and began moving around again.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
In the Avoidance of Women
I
Sidebelly had become aware of the moss on his belly
ever since the time of an early spring
twenty-six years ago when he was twenty-one years old
with a lean incisive body moving easily
through the pines,
running north,
as he had been doing without pause for water
or love
for six years in avoidance of the assumption of
responsibility
he was to take on as a man,
and what brought him down at the end of his youth
were the frequent and penetrating thrusts
of mental daggers being driven through his ear,
sharply and up to the hilt,
which upon further examination
would have proven only to have been
the thorns of wild roses fashioned into tiny darts
by the thin and nimble fingers of some
woman,
no doubt,
and he did, finally, break down smoothness of motion
of wind in hair
into fractured moments
of settling vertebrae and sharply distilled
moments of anxiety,
for he feared his people were yet on the trail
behind him.They weren't, of course,
they had failed to pursue five-and-a-half years back
after he had crossed the River of Separation,
the women moaning the loss of yet another
virile partner,
and he had come to rest slowly trembling,
driven down pointedly into supine immobility
by prayers and Wishes designed for his restraint.
By the Almighty Goddamn
they had caught up with him after all!
Hair by hair, finger by finger, toe by toe, cell by cell,
his breathing came deep
and the moss below his back gave way.
He could feel the breath of his bed exhale
near his ear telling him not to be afraid,
to rest,
that he needed rest,
and he closed his eyes and could feel the moss work
beneath his back and move up the sides of his belly,
taking over the responsibility of keeping him alive,
penetrating through his tissues,
extending through his veins, capillaries, arteries,
and enshrouding his heart
in the timeless revelatory muscle of the earth
as he slept.II
The terrifying complexity
of manufacturing a self contained internal reality
for nine still years spent while saddled motionless
to the back of the earth on a bed of soft spoken moss,
of course,
was not to be undertaken alone.But goddamn if the young Sidebelly was willing
to give up independence of strong, taut
manhood
without a fight for sole
or even partial possession of his tender mind,
no matter the teachers,
goddamn them all to hell with the
fruits and flowers they bring,
"I have been trying for six years to pound them
into dust,"
he told me, "six years to rid myself of their pursuit,
six years in avoidance of their mouths of
open and inviting tragedy,
six years spent hiding from their invasive minds,
six years working my muscles for prime
defense against their advancements,
I knew they would come too,
starting with Susie, of course,
goddamn her who kissed me first while pinning me
up against the wall
next to the garbage bin in the alley
behind the furniture store.
Six years,
six years,
goddamn them women, them witches,
them who spend the earnest moments before
the rise of the sun caressing,
oiling, and perfuming their legs and breasts
with their own juices,
combing and waiting to plait the magnificent length
of their hair under the beauty of the
polished crystal prism of mother’s making,
designed and crafted for the specific purpose
of dispersing the first rays of the morning throughout
the hair in the belief
that to hold the seven colors of the sun
was to hold the power necessary to enliven
the fibers of the hair which in turn,
when laid upon the pillow at night
and spread in imitation of the sun,
would successfully capture and blind a man
into meek submission of catering days;
days of heat and labor
spent under a malignant and difficult sun,
of strained breath spent through thin and dusty lips,
of brittle and confused moments
at the end of the day when conversation
with the woman
becomes necessary yet unavoidable and what is truly
needed is a cold beer
and an open window to the west –
a breeze would be too much for me to handle;
I would go insane in such pleasure of ease-
and goddamn
if she wouldn't then inhale the sun
into her belly at the close of the day,
swelling deeply
at the rush of performing
her daily admonition,
for she would have been stewing all day in her own
juices,
and speaking with the sun between her lips
of my failure to achieve the potency of manhood
in a dignified and respectful manner..."And of course,
it was worthless for Sidebelly to struggle,
dangerous even,
for he was being wrapped tighter to the back of
the Mother Earth
at each impulse of protest,
pulled in deeper to the Woman of all our fruits,
and he would eventually learn that to struggle
would be to relenquish an even greater part
of his masculinity,
but he succeeded in the end,
thankfully,
in securing a bit of his manhood
down and away
in a sack between his legs where they could not
get at it,
the witches.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Pollen Storm Blessing
There he spurneth dust of glittering grains;
How joyous his neigh,
There in mist of sacred pollen hidden, all hidden he;
How joyous his neigh,
There his offspring many grow and thrive forevermore;
How joyous his neigh!
-- from Song of the Horse, NavajoBahe would go to the spring hills to pray against the war. He thought he would attend the war if he had to. He wouldn’t run away from it, even though there was a new woman. With the new woman he had made a child. The child was four months old. He was called Siggy, after Sigurd, the woman’s father. Bahe called the woman Haansh’Taye, which in the Apache means “butterfly.” Her other name was Susie, but Bahe called her Haansh’Taye because he thought of her well shaped hands as delicate wings of the butterfly, and when she held his face between her hands he imagined that this was his only place of brief repose in all the world.
With the war threatening he spent as much time between there as possible. At night he would cry sometimes about having to leave his woman and son and he would ask her to hold his face between her hands and pray against the war. And she, while comforting him with her good words, would begin to cry as well. Then baby Siggy would wake up and start in too. At times like this when the small room would echo with wailing the air would suddenly become cold and it was ghostly when the air became filled with their own visible breath. The haze of their breathing turned blue like there was a neon light from outside their window shining in but there was none and neither he nor the woman knew anything about the blue haze, only that it frightened them and caused them, all three, to huddle against the terror on the corner on the bed. Everything fell away at such times, the hum of engines and the gears shifting over the streets, the sirens, the horns, the rough voices of the kids on the walk and the drunk rantings of husbands heavy on the bottle, everything, everything fell away into the heavy silence and then it was terribly lonely because they felt like they didn’t even have each other then. Bahe thought that this was the way it would be for his family if the war called him out.
There were always images that appeared in the blue haze. All the images were of men, brown men like Bahe himself, and young yet with hair like jet. The men would be stripped to the waist, their torsos lithe and tawny and shining with sweat as they danced around to old drums and sang. But neither Haansh’Taye nor Bahe could hear the drums or hear the men singing. There was just that silence. Bahe and his woman would look across that silence at each other and down at the baby like there was a wide and dark blue sea that separated them finally and completely and made communication impossible. They could only cry and watch the men dance. From the waist down they could see that the men wore fatigues and high black boots, army issue. Bahe knew the men. They were his relations, his ancestors, his uncles and great uncles, his grandfathers and his grandfathers’ brothers, all dead, all passed on in other wars. Only when Bahe and his family stopped crying would the images be gone. The haze would dissipate slowly and the room become warm again, like it ought to be on a spring evening.
So Bahe would go to the hills to pray against the war. He’d take Haansh’Taye with him, and she would place little Siggy into the cradle that Bahe was placed in when he was a baby, and she would strap this onto her back when they struck out onto the trail that led to the meadow where there was a stream and a falls that came down the hills.
One morning after crying all nigh long Bahe called into work and told them that he couldn’t make it, that he was sick. Then he rolled over and shook Haansh’Taye gently on the shoulder. “Haansh’Taye. It looks nice out there today. Let’s take a lunch and go to the hills.”
Haansh’Taye rolled over to face Bahe. Little Siggy lay between them. She stroked the baby’s face and looked up at Bahe. “Okay sweetie. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Did you call into work?”
“I called. I had to lie again, but they wouldn’t understand if I said the truth.”
“I know, sweets, I know.”
Baby didn’t wake until they were already in the truck. When he woke he began to cry. Haansh’Taye just placed a breast in his mouth. After a while he became full and yawned and was burped, then placed back into his special seat. The movement of the truck made him sleepy and pretty soon his head fell to one side.
Haansh’Taye had made for them a dinner of thick sliced cold roast beef along with some fried bread and roasted and peeled green chilis. They also had some coffee and an old percolator which was placed over the fire to heat. All this was placed into the backpack that Bahe carried, as well as a blanket and diapers for Siggy. They never ate breakfast on days they went to pray in the hills and always ate toward the evening when they were finished.
At the woods it was a warm day, and the sun was out high and strong. There was a breeze, and on the breeze there were fresh scents of pines and grasses and flowers. Bahe and Haansh’Taye got out of the truck and looked across the cab at each other and smiled. Haansh’Taye came around to where Bahe was leaning up against the hood and put her arms around him. She kissed him long and deep and their faces lingered next to each other and brought out new scents of skin against skin. This was a vital time for them, to be together like this in the morning air of the country after such a night as had passed where they each had been gripped and stifled in fear and an insurmountable loneliness that left them feeling they were 10,000 miles apart.
Bahe and Haansh’Taye had not planned to bear a child together. In fact, they had seen very little of each other after the first few times of love making, and even after Haansh’Taye was into the initial terms of her pregnancy they rarely spoke about establishing a life together. They found it difficult at first; it was a tremendous burden coming to appreciate one another. The love was not there. Only the sex and the anger and the fear. But now, they found themselves to be deeply wed, and the love had come and the baby had come and the commitment had come and then the war came and it all pressed them deeper into one another so they thought they could never be pried apart again. And then with the war came the cold blue hazes and the awful visions.
Baby Siggy let out a small gurgle from the cab of the truck. Bahe and Haansh’Taye parted with a final kiss and went about preparing for the hike into the woods. This was never a solemn affair for them. There was only joy and a deep sense of wonder and appreciation for life. With the spring there was always life renewed and this was a common bond between Bahe and Haansh’Taye and the land they walked on. Each day after every terrible night their little procession moved along the trail through the woods. They found themselves to be a part of a constant cycle of loss and coming together, of death and rebirth, and it made them feel as if nothing could touch them, that they had been make privy to an eternal secret. Even if Bahe were to go off to the war and die, maybe he wouldn’t really die after all, just go off to some other place to rest before coming back. But still, there were those terrible visions, and they came time and time again. Bahe thought that even if there were an ounce of fear left within him the visions would return again and again and perhaps he would find himself with his ancestors, dancing in the haze. So he prayed to let go of his fear. He prayed to be strong. He prayed against the war.
At the place where they make their camp near the stream there was a young and sturdy dogwood where Haansh’Taye hung baby Siggy in his cradle. The blossoms were just starting to form on the tree. Haansh’Taye stayed within earshot of the baby while she moved about the area in search of wood for the fire. Bahe went off alone towards to stream where the little waterfall was. He sat on a flat slab of granite which overlooked the small pool of water that the falls fell into. He produced a pouch which held his smoking mixture and from this rolled four cigarettes while making a song.
In times past when they had come to the hills it had been peaceful and serene but these days it was not so quiet. Fort Leonardrock was nearby and in full swing; all the troops were in heavy rotation. As Bahe smoked he could hear the heavy trucks rattle and heave over the washboard roads that criss-crossed the area they were camped in. The jets screamed around overhead and the explosions went off constantly. Bahe smoked and prayed while all this was going on, almost expecting to see from over the crest of the hill a movement of troops hupping doubletime through the woods. These things didn’t sit well with Bahe, but he felt it important that he place himself there in the midst of wartime preparations where his fear was at its strongest, thereby confronting the greatest looming cloud of his life at the place where it resided.
At pool’s edge beneath and across the way from where Bahe sat grew a wide ring of cattails. Beyond the cattails at the far edge was the meadow. The meadow sloped gently uphill from the stream bed and there on the hill the grasses waved in the breeze drawing Bahe’s attention gently and slowly and rhythmically so that everything, everything fell away like in the cold blue haze. The trucks, gone. The jets, gone. The explosions, gone. The troops, gone. Everything, gone. But this was no cold blue haze in a tiny room in a corner of the city. Here the canopy rose up high and spread out beneath the sky like a green wing, the tip of which brushed up against the meadow and rested there on the downstroke like the gesture of a mother protecting her young. From here Bahe peered out onto the meadow. He smoked his fourth cigarette. The grasses waved. The wildflowers nodded beneath the fat yellow glory of the afternoon sun and from the spaces between the leaves of the canopy shone the fat glory in wide bright angular beams down onto the edge of the stream on the forest floor. On the beams on the sun there came the pollen from the meadow. Slow, heavy, steady, a pollen storm blessing. Bahe breathed it in, and he breathed it out, smoking.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
The Barn Where It Was Dry
Spring was an awful time to be sick about losing a girl, especially after you let yourself get all caught up in it and gave yourself away by letting her get too close inside you where it started to matter what she said or did. It was something that couldn’t be gone back over and fixed so you were there on the edge of the land in the rain sleeping alone in a goddamned barn with the poison hurt of it. But in your pocket there was some money and a ticket back to the reservation at Mescalero even though it made you feel less of a man to be running away from it. The only token from the whole mess of the situation was the scar you carried away that showed you were capable of an emotional investment in somebody other than yourself. Up until then you were too chickenshit to bring anything up from within you that might lay you open to slaughter and yes, you were a fool to open up but you did it because you finally could and you wanted to be loved but were cut down and gored through instead.
Sometimes when it rained the horses would come up the hill across the meadow to be in the barn where it was dry. You could smell the oats and see the hay spread across the floor of the barn and underfoot the ground was clumpy and uneven with excrement. You hoped the horses would come but they didn’t come. Maybe the rain was not heavy enough. But the rain kept on. The rain kept on and didn’t let up. The horses stayed away.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go
After the snows on the next warm day there were the solo hikes along the old logging trails with a lunch of cheese and crackers and ham stuffed into a satchel slung over the shoulder. Where the trails go on the sides of the hills the snow melts and runs down like a clear brook and if you pause to bend down to it you can hear the water going over the rocks and falling onto itself. It’s wet going and sloppy at the low parts but the low parts are where the sun doesn’t come so it’s cooler and the air feels heavier because of the smell of earth and pines.
Up high along a ridge there is a pond where it’s hot in the afternoon and nice to lay about without a shirt and feel the wind across your chest like it was summer. There are tracks everywhere at the water and you’d even think you heard fish jumping but it would only be snow dropping from the young pines bowed over the edge of the pool. After a while everything would get lazy and hot and sleepy after eating and sketching or writing, and laying down on your back in the grass sleep would come and from way off a shrill whistled note and maybe you dreampt it and maybe you didn’t but it was there in your head and out over the high pines you’d feel something soaring and looking up through the pines you’d know the sky was a pure blue flame where the hawks go.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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Poems from a Friend
posted in Teachings on 7th Feb, 2021KEITH JAMES HAINES
Keith Haines, an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache tribe of south central New Mexico, was born in 1968 in Farmington, New Mexico to Jodee Yazza and Bruce Haines. When he was five years of age his biological mother passed away. Two years later, his father married Charlotte Hara, a Japanese American from Hawaii.
Growing up in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and spending a significant amount of time as a youth in Minnesota, Arizona, and Montana, he left home at seventeen after graduating high school to study art and literature at several universities.
Since leaving the trailer he grew up in, he has traveled extensively throughout the west and mid-west, supporting himself, among various occupations, as laborer, student, cook, pipe maker, ranch-hand, and mill worker. Keith passed away January 28, 2020; yet the legacy of his beautiful spirit through his art and poetry lives on.
Welcome. Here you will find several poems and stories I have written over the last several years, the earliest being The Dirt and the Weeds, and the latest, A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go. I am currently at work on a longer fictional piece entitled Horse of the Sun, same as the headline for this website. In addition, I have included a few pencil sketches of various subjects and plan to add several larger, more fully developed pieces when time and circumstance permit.Enjoy,Keith J. HainesPoetry
Hangover Medicine | In the Avoidance of Women | Fall Valley | The Dirt and the Weeds | On the Forest Floor | Amaranths In Dew | Poet Taking Rest | Second Note to a Past Lover | Under a Feeble Sun | This Desperate Threshhold | Nearing the Base of West Mountain | Spring Hills of Missouri | Penning Delicate Words | Summer River Wildflowers | Parched | Sweating at Meremec | Humming in the Wind | Horse Travel Through the Blues | Nectar | The Long Limbed Day | Jaguar Leaping in the Wind | Outrider
Stories
Pollen Storm Blessing | The Morning World | The Barn Where It Was Dry | A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go | Dog's Neck | Games of Chance and Get Even | Waterbug | Seven Colors of the Sun
Chap Books
The Barn Where It Was Dry, A Collection of short stories from a contemporary Native American artist
Drinking With the Women, Poems. Love, despair, and the ultimate joy of passionate living
The Dirt and the Weeds
This is my father's room.
He likes to call it his tiny box of bitter contemplation.
It rests here,
on the five hundredth and third floor
of a five hundred and three story building.
This blanket is the place where my father sits.
All but him are forbidden to rest here.
This blanket comes from the time when he lived
on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
when he held sway over the broad expanse of this area,
sitting in comfortable ease
and directing with subtle gestures of lips and fingers,
who should pull forth the sun across the sky,
who should govern the revolution of the seasons,
who should provide for the rebirth of the harvests,
and who should lead the flight of the bird across the arc of the sun
and back..It is from here
that my father once motioned for me to bend nearer his lips,
and I did so,
and he began to tell me of the time
when he lived on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
and what happened at dawn one morning
while he was preparing for the day.Long time ago, he told me,
some people who he had never seen came to him
and asked him to leave the spot where he was camped,
but he said, "No. I have been here such a long time already."
One of them then replied, "Well, old man, it is no matter.
We are a gracious people, and we have decided
that we will allow you to remain in the spot you have chosen.
But since you refuse to be displaced outward,"
he told my father,
“we shall simply displace you upward.
In addition,
we have decided that we must lay down our cement rug beneath you
and your blanket,
so if you'll step aside, please, thank you."
My father stepped aside, bewildered.
"Larry," said the man,
get your men over here and lay down a cement slab."
Turning back to my father, he said,
"As well, we have decided that we would like to
build up our walls
around you, and in so doing,
we will raise you to a place
where neither you nor your people have ever been."
"Where is that?" my father asked.
“Old man," he was told,
“prepare for your ascent into heaven. Frank?
Gather your men.
Four walls and a ceiling, please."
My father folded his blanket over the wet cement
and sat down on top of it.
"I am fine here," he said,
and the four walls and the ceiling
began to close in around him.The people who were gathered near,
becoming more and more by the minute,
then raised their hands to the sky
and summoned forth from the ground beneath my
father a powerful movement,
setting into motion the rise of a massive
four-cornered structure made of brick and steel.The tremendous rumbling caused by such an event
was said to have been felt across the plains,
where a sleeping cloud mistook the rumble for
thunder and began to pour forth its rain,
over the mountains,
where the Spine of God is said to have trembled,
through the basins,
where the fruits of the trees
were moved to fall from their branches,
and down into the sea
where the dust was shaken from the shoulder of
the land.And so began the ascension of my father
into this place called heaven.
Now,
when I sit with him,
he likes to tell me that he is still able,
when he closes his eyes,
to hear the weeds in the wind,
blowing their music close to the ground.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
On the Forest Floor
Now,
even the most gentle of female rains
brings down the early dogwood
blossoms,
once white,
now stained pink and red
as if bruised and wounded,
sent to the forest floor
to bleed quietly in the shade.The petals are dirty
are cut and bleeding,
and looking closely,
their hurt faces plead into mine.But what can I do?
I gather a handful,
six or seven,
and begin to shout around about the glory of these
fallen criers of
Spring’s army of joy,
naming the days of their bannered and heralded births,
touting the courage of first blossoms,
and going on about their short lives of timeless purity.Afterward,
I let the petals drop from my fingers,
watch them come to rest
on last Autumn’s leaves,
now dead one full season
and resting with new stories
of the Winterfor the telling to
the freshly fallen dead
of Spring’s army of joy.
Amaranths In Dew
I am a whisperer of the moment,
a piner at the edge of gardens,
a drunk gaper of endless petals,in whose curves
I see the hearts
of potential lovers,wet amaranths
in dew.
Poet Taking Rest
My lover,
I admire the length
and grace
of your well-shaped hands,
delicate wings of the butterfly
pressed tightly together
in prayer,
and in between them,
my only thin asylum
of brief repose.
Second Note to a Past Lover
I do not think of it as folly
to spend all my time dreaming
of your touch,
but I do suffer terrible embarrassment from
those who would say I am
foolishly enamoured with one
whom I am not familiar with
in the least.Nevertheless,
I will continue
to persist in this behavior,
foolish as it may appear to
those lacking in any sense
of romantic abandon, and
it would be to them that I
would simply say that I take
extreme pleasure in the
weaving of this thought of silk
through the 10,000 crests of
the waters
that separate us.
This Desperate Threshhold
At this desperate threshold,
look how white my knuckles –I can’t face wine,
not like I used to.
Not anymore.Oh,
my most admired romancer
of the most strange and terrible nights,
where will I turn
if not to your sopping invitation?You have pulled me too far apart,
at my own request –
I could not ask you
to pull me back together.I have sought out your freeing waters,
often as I could,
for more than a century,
but I have grown weary
of raising your implements to my lips.Understand,
I have loved you more
than I have loved my women.At this desperate threshold,
my friend,
look how white my knuckles,
but look how clear my eyes.
Nearing the Base of West Mountain
In the foothills to the East
there is pollen.I am coming in the pollen.
The pollen falls upon my hair
and streams across my eyes,and in my hair
there is a breeze.
Spring Hills of Missouri
Over endless lakeside hills,
unfolding forests
show spring blossoms,
white lace
airing
among the dogwood
and the plum.
Penning Delicate Words
What fine silk
moves through these trembling
fingertips
but
what an array of dusty stallions
courses through my wrist.A timeless dripping sun
labors over me,
yet
I do not sweat as I pen these delicate
words for you.
Summer River Wildflowers
At riverside,
in the waning days of summer,
I part eight blossoms
from their stems.Later,
wearing the flowers,
I stand waist-deep
in Summer River,
gathering drifting leaves
from beyond Summer River’s bluffs.
Fall Valley
Out here,
all my crushes
are on
divine
sugar maple forests.It’s Fall.
Devastated,
I roam the valley
for a
Summer flower.
Parched
These three desperate throats,
in the wake of such a malignant sun,
where
in this endless brown valley
can we find wine?(These horses are but ashy silhouettes).
What a shabby and dissolute arrangement
has been laid out for us!
Is there left a cool breast
to appeal to?Oh, our dry and tongueless bellow!
Sweating at Meremec
What is there that can restrain joy?
Not me!
These pores on my back-
with what joy they sweat!What a time this is
to radiate with expansiveness and light.
These people around me,
these fine days we are spending together,
such laughter!Under these trees,
in this universe,
we are so small,
yet with joy look how long and wide we reach,
and how deep!
Humming In the Wind
All day
Beneath the hot sun
I thought of you.Thought of how
My love for you is likeTen thousand bright blossoms
Humming in the wind.
Horse Travel Through the Blues
My blue gaze rides
toward
her breast
like dusk
moves
between mountains:deeper,
wetter,
greener,
coller,
roaming and
loping
with heavy melancholia.This
is
the nature
of horse travel through the blues,
stepping through rivers,
noting the shorelines
flowered
and
hung,
bending in the saddle
to part blossom
from stem -true and desperate acts
performed
at dusk
during a cool and
loveless
summer.
Nectar
Isn't love, too,
proclaimed to be at it's most
dangerous
when new,
like the poison of a
young snake?And which is the greater danger?
Love, leaning nearby, musky and aromatic,
or the capable length of a snake?From either tongue
drips nectar from the body
like dew
from the bud.
The Long Limbed Day
She is a lean figure
curved against the window,
a limber boiugh
hung heavy with foliage in the sun,
lithe body drawn from
the sinew and supple muscle
of the
slender
forest deer.In her bare arms
and in her naked shoulders
I witness the
heightened
and tightened
awareness of a doe's limbs, prepared
at any instant
to bound off in a tremendous
single
leap
nine feet long
perhaps,
to go stretching into the
long limbed day,
young
strong
beautiful
forever.Yes.
Oh,
yes, yes, yes.
Jaguar Leaping in the Wind
My muse,
you
have liberated me from the rocks!Long reacher,
high stretcher,
you unfurl your body
a silk ribbon of skin
licking the midday wind,
and I look,oh how I look!
Woman,
it is a poet's duty,
aye,
a poet's pleasure,
to sing the tips of your fingers as claws,
the breadth of your hands as mitts,
the length of your limbs
outstretched and roaring
from your bosom,
as those of a jaguar in hunger
leaping from the rocks
toward
the hot neck of the sun.
Outrider
I unsheath
from my boot
3,000 wet tongues,
grim bladed
butterflies
sent out to riot in
the night,wing tips dark as hot razors
stained with the blood
of
a
long
haired
poet.I unsheath
these wet things,
hold them level
at sea,
one man standing
against
all comers,long haired, doublebraided,
point taken,
praying for hope against
the bellowing
sea
of
the
East.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Hangover Medicine
Coyote had been drinking too much whiskey when he left
the place where the group was camped.
He left because he wanted to go make pee.
He invited those who wished to attend
to come along.
Everybody said, "No!"
So coyote began to wander off
by himself
to go make his pee in private.
Then he turned around and told the others that
when his pee hardened,
it would become a solid lump of pure white gold,
but the others were wise to his tricks,
and so they said, "No! No way! Even we don't believe
you can turn your pee into riches.
Go along in your own peculiar way,
Coyote,
and make your pee without bothering us anymore.”So Coyote went along the tree line until
he found a nice clearing to put forth his water,
but he decided to rest
for a while before doing this,
and he passed out beneath the tree
he had been leaning on,
forgetting all about the necessity of putting out
the liquor he had poured into his belly.Next morning,
Coyote awoke with a pain in his innards.
"What is the trouble here?" he said,
"ohhh, why does my body ache so?"
He rubbed his belly all over and made several chants,
but nothing helped the aches go away.
Finally,
he got angry and grabbed hold of his member
and began to swing it around and choke it, saying,
"Look! What is wrong with me?
I feel so awful!
Help make me better!
Send the troublemaker who is giving me hell in my body
out your little hole so I can punish him!
Do it!"
Coyote flung his penis around
and threw it against some trees,he even caressed it and encouraged it to perform,
but not a thing was forthcoming.
He began to feel even worse,
but he was not worried yet.
He put some lotion on his member to heal the sores
and tucked it away in his pants.That is when he began talking to his anus.
"See here!" said Coyote to his anus,
"I have maligned and injured my own member
over this pain I feel in my body.
No matter what I do,
my penis,
my favorite,
won't even help rid me of my discomfort.
Help me, anus,
help me to expel the troublemaker at work in my body."
So saying,
Coyote dug a hole,
pulled down his trousers,
and squatted.
He began to strain with all his might.
He grunted. He waited.
He implored his anus to do its best,
and his face grew more red with each try.
Finally,
he grew tired from so much effort and rolled over onto his belly,
cursing his body for the weakness it showed
in expelling this nemesis from within him.By this time
Coyote could hardly move from the pain,
and his lower lip began to tremble,
and he could do nothing but try to cry.
He stayed that way for a while,
trying to cry,
but no tears came out either,
and he felt worse than ever.
He stayed that way for two whole days.After that,
he felt better,
and he got up and began moving around again.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
In the Avoidance of Women
I
Sidebelly had become aware of the moss on his belly
ever since the time of an early spring
twenty-six years ago when he was twenty-one years old
with a lean incisive body moving easily
through the pines,
running north,
as he had been doing without pause for water
or love
for six years in avoidance of the assumption of
responsibility
he was to take on as a man,
and what brought him down at the end of his youth
were the frequent and penetrating thrusts
of mental daggers being driven through his ear,
sharply and up to the hilt,
which upon further examination
would have proven only to have been
the thorns of wild roses fashioned into tiny darts
by the thin and nimble fingers of some
woman,
no doubt,
and he did, finally, break down smoothness of motion
of wind in hair
into fractured moments
of settling vertebrae and sharply distilled
moments of anxiety,
for he feared his people were yet on the trail
behind him.They weren't, of course,
they had failed to pursue five-and-a-half years back
after he had crossed the River of Separation,
the women moaning the loss of yet another
virile partner,
and he had come to rest slowly trembling,
driven down pointedly into supine immobility
by prayers and Wishes designed for his restraint.
By the Almighty Goddamn
they had caught up with him after all!
Hair by hair, finger by finger, toe by toe, cell by cell,
his breathing came deep
and the moss below his back gave way.
He could feel the breath of his bed exhale
near his ear telling him not to be afraid,
to rest,
that he needed rest,
and he closed his eyes and could feel the moss work
beneath his back and move up the sides of his belly,
taking over the responsibility of keeping him alive,
penetrating through his tissues,
extending through his veins, capillaries, arteries,
and enshrouding his heart
in the timeless revelatory muscle of the earth
as he slept.II
The terrifying complexity
of manufacturing a self contained internal reality
for nine still years spent while saddled motionless
to the back of the earth on a bed of soft spoken moss,
of course,
was not to be undertaken alone.But goddamn if the young Sidebelly was willing
to give up independence of strong, taut
manhood
without a fight for sole
or even partial possession of his tender mind,
no matter the teachers,
goddamn them all to hell with the
fruits and flowers they bring,
"I have been trying for six years to pound them
into dust,"
he told me, "six years to rid myself of their pursuit,
six years in avoidance of their mouths of
open and inviting tragedy,
six years spent hiding from their invasive minds,
six years working my muscles for prime
defense against their advancements,
I knew they would come too,
starting with Susie, of course,
goddamn her who kissed me first while pinning me
up against the wall
next to the garbage bin in the alley
behind the furniture store.
Six years,
six years,
goddamn them women, them witches,
them who spend the earnest moments before
the rise of the sun caressing,
oiling, and perfuming their legs and breasts
with their own juices,
combing and waiting to plait the magnificent length
of their hair under the beauty of the
polished crystal prism of mother’s making,
designed and crafted for the specific purpose
of dispersing the first rays of the morning throughout
the hair in the belief
that to hold the seven colors of the sun
was to hold the power necessary to enliven
the fibers of the hair which in turn,
when laid upon the pillow at night
and spread in imitation of the sun,
would successfully capture and blind a man
into meek submission of catering days;
days of heat and labor
spent under a malignant and difficult sun,
of strained breath spent through thin and dusty lips,
of brittle and confused moments
at the end of the day when conversation
with the woman
becomes necessary yet unavoidable and what is truly
needed is a cold beer
and an open window to the west –
a breeze would be too much for me to handle;
I would go insane in such pleasure of ease-
and goddamn
if she wouldn't then inhale the sun
into her belly at the close of the day,
swelling deeply
at the rush of performing
her daily admonition,
for she would have been stewing all day in her own
juices,
and speaking with the sun between her lips
of my failure to achieve the potency of manhood
in a dignified and respectful manner..."And of course,
it was worthless for Sidebelly to struggle,
dangerous even,
for he was being wrapped tighter to the back of
the Mother Earth
at each impulse of protest,
pulled in deeper to the Woman of all our fruits,
and he would eventually learn that to struggle
would be to relenquish an even greater part
of his masculinity,
but he succeeded in the end,
thankfully,
in securing a bit of his manhood
down and away
in a sack between his legs where they could not
get at it,
the witches.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Pollen Storm Blessing
There he spurneth dust of glittering grains;
How joyous his neigh,
There in mist of sacred pollen hidden, all hidden he;
How joyous his neigh,
There his offspring many grow and thrive forevermore;
How joyous his neigh!
-- from Song of the Horse, NavajoBahe would go to the spring hills to pray against the war. He thought he would attend the war if he had to. He wouldn’t run away from it, even though there was a new woman. With the new woman he had made a child. The child was four months old. He was called Siggy, after Sigurd, the woman’s father. Bahe called the woman Haansh’Taye, which in the Apache means “butterfly.” Her other name was Susie, but Bahe called her Haansh’Taye because he thought of her well shaped hands as delicate wings of the butterfly, and when she held his face between her hands he imagined that this was his only place of brief repose in all the world.
With the war threatening he spent as much time between there as possible. At night he would cry sometimes about having to leave his woman and son and he would ask her to hold his face between her hands and pray against the war. And she, while comforting him with her good words, would begin to cry as well. Then baby Siggy would wake up and start in too. At times like this when the small room would echo with wailing the air would suddenly become cold and it was ghostly when the air became filled with their own visible breath. The haze of their breathing turned blue like there was a neon light from outside their window shining in but there was none and neither he nor the woman knew anything about the blue haze, only that it frightened them and caused them, all three, to huddle against the terror on the corner on the bed. Everything fell away at such times, the hum of engines and the gears shifting over the streets, the sirens, the horns, the rough voices of the kids on the walk and the drunk rantings of husbands heavy on the bottle, everything, everything fell away into the heavy silence and then it was terribly lonely because they felt like they didn’t even have each other then. Bahe thought that this was the way it would be for his family if the war called him out.
There were always images that appeared in the blue haze. All the images were of men, brown men like Bahe himself, and young yet with hair like jet. The men would be stripped to the waist, their torsos lithe and tawny and shining with sweat as they danced around to old drums and sang. But neither Haansh’Taye nor Bahe could hear the drums or hear the men singing. There was just that silence. Bahe and his woman would look across that silence at each other and down at the baby like there was a wide and dark blue sea that separated them finally and completely and made communication impossible. They could only cry and watch the men dance. From the waist down they could see that the men wore fatigues and high black boots, army issue. Bahe knew the men. They were his relations, his ancestors, his uncles and great uncles, his grandfathers and his grandfathers’ brothers, all dead, all passed on in other wars. Only when Bahe and his family stopped crying would the images be gone. The haze would dissipate slowly and the room become warm again, like it ought to be on a spring evening.
So Bahe would go to the hills to pray against the war. He’d take Haansh’Taye with him, and she would place little Siggy into the cradle that Bahe was placed in when he was a baby, and she would strap this onto her back when they struck out onto the trail that led to the meadow where there was a stream and a falls that came down the hills.
One morning after crying all nigh long Bahe called into work and told them that he couldn’t make it, that he was sick. Then he rolled over and shook Haansh’Taye gently on the shoulder. “Haansh’Taye. It looks nice out there today. Let’s take a lunch and go to the hills.”
Haansh’Taye rolled over to face Bahe. Little Siggy lay between them. She stroked the baby’s face and looked up at Bahe. “Okay sweetie. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Did you call into work?”
“I called. I had to lie again, but they wouldn’t understand if I said the truth.”
“I know, sweets, I know.”
Baby didn’t wake until they were already in the truck. When he woke he began to cry. Haansh’Taye just placed a breast in his mouth. After a while he became full and yawned and was burped, then placed back into his special seat. The movement of the truck made him sleepy and pretty soon his head fell to one side.
Haansh’Taye had made for them a dinner of thick sliced cold roast beef along with some fried bread and roasted and peeled green chilis. They also had some coffee and an old percolator which was placed over the fire to heat. All this was placed into the backpack that Bahe carried, as well as a blanket and diapers for Siggy. They never ate breakfast on days they went to pray in the hills and always ate toward the evening when they were finished.
At the woods it was a warm day, and the sun was out high and strong. There was a breeze, and on the breeze there were fresh scents of pines and grasses and flowers. Bahe and Haansh’Taye got out of the truck and looked across the cab at each other and smiled. Haansh’Taye came around to where Bahe was leaning up against the hood and put her arms around him. She kissed him long and deep and their faces lingered next to each other and brought out new scents of skin against skin. This was a vital time for them, to be together like this in the morning air of the country after such a night as had passed where they each had been gripped and stifled in fear and an insurmountable loneliness that left them feeling they were 10,000 miles apart.
Bahe and Haansh’Taye had not planned to bear a child together. In fact, they had seen very little of each other after the first few times of love making, and even after Haansh’Taye was into the initial terms of her pregnancy they rarely spoke about establishing a life together. They found it difficult at first; it was a tremendous burden coming to appreciate one another. The love was not there. Only the sex and the anger and the fear. But now, they found themselves to be deeply wed, and the love had come and the baby had come and the commitment had come and then the war came and it all pressed them deeper into one another so they thought they could never be pried apart again. And then with the war came the cold blue hazes and the awful visions.
Baby Siggy let out a small gurgle from the cab of the truck. Bahe and Haansh’Taye parted with a final kiss and went about preparing for the hike into the woods. This was never a solemn affair for them. There was only joy and a deep sense of wonder and appreciation for life. With the spring there was always life renewed and this was a common bond between Bahe and Haansh’Taye and the land they walked on. Each day after every terrible night their little procession moved along the trail through the woods. They found themselves to be a part of a constant cycle of loss and coming together, of death and rebirth, and it made them feel as if nothing could touch them, that they had been make privy to an eternal secret. Even if Bahe were to go off to the war and die, maybe he wouldn’t really die after all, just go off to some other place to rest before coming back. But still, there were those terrible visions, and they came time and time again. Bahe thought that even if there were an ounce of fear left within him the visions would return again and again and perhaps he would find himself with his ancestors, dancing in the haze. So he prayed to let go of his fear. He prayed to be strong. He prayed against the war.
At the place where they make their camp near the stream there was a young and sturdy dogwood where Haansh’Taye hung baby Siggy in his cradle. The blossoms were just starting to form on the tree. Haansh’Taye stayed within earshot of the baby while she moved about the area in search of wood for the fire. Bahe went off alone towards to stream where the little waterfall was. He sat on a flat slab of granite which overlooked the small pool of water that the falls fell into. He produced a pouch which held his smoking mixture and from this rolled four cigarettes while making a song.
In times past when they had come to the hills it had been peaceful and serene but these days it was not so quiet. Fort Leonardrock was nearby and in full swing; all the troops were in heavy rotation. As Bahe smoked he could hear the heavy trucks rattle and heave over the washboard roads that criss-crossed the area they were camped in. The jets screamed around overhead and the explosions went off constantly. Bahe smoked and prayed while all this was going on, almost expecting to see from over the crest of the hill a movement of troops hupping doubletime through the woods. These things didn’t sit well with Bahe, but he felt it important that he place himself there in the midst of wartime preparations where his fear was at its strongest, thereby confronting the greatest looming cloud of his life at the place where it resided.
At pool’s edge beneath and across the way from where Bahe sat grew a wide ring of cattails. Beyond the cattails at the far edge was the meadow. The meadow sloped gently uphill from the stream bed and there on the hill the grasses waved in the breeze drawing Bahe’s attention gently and slowly and rhythmically so that everything, everything fell away like in the cold blue haze. The trucks, gone. The jets, gone. The explosions, gone. The troops, gone. Everything, gone. But this was no cold blue haze in a tiny room in a corner of the city. Here the canopy rose up high and spread out beneath the sky like a green wing, the tip of which brushed up against the meadow and rested there on the downstroke like the gesture of a mother protecting her young. From here Bahe peered out onto the meadow. He smoked his fourth cigarette. The grasses waved. The wildflowers nodded beneath the fat yellow glory of the afternoon sun and from the spaces between the leaves of the canopy shone the fat glory in wide bright angular beams down onto the edge of the stream on the forest floor. On the beams on the sun there came the pollen from the meadow. Slow, heavy, steady, a pollen storm blessing. Bahe breathed it in, and he breathed it out, smoking.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
The Barn Where It Was Dry
Spring was an awful time to be sick about losing a girl, especially after you let yourself get all caught up in it and gave yourself away by letting her get too close inside you where it started to matter what she said or did. It was something that couldn’t be gone back over and fixed so you were there on the edge of the land in the rain sleeping alone in a goddamned barn with the poison hurt of it. But in your pocket there was some money and a ticket back to the reservation at Mescalero even though it made you feel less of a man to be running away from it. The only token from the whole mess of the situation was the scar you carried away that showed you were capable of an emotional investment in somebody other than yourself. Up until then you were too chickenshit to bring anything up from within you that might lay you open to slaughter and yes, you were a fool to open up but you did it because you finally could and you wanted to be loved but were cut down and gored through instead.
Sometimes when it rained the horses would come up the hill across the meadow to be in the barn where it was dry. You could smell the oats and see the hay spread across the floor of the barn and underfoot the ground was clumpy and uneven with excrement. You hoped the horses would come but they didn’t come. Maybe the rain was not heavy enough. But the rain kept on. The rain kept on and didn’t let up. The horses stayed away.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go
After the snows on the next warm day there were the solo hikes along the old logging trails with a lunch of cheese and crackers and ham stuffed into a satchel slung over the shoulder. Where the trails go on the sides of the hills the snow melts and runs down like a clear brook and if you pause to bend down to it you can hear the water going over the rocks and falling onto itself. It’s wet going and sloppy at the low parts but the low parts are where the sun doesn’t come so it’s cooler and the air feels heavier because of the smell of earth and pines.
Up high along a ridge there is a pond where it’s hot in the afternoon and nice to lay about without a shirt and feel the wind across your chest like it was summer. There are tracks everywhere at the water and you’d even think you heard fish jumping but it would only be snow dropping from the young pines bowed over the edge of the pool. After a while everything would get lazy and hot and sleepy after eating and sketching or writing, and laying down on your back in the grass sleep would come and from way off a shrill whistled note and maybe you dreampt it and maybe you didn’t but it was there in your head and out over the high pines you’d feel something soaring and looking up through the pines you’d know the sky was a pure blue flame where the hawks go.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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Poems from a Friend
posted in Teachings on 7th Feb, 2021KEITH JAMES HAINES
Keith Haines, an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache tribe of south central New Mexico, was born in 1968 in Farmington, New Mexico to Jodee Yazza and Bruce Haines. When he was five years of age his biological mother passed away. Two years later, his father married Charlotte Hara, a Japanese American from Hawaii.
Growing up in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and spending a significant amount of time as a youth in Minnesota, Arizona, and Montana, he left home at seventeen after graduating high school to study art and literature at several universities.
Since leaving the trailer he grew up in, he has traveled extensively throughout the west and mid-west, supporting himself, among various occupations, as laborer, student, cook, pipe maker, ranch-hand, and mill worker. Keith passed away January 28, 2020; yet the legacy of his beautiful spirit through his art and poetry lives on.
Welcome. Here you will find several poems and stories I have written over the last several years, the earliest being The Dirt and the Weeds, and the latest, A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go. I am currently at work on a longer fictional piece entitled Horse of the Sun, same as the headline for this website. In addition, I have included a few pencil sketches of various subjects and plan to add several larger, more fully developed pieces when time and circumstance permit.Enjoy,Keith J. HainesPoetry
Hangover Medicine | In the Avoidance of Women | Fall Valley | The Dirt and the Weeds | On the Forest Floor | Amaranths In Dew | Poet Taking Rest | Second Note to a Past Lover | Under a Feeble Sun | This Desperate Threshhold | Nearing the Base of West Mountain | Spring Hills of Missouri | Penning Delicate Words | Summer River Wildflowers | Parched | Sweating at Meremec | Humming in the Wind | Horse Travel Through the Blues | Nectar | The Long Limbed Day | Jaguar Leaping in the Wind | Outrider
Stories
Pollen Storm Blessing | The Morning World | The Barn Where It Was Dry | A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go | Dog's Neck | Games of Chance and Get Even | Waterbug | Seven Colors of the Sun
Chap Books
The Barn Where It Was Dry, A Collection of short stories from a contemporary Native American artist
Drinking With the Women, Poems. Love, despair, and the ultimate joy of passionate living
The Dirt and the Weeds
This is my father's room.
He likes to call it his tiny box of bitter contemplation.
It rests here,
on the five hundredth and third floor
of a five hundred and three story building.
This blanket is the place where my father sits.
All but him are forbidden to rest here.
This blanket comes from the time when he lived
on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
when he held sway over the broad expanse of this area,
sitting in comfortable ease
and directing with subtle gestures of lips and fingers,
who should pull forth the sun across the sky,
who should govern the revolution of the seasons,
who should provide for the rebirth of the harvests,
and who should lead the flight of the bird across the arc of the sun
and back..It is from here
that my father once motioned for me to bend nearer his lips,
and I did so,
and he began to tell me of the time
when he lived on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
and what happened at dawn one morning
while he was preparing for the day.Long time ago, he told me,
some people who he had never seen came to him
and asked him to leave the spot where he was camped,
but he said, "No. I have been here such a long time already."
One of them then replied, "Well, old man, it is no matter.
We are a gracious people, and we have decided
that we will allow you to remain in the spot you have chosen.
But since you refuse to be displaced outward,"
he told my father,
“we shall simply displace you upward.
In addition,
we have decided that we must lay down our cement rug beneath you
and your blanket,
so if you'll step aside, please, thank you."
My father stepped aside, bewildered.
"Larry," said the man,
get your men over here and lay down a cement slab."
Turning back to my father, he said,
"As well, we have decided that we would like to
build up our walls
around you, and in so doing,
we will raise you to a place
where neither you nor your people have ever been."
"Where is that?" my father asked.
“Old man," he was told,
“prepare for your ascent into heaven. Frank?
Gather your men.
Four walls and a ceiling, please."
My father folded his blanket over the wet cement
and sat down on top of it.
"I am fine here," he said,
and the four walls and the ceiling
began to close in around him.The people who were gathered near,
becoming more and more by the minute,
then raised their hands to the sky
and summoned forth from the ground beneath my
father a powerful movement,
setting into motion the rise of a massive
four-cornered structure made of brick and steel.The tremendous rumbling caused by such an event
was said to have been felt across the plains,
where a sleeping cloud mistook the rumble for
thunder and began to pour forth its rain,
over the mountains,
where the Spine of God is said to have trembled,
through the basins,
where the fruits of the trees
were moved to fall from their branches,
and down into the sea
where the dust was shaken from the shoulder of
the land.And so began the ascension of my father
into this place called heaven.
Now,
when I sit with him,
he likes to tell me that he is still able,
when he closes his eyes,
to hear the weeds in the wind,
blowing their music close to the ground.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
On the Forest Floor
Now,
even the most gentle of female rains
brings down the early dogwood
blossoms,
once white,
now stained pink and red
as if bruised and wounded,
sent to the forest floor
to bleed quietly in the shade.The petals are dirty
are cut and bleeding,
and looking closely,
their hurt faces plead into mine.But what can I do?
I gather a handful,
six or seven,
and begin to shout around about the glory of these
fallen criers of
Spring’s army of joy,
naming the days of their bannered and heralded births,
touting the courage of first blossoms,
and going on about their short lives of timeless purity.Afterward,
I let the petals drop from my fingers,
watch them come to rest
on last Autumn’s leaves,
now dead one full season
and resting with new stories
of the Winterfor the telling to
the freshly fallen dead
of Spring’s army of joy.
Amaranths In Dew
I am a whisperer of the moment,
a piner at the edge of gardens,
a drunk gaper of endless petals,in whose curves
I see the hearts
of potential lovers,wet amaranths
in dew.
Poet Taking Rest
My lover,
I admire the length
and grace
of your well-shaped hands,
delicate wings of the butterfly
pressed tightly together
in prayer,
and in between them,
my only thin asylum
of brief repose.
Second Note to a Past Lover
I do not think of it as folly
to spend all my time dreaming
of your touch,
but I do suffer terrible embarrassment from
those who would say I am
foolishly enamoured with one
whom I am not familiar with
in the least.Nevertheless,
I will continue
to persist in this behavior,
foolish as it may appear to
those lacking in any sense
of romantic abandon, and
it would be to them that I
would simply say that I take
extreme pleasure in the
weaving of this thought of silk
through the 10,000 crests of
the waters
that separate us.
This Desperate Threshhold
At this desperate threshold,
look how white my knuckles –I can’t face wine,
not like I used to.
Not anymore.Oh,
my most admired romancer
of the most strange and terrible nights,
where will I turn
if not to your sopping invitation?You have pulled me too far apart,
at my own request –
I could not ask you
to pull me back together.I have sought out your freeing waters,
often as I could,
for more than a century,
but I have grown weary
of raising your implements to my lips.Understand,
I have loved you more
than I have loved my women.At this desperate threshold,
my friend,
look how white my knuckles,
but look how clear my eyes.
Nearing the Base of West Mountain
In the foothills to the East
there is pollen.I am coming in the pollen.
The pollen falls upon my hair
and streams across my eyes,and in my hair
there is a breeze.
Spring Hills of Missouri
Over endless lakeside hills,
unfolding forests
show spring blossoms,
white lace
airing
among the dogwood
and the plum.
Penning Delicate Words
What fine silk
moves through these trembling
fingertips
but
what an array of dusty stallions
courses through my wrist.A timeless dripping sun
labors over me,
yet
I do not sweat as I pen these delicate
words for you.
Summer River Wildflowers
At riverside,
in the waning days of summer,
I part eight blossoms
from their stems.Later,
wearing the flowers,
I stand waist-deep
in Summer River,
gathering drifting leaves
from beyond Summer River’s bluffs.
Fall Valley
Out here,
all my crushes
are on
divine
sugar maple forests.It’s Fall.
Devastated,
I roam the valley
for a
Summer flower.
Parched
These three desperate throats,
in the wake of such a malignant sun,
where
in this endless brown valley
can we find wine?(These horses are but ashy silhouettes).
What a shabby and dissolute arrangement
has been laid out for us!
Is there left a cool breast
to appeal to?Oh, our dry and tongueless bellow!
Sweating at Meremec
What is there that can restrain joy?
Not me!
These pores on my back-
with what joy they sweat!What a time this is
to radiate with expansiveness and light.
These people around me,
these fine days we are spending together,
such laughter!Under these trees,
in this universe,
we are so small,
yet with joy look how long and wide we reach,
and how deep!
Humming In the Wind
All day
Beneath the hot sun
I thought of you.Thought of how
My love for you is likeTen thousand bright blossoms
Humming in the wind.
Horse Travel Through the Blues
My blue gaze rides
toward
her breast
like dusk
moves
between mountains:deeper,
wetter,
greener,
coller,
roaming and
loping
with heavy melancholia.This
is
the nature
of horse travel through the blues,
stepping through rivers,
noting the shorelines
flowered
and
hung,
bending in the saddle
to part blossom
from stem -true and desperate acts
performed
at dusk
during a cool and
loveless
summer.
Nectar
Isn't love, too,
proclaimed to be at it's most
dangerous
when new,
like the poison of a
young snake?And which is the greater danger?
Love, leaning nearby, musky and aromatic,
or the capable length of a snake?From either tongue
drips nectar from the body
like dew
from the bud.
The Long Limbed Day
She is a lean figure
curved against the window,
a limber boiugh
hung heavy with foliage in the sun,
lithe body drawn from
the sinew and supple muscle
of the
slender
forest deer.In her bare arms
and in her naked shoulders
I witness the
heightened
and tightened
awareness of a doe's limbs, prepared
at any instant
to bound off in a tremendous
single
leap
nine feet long
perhaps,
to go stretching into the
long limbed day,
young
strong
beautiful
forever.Yes.
Oh,
yes, yes, yes.
Jaguar Leaping in the Wind
My muse,
you
have liberated me from the rocks!Long reacher,
high stretcher,
you unfurl your body
a silk ribbon of skin
licking the midday wind,
and I look,oh how I look!
Woman,
it is a poet's duty,
aye,
a poet's pleasure,
to sing the tips of your fingers as claws,
the breadth of your hands as mitts,
the length of your limbs
outstretched and roaring
from your bosom,
as those of a jaguar in hunger
leaping from the rocks
toward
the hot neck of the sun.
Outrider
I unsheath
from my boot
3,000 wet tongues,
grim bladed
butterflies
sent out to riot in
the night,wing tips dark as hot razors
stained with the blood
of
a
long
haired
poet.I unsheath
these wet things,
hold them level
at sea,
one man standing
against
all comers,long haired, doublebraided,
point taken,
praying for hope against
the bellowing
sea
of
the
East.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Hangover Medicine
Coyote had been drinking too much whiskey when he left
the place where the group was camped.
He left because he wanted to go make pee.
He invited those who wished to attend
to come along.
Everybody said, "No!"
So coyote began to wander off
by himself
to go make his pee in private.
Then he turned around and told the others that
when his pee hardened,
it would become a solid lump of pure white gold,
but the others were wise to his tricks,
and so they said, "No! No way! Even we don't believe
you can turn your pee into riches.
Go along in your own peculiar way,
Coyote,
and make your pee without bothering us anymore.”So Coyote went along the tree line until
he found a nice clearing to put forth his water,
but he decided to rest
for a while before doing this,
and he passed out beneath the tree
he had been leaning on,
forgetting all about the necessity of putting out
the liquor he had poured into his belly.Next morning,
Coyote awoke with a pain in his innards.
"What is the trouble here?" he said,
"ohhh, why does my body ache so?"
He rubbed his belly all over and made several chants,
but nothing helped the aches go away.
Finally,
he got angry and grabbed hold of his member
and began to swing it around and choke it, saying,
"Look! What is wrong with me?
I feel so awful!
Help make me better!
Send the troublemaker who is giving me hell in my body
out your little hole so I can punish him!
Do it!"
Coyote flung his penis around
and threw it against some trees,he even caressed it and encouraged it to perform,
but not a thing was forthcoming.
He began to feel even worse,
but he was not worried yet.
He put some lotion on his member to heal the sores
and tucked it away in his pants.That is when he began talking to his anus.
"See here!" said Coyote to his anus,
"I have maligned and injured my own member
over this pain I feel in my body.
No matter what I do,
my penis,
my favorite,
won't even help rid me of my discomfort.
Help me, anus,
help me to expel the troublemaker at work in my body."
So saying,
Coyote dug a hole,
pulled down his trousers,
and squatted.
He began to strain with all his might.
He grunted. He waited.
He implored his anus to do its best,
and his face grew more red with each try.
Finally,
he grew tired from so much effort and rolled over onto his belly,
cursing his body for the weakness it showed
in expelling this nemesis from within him.By this time
Coyote could hardly move from the pain,
and his lower lip began to tremble,
and he could do nothing but try to cry.
He stayed that way for a while,
trying to cry,
but no tears came out either,
and he felt worse than ever.
He stayed that way for two whole days.After that,
he felt better,
and he got up and began moving around again.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
In the Avoidance of Women
I
Sidebelly had become aware of the moss on his belly
ever since the time of an early spring
twenty-six years ago when he was twenty-one years old
with a lean incisive body moving easily
through the pines,
running north,
as he had been doing without pause for water
or love
for six years in avoidance of the assumption of
responsibility
he was to take on as a man,
and what brought him down at the end of his youth
were the frequent and penetrating thrusts
of mental daggers being driven through his ear,
sharply and up to the hilt,
which upon further examination
would have proven only to have been
the thorns of wild roses fashioned into tiny darts
by the thin and nimble fingers of some
woman,
no doubt,
and he did, finally, break down smoothness of motion
of wind in hair
into fractured moments
of settling vertebrae and sharply distilled
moments of anxiety,
for he feared his people were yet on the trail
behind him.They weren't, of course,
they had failed to pursue five-and-a-half years back
after he had crossed the River of Separation,
the women moaning the loss of yet another
virile partner,
and he had come to rest slowly trembling,
driven down pointedly into supine immobility
by prayers and Wishes designed for his restraint.
By the Almighty Goddamn
they had caught up with him after all!
Hair by hair, finger by finger, toe by toe, cell by cell,
his breathing came deep
and the moss below his back gave way.
He could feel the breath of his bed exhale
near his ear telling him not to be afraid,
to rest,
that he needed rest,
and he closed his eyes and could feel the moss work
beneath his back and move up the sides of his belly,
taking over the responsibility of keeping him alive,
penetrating through his tissues,
extending through his veins, capillaries, arteries,
and enshrouding his heart
in the timeless revelatory muscle of the earth
as he slept.II
The terrifying complexity
of manufacturing a self contained internal reality
for nine still years spent while saddled motionless
to the back of the earth on a bed of soft spoken moss,
of course,
was not to be undertaken alone.But goddamn if the young Sidebelly was willing
to give up independence of strong, taut
manhood
without a fight for sole
or even partial possession of his tender mind,
no matter the teachers,
goddamn them all to hell with the
fruits and flowers they bring,
"I have been trying for six years to pound them
into dust,"
he told me, "six years to rid myself of their pursuit,
six years in avoidance of their mouths of
open and inviting tragedy,
six years spent hiding from their invasive minds,
six years working my muscles for prime
defense against their advancements,
I knew they would come too,
starting with Susie, of course,
goddamn her who kissed me first while pinning me
up against the wall
next to the garbage bin in the alley
behind the furniture store.
Six years,
six years,
goddamn them women, them witches,
them who spend the earnest moments before
the rise of the sun caressing,
oiling, and perfuming their legs and breasts
with their own juices,
combing and waiting to plait the magnificent length
of their hair under the beauty of the
polished crystal prism of mother’s making,
designed and crafted for the specific purpose
of dispersing the first rays of the morning throughout
the hair in the belief
that to hold the seven colors of the sun
was to hold the power necessary to enliven
the fibers of the hair which in turn,
when laid upon the pillow at night
and spread in imitation of the sun,
would successfully capture and blind a man
into meek submission of catering days;
days of heat and labor
spent under a malignant and difficult sun,
of strained breath spent through thin and dusty lips,
of brittle and confused moments
at the end of the day when conversation
with the woman
becomes necessary yet unavoidable and what is truly
needed is a cold beer
and an open window to the west –
a breeze would be too much for me to handle;
I would go insane in such pleasure of ease-
and goddamn
if she wouldn't then inhale the sun
into her belly at the close of the day,
swelling deeply
at the rush of performing
her daily admonition,
for she would have been stewing all day in her own
juices,
and speaking with the sun between her lips
of my failure to achieve the potency of manhood
in a dignified and respectful manner..."And of course,
it was worthless for Sidebelly to struggle,
dangerous even,
for he was being wrapped tighter to the back of
the Mother Earth
at each impulse of protest,
pulled in deeper to the Woman of all our fruits,
and he would eventually learn that to struggle
would be to relenquish an even greater part
of his masculinity,
but he succeeded in the end,
thankfully,
in securing a bit of his manhood
down and away
in a sack between his legs where they could not
get at it,
the witches.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Pollen Storm Blessing
There he spurneth dust of glittering grains;
How joyous his neigh,
There in mist of sacred pollen hidden, all hidden he;
How joyous his neigh,
There his offspring many grow and thrive forevermore;
How joyous his neigh!
-- from Song of the Horse, NavajoBahe would go to the spring hills to pray against the war. He thought he would attend the war if he had to. He wouldn’t run away from it, even though there was a new woman. With the new woman he had made a child. The child was four months old. He was called Siggy, after Sigurd, the woman’s father. Bahe called the woman Haansh’Taye, which in the Apache means “butterfly.” Her other name was Susie, but Bahe called her Haansh’Taye because he thought of her well shaped hands as delicate wings of the butterfly, and when she held his face between her hands he imagined that this was his only place of brief repose in all the world.
With the war threatening he spent as much time between there as possible. At night he would cry sometimes about having to leave his woman and son and he would ask her to hold his face between her hands and pray against the war. And she, while comforting him with her good words, would begin to cry as well. Then baby Siggy would wake up and start in too. At times like this when the small room would echo with wailing the air would suddenly become cold and it was ghostly when the air became filled with their own visible breath. The haze of their breathing turned blue like there was a neon light from outside their window shining in but there was none and neither he nor the woman knew anything about the blue haze, only that it frightened them and caused them, all three, to huddle against the terror on the corner on the bed. Everything fell away at such times, the hum of engines and the gears shifting over the streets, the sirens, the horns, the rough voices of the kids on the walk and the drunk rantings of husbands heavy on the bottle, everything, everything fell away into the heavy silence and then it was terribly lonely because they felt like they didn’t even have each other then. Bahe thought that this was the way it would be for his family if the war called him out.
There were always images that appeared in the blue haze. All the images were of men, brown men like Bahe himself, and young yet with hair like jet. The men would be stripped to the waist, their torsos lithe and tawny and shining with sweat as they danced around to old drums and sang. But neither Haansh’Taye nor Bahe could hear the drums or hear the men singing. There was just that silence. Bahe and his woman would look across that silence at each other and down at the baby like there was a wide and dark blue sea that separated them finally and completely and made communication impossible. They could only cry and watch the men dance. From the waist down they could see that the men wore fatigues and high black boots, army issue. Bahe knew the men. They were his relations, his ancestors, his uncles and great uncles, his grandfathers and his grandfathers’ brothers, all dead, all passed on in other wars. Only when Bahe and his family stopped crying would the images be gone. The haze would dissipate slowly and the room become warm again, like it ought to be on a spring evening.
So Bahe would go to the hills to pray against the war. He’d take Haansh’Taye with him, and she would place little Siggy into the cradle that Bahe was placed in when he was a baby, and she would strap this onto her back when they struck out onto the trail that led to the meadow where there was a stream and a falls that came down the hills.
One morning after crying all nigh long Bahe called into work and told them that he couldn’t make it, that he was sick. Then he rolled over and shook Haansh’Taye gently on the shoulder. “Haansh’Taye. It looks nice out there today. Let’s take a lunch and go to the hills.”
Haansh’Taye rolled over to face Bahe. Little Siggy lay between them. She stroked the baby’s face and looked up at Bahe. “Okay sweetie. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Did you call into work?”
“I called. I had to lie again, but they wouldn’t understand if I said the truth.”
“I know, sweets, I know.”
Baby didn’t wake until they were already in the truck. When he woke he began to cry. Haansh’Taye just placed a breast in his mouth. After a while he became full and yawned and was burped, then placed back into his special seat. The movement of the truck made him sleepy and pretty soon his head fell to one side.
Haansh’Taye had made for them a dinner of thick sliced cold roast beef along with some fried bread and roasted and peeled green chilis. They also had some coffee and an old percolator which was placed over the fire to heat. All this was placed into the backpack that Bahe carried, as well as a blanket and diapers for Siggy. They never ate breakfast on days they went to pray in the hills and always ate toward the evening when they were finished.
At the woods it was a warm day, and the sun was out high and strong. There was a breeze, and on the breeze there were fresh scents of pines and grasses and flowers. Bahe and Haansh’Taye got out of the truck and looked across the cab at each other and smiled. Haansh’Taye came around to where Bahe was leaning up against the hood and put her arms around him. She kissed him long and deep and their faces lingered next to each other and brought out new scents of skin against skin. This was a vital time for them, to be together like this in the morning air of the country after such a night as had passed where they each had been gripped and stifled in fear and an insurmountable loneliness that left them feeling they were 10,000 miles apart.
Bahe and Haansh’Taye had not planned to bear a child together. In fact, they had seen very little of each other after the first few times of love making, and even after Haansh’Taye was into the initial terms of her pregnancy they rarely spoke about establishing a life together. They found it difficult at first; it was a tremendous burden coming to appreciate one another. The love was not there. Only the sex and the anger and the fear. But now, they found themselves to be deeply wed, and the love had come and the baby had come and the commitment had come and then the war came and it all pressed them deeper into one another so they thought they could never be pried apart again. And then with the war came the cold blue hazes and the awful visions.
Baby Siggy let out a small gurgle from the cab of the truck. Bahe and Haansh’Taye parted with a final kiss and went about preparing for the hike into the woods. This was never a solemn affair for them. There was only joy and a deep sense of wonder and appreciation for life. With the spring there was always life renewed and this was a common bond between Bahe and Haansh’Taye and the land they walked on. Each day after every terrible night their little procession moved along the trail through the woods. They found themselves to be a part of a constant cycle of loss and coming together, of death and rebirth, and it made them feel as if nothing could touch them, that they had been make privy to an eternal secret. Even if Bahe were to go off to the war and die, maybe he wouldn’t really die after all, just go off to some other place to rest before coming back. But still, there were those terrible visions, and they came time and time again. Bahe thought that even if there were an ounce of fear left within him the visions would return again and again and perhaps he would find himself with his ancestors, dancing in the haze. So he prayed to let go of his fear. He prayed to be strong. He prayed against the war.
At the place where they make their camp near the stream there was a young and sturdy dogwood where Haansh’Taye hung baby Siggy in his cradle. The blossoms were just starting to form on the tree. Haansh’Taye stayed within earshot of the baby while she moved about the area in search of wood for the fire. Bahe went off alone towards to stream where the little waterfall was. He sat on a flat slab of granite which overlooked the small pool of water that the falls fell into. He produced a pouch which held his smoking mixture and from this rolled four cigarettes while making a song.
In times past when they had come to the hills it had been peaceful and serene but these days it was not so quiet. Fort Leonardrock was nearby and in full swing; all the troops were in heavy rotation. As Bahe smoked he could hear the heavy trucks rattle and heave over the washboard roads that criss-crossed the area they were camped in. The jets screamed around overhead and the explosions went off constantly. Bahe smoked and prayed while all this was going on, almost expecting to see from over the crest of the hill a movement of troops hupping doubletime through the woods. These things didn’t sit well with Bahe, but he felt it important that he place himself there in the midst of wartime preparations where his fear was at its strongest, thereby confronting the greatest looming cloud of his life at the place where it resided.
At pool’s edge beneath and across the way from where Bahe sat grew a wide ring of cattails. Beyond the cattails at the far edge was the meadow. The meadow sloped gently uphill from the stream bed and there on the hill the grasses waved in the breeze drawing Bahe’s attention gently and slowly and rhythmically so that everything, everything fell away like in the cold blue haze. The trucks, gone. The jets, gone. The explosions, gone. The troops, gone. Everything, gone. But this was no cold blue haze in a tiny room in a corner of the city. Here the canopy rose up high and spread out beneath the sky like a green wing, the tip of which brushed up against the meadow and rested there on the downstroke like the gesture of a mother protecting her young. From here Bahe peered out onto the meadow. He smoked his fourth cigarette. The grasses waved. The wildflowers nodded beneath the fat yellow glory of the afternoon sun and from the spaces between the leaves of the canopy shone the fat glory in wide bright angular beams down onto the edge of the stream on the forest floor. On the beams on the sun there came the pollen from the meadow. Slow, heavy, steady, a pollen storm blessing. Bahe breathed it in, and he breathed it out, smoking.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
The Barn Where It Was Dry
Spring was an awful time to be sick about losing a girl, especially after you let yourself get all caught up in it and gave yourself away by letting her get too close inside you where it started to matter what she said or did. It was something that couldn’t be gone back over and fixed so you were there on the edge of the land in the rain sleeping alone in a goddamned barn with the poison hurt of it. But in your pocket there was some money and a ticket back to the reservation at Mescalero even though it made you feel less of a man to be running away from it. The only token from the whole mess of the situation was the scar you carried away that showed you were capable of an emotional investment in somebody other than yourself. Up until then you were too chickenshit to bring anything up from within you that might lay you open to slaughter and yes, you were a fool to open up but you did it because you finally could and you wanted to be loved but were cut down and gored through instead.
Sometimes when it rained the horses would come up the hill across the meadow to be in the barn where it was dry. You could smell the oats and see the hay spread across the floor of the barn and underfoot the ground was clumpy and uneven with excrement. You hoped the horses would come but they didn’t come. Maybe the rain was not heavy enough. But the rain kept on. The rain kept on and didn’t let up. The horses stayed away.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go
After the snows on the next warm day there were the solo hikes along the old logging trails with a lunch of cheese and crackers and ham stuffed into a satchel slung over the shoulder. Where the trails go on the sides of the hills the snow melts and runs down like a clear brook and if you pause to bend down to it you can hear the water going over the rocks and falling onto itself. It’s wet going and sloppy at the low parts but the low parts are where the sun doesn’t come so it’s cooler and the air feels heavier because of the smell of earth and pines.
Up high along a ridge there is a pond where it’s hot in the afternoon and nice to lay about without a shirt and feel the wind across your chest like it was summer. There are tracks everywhere at the water and you’d even think you heard fish jumping but it would only be snow dropping from the young pines bowed over the edge of the pool. After a while everything would get lazy and hot and sleepy after eating and sketching or writing, and laying down on your back in the grass sleep would come and from way off a shrill whistled note and maybe you dreampt it and maybe you didn’t but it was there in your head and out over the high pines you’d feel something soaring and looking up through the pines you’d know the sky was a pure blue flame where the hawks go.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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Poems from a Friend
posted in Teachings on 7th Feb, 2021KEITH JAMES HAINES
Keith Haines, an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache tribe of south central New Mexico, was born in 1968 in Farmington, New Mexico to Jodee Yazza and Bruce Haines. When he was five years of age his biological mother passed away. Two years later, his father married Charlotte Hara, a Japanese American from Hawaii.
Growing up in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and spending a significant amount of time as a youth in Minnesota, Arizona, and Montana, he left home at seventeen after graduating high school to study art and literature at several universities.
Since leaving the trailer he grew up in, he has traveled extensively throughout the west and mid-west, supporting himself, among various occupations, as laborer, student, cook, pipe maker, ranch-hand, and mill worker. Keith passed away January 28, 2020; yet the legacy of his beautiful spirit through his art and poetry lives on.
Welcome. Here you will find several poems and stories I have written over the last several years, the earliest being The Dirt and the Weeds, and the latest, A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go. I am currently at work on a longer fictional piece entitled Horse of the Sun, same as the headline for this website. In addition, I have included a few pencil sketches of various subjects and plan to add several larger, more fully developed pieces when time and circumstance permit.Enjoy,Keith J. HainesPoetry
Hangover Medicine | In the Avoidance of Women | Fall Valley | The Dirt and the Weeds | On the Forest Floor | Amaranths In Dew | Poet Taking Rest | Second Note to a Past Lover | Under a Feeble Sun | This Desperate Threshhold | Nearing the Base of West Mountain | Spring Hills of Missouri | Penning Delicate Words | Summer River Wildflowers | Parched | Sweating at Meremec | Humming in the Wind | Horse Travel Through the Blues | Nectar | The Long Limbed Day | Jaguar Leaping in the Wind | Outrider
Stories
Pollen Storm Blessing | The Morning World | The Barn Where It Was Dry | A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go | Dog's Neck | Games of Chance and Get Even | Waterbug | Seven Colors of the Sun
Chap Books
The Barn Where It Was Dry, A Collection of short stories from a contemporary Native American artist
Drinking With the Women, Poems. Love, despair, and the ultimate joy of passionate living
The Dirt and the Weeds
This is my father's room.
He likes to call it his tiny box of bitter contemplation.
It rests here,
on the five hundredth and third floor
of a five hundred and three story building.
This blanket is the place where my father sits.
All but him are forbidden to rest here.
This blanket comes from the time when he lived
on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
when he held sway over the broad expanse of this area,
sitting in comfortable ease
and directing with subtle gestures of lips and fingers,
who should pull forth the sun across the sky,
who should govern the revolution of the seasons,
who should provide for the rebirth of the harvests,
and who should lead the flight of the bird across the arc of the sun
and back..It is from here
that my father once motioned for me to bend nearer his lips,
and I did so,
and he began to tell me of the time
when he lived on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
and what happened at dawn one morning
while he was preparing for the day.Long time ago, he told me,
some people who he had never seen came to him
and asked him to leave the spot where he was camped,
but he said, "No. I have been here such a long time already."
One of them then replied, "Well, old man, it is no matter.
We are a gracious people, and we have decided
that we will allow you to remain in the spot you have chosen.
But since you refuse to be displaced outward,"
he told my father,
“we shall simply displace you upward.
In addition,
we have decided that we must lay down our cement rug beneath you
and your blanket,
so if you'll step aside, please, thank you."
My father stepped aside, bewildered.
"Larry," said the man,
get your men over here and lay down a cement slab."
Turning back to my father, he said,
"As well, we have decided that we would like to
build up our walls
around you, and in so doing,
we will raise you to a place
where neither you nor your people have ever been."
"Where is that?" my father asked.
“Old man," he was told,
“prepare for your ascent into heaven. Frank?
Gather your men.
Four walls and a ceiling, please."
My father folded his blanket over the wet cement
and sat down on top of it.
"I am fine here," he said,
and the four walls and the ceiling
began to close in around him.The people who were gathered near,
becoming more and more by the minute,
then raised their hands to the sky
and summoned forth from the ground beneath my
father a powerful movement,
setting into motion the rise of a massive
four-cornered structure made of brick and steel.The tremendous rumbling caused by such an event
was said to have been felt across the plains,
where a sleeping cloud mistook the rumble for
thunder and began to pour forth its rain,
over the mountains,
where the Spine of God is said to have trembled,
through the basins,
where the fruits of the trees
were moved to fall from their branches,
and down into the sea
where the dust was shaken from the shoulder of
the land.And so began the ascension of my father
into this place called heaven.
Now,
when I sit with him,
he likes to tell me that he is still able,
when he closes his eyes,
to hear the weeds in the wind,
blowing their music close to the ground.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
On the Forest Floor
Now,
even the most gentle of female rains
brings down the early dogwood
blossoms,
once white,
now stained pink and red
as if bruised and wounded,
sent to the forest floor
to bleed quietly in the shade.The petals are dirty
are cut and bleeding,
and looking closely,
their hurt faces plead into mine.But what can I do?
I gather a handful,
six or seven,
and begin to shout around about the glory of these
fallen criers of
Spring’s army of joy,
naming the days of their bannered and heralded births,
touting the courage of first blossoms,
and going on about their short lives of timeless purity.Afterward,
I let the petals drop from my fingers,
watch them come to rest
on last Autumn’s leaves,
now dead one full season
and resting with new stories
of the Winterfor the telling to
the freshly fallen dead
of Spring’s army of joy.
Amaranths In Dew
I am a whisperer of the moment,
a piner at the edge of gardens,
a drunk gaper of endless petals,in whose curves
I see the hearts
of potential lovers,wet amaranths
in dew.
Poet Taking Rest
My lover,
I admire the length
and grace
of your well-shaped hands,
delicate wings of the butterfly
pressed tightly together
in prayer,
and in between them,
my only thin asylum
of brief repose.
Second Note to a Past Lover
I do not think of it as folly
to spend all my time dreaming
of your touch,
but I do suffer terrible embarrassment from
those who would say I am
foolishly enamoured with one
whom I am not familiar with
in the least.Nevertheless,
I will continue
to persist in this behavior,
foolish as it may appear to
those lacking in any sense
of romantic abandon, and
it would be to them that I
would simply say that I take
extreme pleasure in the
weaving of this thought of silk
through the 10,000 crests of
the waters
that separate us.
This Desperate Threshhold
At this desperate threshold,
look how white my knuckles –I can’t face wine,
not like I used to.
Not anymore.Oh,
my most admired romancer
of the most strange and terrible nights,
where will I turn
if not to your sopping invitation?You have pulled me too far apart,
at my own request –
I could not ask you
to pull me back together.I have sought out your freeing waters,
often as I could,
for more than a century,
but I have grown weary
of raising your implements to my lips.Understand,
I have loved you more
than I have loved my women.At this desperate threshold,
my friend,
look how white my knuckles,
but look how clear my eyes.
Nearing the Base of West Mountain
In the foothills to the East
there is pollen.I am coming in the pollen.
The pollen falls upon my hair
and streams across my eyes,and in my hair
there is a breeze.
Spring Hills of Missouri
Over endless lakeside hills,
unfolding forests
show spring blossoms,
white lace
airing
among the dogwood
and the plum.
Penning Delicate Words
What fine silk
moves through these trembling
fingertips
but
what an array of dusty stallions
courses through my wrist.A timeless dripping sun
labors over me,
yet
I do not sweat as I pen these delicate
words for you.
Summer River Wildflowers
At riverside,
in the waning days of summer,
I part eight blossoms
from their stems.Later,
wearing the flowers,
I stand waist-deep
in Summer River,
gathering drifting leaves
from beyond Summer River’s bluffs.
Fall Valley
Out here,
all my crushes
are on
divine
sugar maple forests.It’s Fall.
Devastated,
I roam the valley
for a
Summer flower.
Parched
These three desperate throats,
in the wake of such a malignant sun,
where
in this endless brown valley
can we find wine?(These horses are but ashy silhouettes).
What a shabby and dissolute arrangement
has been laid out for us!
Is there left a cool breast
to appeal to?Oh, our dry and tongueless bellow!
Sweating at Meremec
What is there that can restrain joy?
Not me!
These pores on my back-
with what joy they sweat!What a time this is
to radiate with expansiveness and light.
These people around me,
these fine days we are spending together,
such laughter!Under these trees,
in this universe,
we are so small,
yet with joy look how long and wide we reach,
and how deep!
Humming In the Wind
All day
Beneath the hot sun
I thought of you.Thought of how
My love for you is likeTen thousand bright blossoms
Humming in the wind.
Horse Travel Through the Blues
My blue gaze rides
toward
her breast
like dusk
moves
between mountains:deeper,
wetter,
greener,
coller,
roaming and
loping
with heavy melancholia.This
is
the nature
of horse travel through the blues,
stepping through rivers,
noting the shorelines
flowered
and
hung,
bending in the saddle
to part blossom
from stem -true and desperate acts
performed
at dusk
during a cool and
loveless
summer.
Nectar
Isn't love, too,
proclaimed to be at it's most
dangerous
when new,
like the poison of a
young snake?And which is the greater danger?
Love, leaning nearby, musky and aromatic,
or the capable length of a snake?From either tongue
drips nectar from the body
like dew
from the bud.
The Long Limbed Day
She is a lean figure
curved against the window,
a limber boiugh
hung heavy with foliage in the sun,
lithe body drawn from
the sinew and supple muscle
of the
slender
forest deer.In her bare arms
and in her naked shoulders
I witness the
heightened
and tightened
awareness of a doe's limbs, prepared
at any instant
to bound off in a tremendous
single
leap
nine feet long
perhaps,
to go stretching into the
long limbed day,
young
strong
beautiful
forever.Yes.
Oh,
yes, yes, yes.
Jaguar Leaping in the Wind
My muse,
you
have liberated me from the rocks!Long reacher,
high stretcher,
you unfurl your body
a silk ribbon of skin
licking the midday wind,
and I look,oh how I look!
Woman,
it is a poet's duty,
aye,
a poet's pleasure,
to sing the tips of your fingers as claws,
the breadth of your hands as mitts,
the length of your limbs
outstretched and roaring
from your bosom,
as those of a jaguar in hunger
leaping from the rocks
toward
the hot neck of the sun.
Outrider
I unsheath
from my boot
3,000 wet tongues,
grim bladed
butterflies
sent out to riot in
the night,wing tips dark as hot razors
stained with the blood
of
a
long
haired
poet.I unsheath
these wet things,
hold them level
at sea,
one man standing
against
all comers,long haired, doublebraided,
point taken,
praying for hope against
the bellowing
sea
of
the
East.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Hangover Medicine
Coyote had been drinking too much whiskey when he left
the place where the group was camped.
He left because he wanted to go make pee.
He invited those who wished to attend
to come along.
Everybody said, "No!"
So coyote began to wander off
by himself
to go make his pee in private.
Then he turned around and told the others that
when his pee hardened,
it would become a solid lump of pure white gold,
but the others were wise to his tricks,
and so they said, "No! No way! Even we don't believe
you can turn your pee into riches.
Go along in your own peculiar way,
Coyote,
and make your pee without bothering us anymore.”So Coyote went along the tree line until
he found a nice clearing to put forth his water,
but he decided to rest
for a while before doing this,
and he passed out beneath the tree
he had been leaning on,
forgetting all about the necessity of putting out
the liquor he had poured into his belly.Next morning,
Coyote awoke with a pain in his innards.
"What is the trouble here?" he said,
"ohhh, why does my body ache so?"
He rubbed his belly all over and made several chants,
but nothing helped the aches go away.
Finally,
he got angry and grabbed hold of his member
and began to swing it around and choke it, saying,
"Look! What is wrong with me?
I feel so awful!
Help make me better!
Send the troublemaker who is giving me hell in my body
out your little hole so I can punish him!
Do it!"
Coyote flung his penis around
and threw it against some trees,he even caressed it and encouraged it to perform,
but not a thing was forthcoming.
He began to feel even worse,
but he was not worried yet.
He put some lotion on his member to heal the sores
and tucked it away in his pants.That is when he began talking to his anus.
"See here!" said Coyote to his anus,
"I have maligned and injured my own member
over this pain I feel in my body.
No matter what I do,
my penis,
my favorite,
won't even help rid me of my discomfort.
Help me, anus,
help me to expel the troublemaker at work in my body."
So saying,
Coyote dug a hole,
pulled down his trousers,
and squatted.
He began to strain with all his might.
He grunted. He waited.
He implored his anus to do its best,
and his face grew more red with each try.
Finally,
he grew tired from so much effort and rolled over onto his belly,
cursing his body for the weakness it showed
in expelling this nemesis from within him.By this time
Coyote could hardly move from the pain,
and his lower lip began to tremble,
and he could do nothing but try to cry.
He stayed that way for a while,
trying to cry,
but no tears came out either,
and he felt worse than ever.
He stayed that way for two whole days.After that,
he felt better,
and he got up and began moving around again.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
In the Avoidance of Women
ISidebelly had become aware of the moss on his belly
ever since the time of an early spring
twenty-six years ago when he was twenty-one years old
with a lean incisive body moving easily
through the pines,
running north,
as he had been doing without pause for water
or love
for six years in avoidance of the assumption of
responsibility
he was to take on as a man,
and what brought him down at the end of his youth
were the frequent and penetrating thrusts
of mental daggers being driven through his ear,
sharply and up to the hilt,
which upon further examination
would have proven only to have been
the thorns of wild roses fashioned into tiny darts
by the thin and nimble fingers of some
woman,
no doubt,
and he did, finally, break down smoothness of motion
of wind in hair
into fractured moments
of settling vertebrae and sharply distilled
moments of anxiety,
for he feared his people were yet on the trail
behind him.They weren't, of course,
they had failed to pursue five-and-a-half years back
after he had crossed the River of Separation,
the women moaning the loss of yet another
virile partner,
and he had come to rest slowly trembling,
driven down pointedly into supine immobility
by prayers and Wishes designed for his restraint.
By the Almighty Goddamn
they had caught up with him after all!
Hair by hair, finger by finger, toe by toe, cell by cell,
his breathing came deep
and the moss below his back gave way.
He could feel the breath of his bed exhale
near his ear telling him not to be afraid,
to rest,
that he needed rest,
and he closed his eyes and could feel the moss work
beneath his back and move up the sides of his belly,
taking over the responsibility of keeping him alive,
penetrating through his tissues,
extending through his veins, capillaries, arteries,
and enshrouding his heart
in the timeless revelatory muscle of the earth
as he slept.II
The terrifying complexity
of manufacturing a self contained internal reality
for nine still years spent while saddled motionless
to the back of the earth on a bed of soft spoken moss,
of course,
was not to be undertaken alone.But goddamn if the young Sidebelly was willing
to give up independence of strong, taut
manhood
without a fight for sole
or even partial possession of his tender mind,
no matter the teachers,
goddamn them all to hell with the
fruits and flowers they bring,
"I have been trying for six years to pound them
into dust,"
he told me, "six years to rid myself of their pursuit,
six years in avoidance of their mouths of
open and inviting tragedy,
six years spent hiding from their invasive minds,
six years working my muscles for prime
defense against their advancements,
I knew they would come too,
starting with Susie, of course,
goddamn her who kissed me first while pinning me
up against the wall
next to the garbage bin in the alley
behind the furniture store.
Six years,
six years,
goddamn them women, them witches,
them who spend the earnest moments before
the rise of the sun caressing,
oiling, and perfuming their legs and breasts
with their own juices,
combing and waiting to plait the magnificent length
of their hair under the beauty of the
polished crystal prism of mother’s making,
designed and crafted for the specific purpose
of dispersing the first rays of the morning throughout
the hair in the belief
that to hold the seven colors of the sun
was to hold the power necessary to enliven
the fibers of the hair which in turn,
when laid upon the pillow at night
and spread in imitation of the sun,
would successfully capture and blind a man
into meek submission of catering days;
days of heat and labor
spent under a malignant and difficult sun,
of strained breath spent through thin and dusty lips,
of brittle and confused moments
at the end of the day when conversation
with the woman
becomes necessary yet unavoidable and what is truly
needed is a cold beer
and an open window to the west –
a breeze would be too much for me to handle;
I would go insane in such pleasure of ease-
and goddamn
if she wouldn't then inhale the sun
into her belly at the close of the day,
swelling deeply
at the rush of performing
her daily admonition,
for she would have been stewing all day in her own
juices,
and speaking with the sun between her lips
of my failure to achieve the potency of manhood
in a dignified and respectful manner..."And of course,
it was worthless for Sidebelly to struggle,
dangerous even,
for he was being wrapped tighter to the back of
the Mother Earth
at each impulse of protest,
pulled in deeper to the Woman of all our fruits,
and he would eventually learn that to struggle
would be to relenquish an even greater part
of his masculinity,
but he succeeded in the end,thankfully,
in securing a bit of his manhood
down and away
in a sack between his legs where they could not
get at it,
the witches.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Pollen Storm Blessing
There he spurneth dust of glittering grains;
How joyous his neigh,
There in mist of sacred pollen hidden, all hidden he;
How joyous his neigh,
There his offspring many grow and thrive forevermore;
How joyous his neigh!
-- from Song of the Horse, NavajoBahe would go to the spring hills to pray against the war. He thought he would attend the war if he had to. He wouldn’t run away from it, even though there was a new woman. With the new woman he had made a child. The child was four months old. He was called Siggy, after Sigurd, the woman’s father. Bahe called the woman Haansh’Taye, which in the Apache means “butterfly.” Her other name was Susie, but Bahe called her Haansh’Taye because he thought of her well shaped hands as delicate wings of the butterfly, and when she held his face between her hands he imagined that this was his only place of brief repose in all the world.
With the war threatening he spent as much time between there as possible. At night he would cry sometimes about having to leave his woman and son and he would ask her to hold his face between her hands and pray against the war. And she, while comforting him with her good words, would begin to cry as well. Then baby Siggy would wake up and start in too. At times like this when the small room would echo with wailing the air would suddenly become cold and it was ghostly when the air became filled with their own visible breath. The haze of their breathing turned blue like there was a neon light from outside their window shining in but there was none and neither he nor the woman knew anything about the blue haze, only that it frightened them and caused them, all three, to huddle against the terror on the corner on the bed. Everything fell away at such times, the hum of engines and the gears shifting over the streets, the sirens, the horns, the rough voices of the kids on the walk and the drunk rantings of husbands heavy on the bottle, everything, everything fell away into the heavy silence and then it was terribly lonely because they felt like they didn’t even have each other then. Bahe thought that this was the way it would be for his family if the war called him out.
There were always images that appeared in the blue haze. All the images were of men, brown men like Bahe himself, and young yet with hair like jet. The men would be stripped to the waist, their torsos lithe and tawny and shining with sweat as they danced around to old drums and sang. But neither Haansh’Taye nor Bahe could hear the drums or hear the men singing. There was just that silence. Bahe and his woman would look across that silence at each other and down at the baby like there was a wide and dark blue sea that separated them finally and completely and made communication impossible. They could only cry and watch the men dance. From the waist down they could see that the men wore fatigues and high black boots, army issue. Bahe knew the men. They were his relations, his ancestors, his uncles and great uncles, his grandfathers and his grandfathers’ brothers, all dead, all passed on in other wars. Only when Bahe and his family stopped crying would the images be gone. The haze would dissipate slowly and the room become warm again, like it ought to be on a spring evening.
So Bahe would go to the hills to pray against the war. He’d take Haansh’Taye with him, and she would place little Siggy into the cradle that Bahe was placed in when he was a baby, and she would strap this onto her back when they struck out onto the trail that led to the meadow where there was a stream and a falls that came down the hills.
One morning after crying all nigh long Bahe called into work and told them that he couldn’t make it, that he was sick. Then he rolled over and shook Haansh’Taye gently on the shoulder. “Haansh’Taye. It looks nice out there today. Let’s take a lunch and go to the hills.”
Haansh’Taye rolled over to face Bahe. Little Siggy lay between them. She stroked the baby’s face and looked up at Bahe. “Okay sweetie. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Did you call into work?”
“I called. I had to lie again, but they wouldn’t understand if I said the truth.”
“I know, sweets, I know.”
Baby didn’t wake until they were already in the truck. When he woke he began to cry. Haansh’Taye just placed a breast in his mouth. After a while he became full and yawned and was burped, then placed back into his special seat. The movement of the truck made him sleepy and pretty soon his head fell to one side.
Haansh’Taye had made for them a dinner of thick sliced cold roast beef along with some fried bread and roasted and peeled green chilis. They also had some coffee and an old percolator which was placed over the fire to heat. All this was placed into the backpack that Bahe carried, as well as a blanket and diapers for Siggy. They never ate breakfast on days they went to pray in the hills and always ate toward the evening when they were finished.
At the woods it was a warm day, and the sun was out high and strong. There was a breeze, and on the breeze there were fresh scents of pines and grasses and flowers. Bahe and Haansh’Taye got out of the truck and looked across the cab at each other and smiled. Haansh’Taye came around to where Bahe was leaning up against the hood and put her arms around him. She kissed him long and deep and their faces lingered next to each other and brought out new scents of skin against skin. This was a vital time for them, to be together like this in the morning air of the country after such a night as had passed where they each had been gripped and stifled in fear and an insurmountable loneliness that left them feeling they were 10,000 miles apart.
Bahe and Haansh’Taye had not planned to bear a child together. In fact, they had seen very little of each other after the first few times of love making, and even after Haansh’Taye was into the initial terms of her pregnancy they rarely spoke about establishing a life together. They found it difficult at first; it was a tremendous burden coming to appreciate one another. The love was not there. Only the sex and the anger and the fear. But now, they found themselves to be deeply wed, and the love had come and the baby had come and the commitment had come and then the war came and it all pressed them deeper into one another so they thought they could never be pried apart again. And then with the war came the cold blue hazes and the awful visions.
Baby Siggy let out a small gurgle from the cab of the truck. Bahe and Haansh’Taye parted with a final kiss and went about preparing for the hike into the woods. This was never a solemn affair for them. There was only joy and a deep sense of wonder and appreciation for life. With the spring there was always life renewed and this was a common bond between Bahe and Haansh’Taye and the land they walked on. Each day after every terrible night their little procession moved along the trail through the woods. They found themselves to be a part of a constant cycle of loss and coming together, of death and rebirth, and it made them feel as if nothing could touch them, that they had been make privy to an eternal secret. Even if Bahe were to go off to the war and die, maybe he wouldn’t really die after all, just go off to some other place to rest before coming back. But still, there were those terrible visions, and they came time and time again. Bahe thought that even if there were an ounce of fear left within him the visions would return again and again and perhaps he would find himself with his ancestors, dancing in the haze. So he prayed to let go of his fear. He prayed to be strong. He prayed against the war.
At the place where they make their camp near the stream there was a young and sturdy dogwood where Haansh’Taye hung baby Siggy in his cradle. The blossoms were just starting to form on the tree. Haansh’Taye stayed within earshot of the baby while she moved about the area in search of wood for the fire. Bahe went off alone towards to stream where the little waterfall was. He sat on a flat slab of granite which overlooked the small pool of water that the falls fell into. He produced a pouch which held his smoking mixture and from this rolled four cigarettes while making a song.
In times past when they had come to the hills it had been peaceful and serene but these days it was not so quiet. Fort Leonardrock was nearby and in full swing; all the troops were in heavy rotation. As Bahe smoked he could hear the heavy trucks rattle and heave over the washboard roads that criss-crossed the area they were camped in. The jets screamed around overhead and the explosions went off constantly. Bahe smoked and prayed while all this was going on, almost expecting to see from over the crest of the hill a movement of troops hupping doubletime through the woods. These things didn’t sit well with Bahe, but he felt it important that he place himself there in the midst of wartime preparations where his fear was at its strongest, thereby confronting the greatest looming cloud of his life at the place where it resided.
At pool’s edge beneath and across the way from where Bahe sat grew a wide ring of cattails. Beyond the cattails at the far edge was the meadow. The meadow sloped gently uphill from the stream bed and there on the hill the grasses waved in the breeze drawing Bahe’s attention gently and slowly and rhythmically so that everything, everything fell away like in the cold blue haze. The trucks, gone. The jets, gone. The explosions, gone. The troops, gone. Everything, gone. But this was no cold blue haze in a tiny room in a corner of the city. Here the canopy rose up high and spread out beneath the sky like a green wing, the tip of which brushed up against the meadow and rested there on the downstroke like the gesture of a mother protecting her young. From here Bahe peered out onto the meadow. He smoked his fourth cigarette. The grasses waved. The wildflowers nodded beneath the fat yellow glory of the afternoon sun and from the spaces between the leaves of the canopy shone the fat glory in wide bright angular beams down onto the edge of the stream on the forest floor. On the beams on the sun there came the pollen from the meadow. Slow, heavy, steady, a pollen storm blessing. Bahe breathed it in, and he breathed it out, smoking.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
The Barn Where It Was Dry
Spring was an awful time to be sick about losing a girl, especially after you let yourself get all caught up in it and gave yourself away by letting her get too close inside you where it started to matter what she said or did. It was something that couldn’t be gone back over and fixed so you were there on the edge of the land in the rain sleeping alone in a goddamned barn with the poison hurt of it. But in your pocket there was some money and a ticket back to the reservation at Mescalero even though it made you feel less of a man to be running away from it. The only token from the whole mess of the situation was the scar you carried away that showed you were capable of an emotional investment in somebody other than yourself. Up until then you were too chickenshit to bring anything up from within you that might lay you open to slaughter and yes, you were a fool to open up but you did it because you finally could and you wanted to be loved but were cut down and gored through instead.
Sometimes when it rained the horses would come up the hill across the meadow to be in the barn where it was dry. You could smell the oats and see the hay spread across the floor of the barn and underfoot the ground was clumpy and uneven with excrement. You hoped the horses would come but they didn’t come. Maybe the rain was not heavy enough. But the rain kept on. The rain kept on and didn’t let up. The horses stayed away.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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Poems from a Friend
posted in Teachings on 7th Feb, 2021KEITH JAMES HAINES
Keith Haines, an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache tribe of south central New Mexico, was born in 1968 in Farmington, New Mexico to Jodee Yazza and Bruce Haines. When he was five years of age his biological mother passed away. Two years later, his father married Charlotte Hara, a Japanese American from Hawaii.
Growing up in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and spending a significant amount of time as a youth in Minnesota, Arizona, and Montana, he left home at seventeen after graduating high school to study art and literature at several universities.
Since leaving the trailer he grew up in, he has traveled extensively throughout the west and mid-west, supporting himself, among various occupations, as laborer, student, cook, pipe maker, ranch-hand, and mill worker. Keith passed away January 28, 2020; yet the legacy of his beautiful spirit through his art and poetry lives on.
Welcome. Here you will find several poems and stories I have written over the last several years, the earliest being The Dirt and the Weeds, and the latest, A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go. I am currently at work on a longer fictional piece entitled Horse of the Sun, same as the headline for this website. In addition, I have included a few pencil sketches of various subjects and plan to add several larger, more fully developed pieces when time and circumstance permit.Enjoy,Keith J. HainesPoetry
Hangover Medicine | In the Avoidance of Women | Fall Valley | The Dirt and the Weeds | On the Forest Floor | Amaranths In Dew | Poet Taking Rest | Second Note to a Past Lover | Under a Feeble Sun | This Desperate Threshhold | Nearing the Base of West Mountain | Spring Hills of Missouri | Penning Delicate Words | Summer River Wildflowers | Parched | Sweating at Meremec | Humming in the Wind | Horse Travel Through the Blues | Nectar | The Long Limbed Day | Jaguar Leaping in the Wind | Outrider
Stories
Pollen Storm Blessing | The Morning World | The Barn Where It Was Dry | A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go | Dog's Neck | Games of Chance and Get Even | Waterbug | Seven Colors of the Sun
Chap Books
The Barn Where It Was Dry, A Collection of short stories from a contemporary Native American artist
Drinking With the Women, Poems. Love, despair, and the ultimate joy of passionate living
The Dirt and the Weeds
This is my father's room.
He likes to call it his tiny box of bitter contemplation.
It rests here,
on the five hundredth and third floor
of a five hundred and three story building.
This blanket is the place where my father sits.
All but him are forbidden to rest here.
This blanket comes from the time when he lived
on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
when he held sway over the broad expanse of this area,
sitting in comfortable ease
and directing with subtle gestures of lips and fingers,
who should pull forth the sun across the sky,
who should govern the revolution of the seasons,
who should provide for the rebirth of the harvests,
and who should lead the flight of the bird across the arc of the sun
and back..It is from here
that my father once motioned for me to bend nearer his lips,
and I did so,
and he began to tell me of the time
when he lived on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
and what happened at dawn one morning
while he was preparing for the day.Long time ago, he told me,
some people who he had never seen came to him
and asked him to leave the spot where he was camped,
but he said, "No. I have been here such a long time already."
One of them then replied, "Well, old man, it is no matter.
We are a gracious people, and we have decided
that we will allow you to remain in the spot you have chosen.
But since you refuse to be displaced outward,"
he told my father,
“we shall simply displace you upward.
In addition,
we have decided that we must lay down our cement rug beneath you
and your blanket,
so if you'll step aside, please, thank you."
My father stepped aside, bewildered.
"Larry," said the man,
get your men over here and lay down a cement slab."
Turning back to my father, he said,
"As well, we have decided that we would like to
build up our walls
around you, and in so doing,
we will raise you to a place
where neither you nor your people have ever been."
"Where is that?" my father asked.
“Old man," he was told,
“prepare for your ascent into heaven. Frank?
Gather your men.
Four walls and a ceiling, please."
My father folded his blanket over the wet cement
and sat down on top of it.
"I am fine here," he said,
and the four walls and the ceiling
began to close in around him.The people who were gathered near,
becoming more and more by the minute,
then raised their hands to the sky
and summoned forth from the ground beneath my
father a powerful movement,
setting into motion the rise of a massive
four-cornered structure made of brick and steel.The tremendous rumbling caused by such an event
was said to have been felt across the plains,
where a sleeping cloud mistook the rumble for
thunder and began to pour forth its rain,
over the mountains,
where the Spine of God is said to have trembled,
through the basins,
where the fruits of the trees
were moved to fall from their branches,
and down into the sea
where the dust was shaken from the shoulder of
the land.And so began the ascension of my father
into this place called heaven.
Now,
when I sit with him,
he likes to tell me that he is still able,
when he closes his eyes,
to hear the weeds in the wind,
blowing their music close to the ground.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
On the Forest Floor
Now,
even the most gentle of female rains
brings down the early dogwood
blossoms,
once white,
now stained pink and red
as if bruised and wounded,
sent to the forest floor
to bleed quietly in the shade.The petals are dirty
are cut and bleeding,
and looking closely,
their hurt faces plead into mine.But what can I do?
I gather a handful,
six or seven,
and begin to shout around about the glory of these
fallen criers of
Spring’s army of joy,
naming the days of their bannered and heralded births,
touting the courage of first blossoms,
and going on about their short lives of timeless purity.Afterward,
I let the petals drop from my fingers,
watch them come to rest
on last Autumn’s leaves,
now dead one full season
and resting with new stories
of the Winterfor the telling to
the freshly fallen dead
of Spring’s army of joy.
Amaranths In Dew
I am a whisperer of the moment,
a piner at the edge of gardens,
a drunk gaper of endless petals,in whose curves
I see the hearts
of potential lovers,wet amaranths
in dew.
Poet Taking Rest
My lover,
I admire the length
and grace
of your well-shaped hands,
delicate wings of the butterfly
pressed tightly together
in prayer,
and in between them,
my only thin asylum
of brief repose.
Second Note to a Past Lover
I do not think of it as folly
to spend all my time dreaming
of your touch,
but I do suffer terrible embarrassment from
those who would say I am
foolishly enamoured with one
whom I am not familiar with
in the least.Nevertheless,
I will continue
to persist in this behavior,
foolish as it may appear to
those lacking in any sense
of romantic abandon, and
it would be to them that I
would simply say that I take
extreme pleasure in the
weaving of this thought of silk
through the 10,000 crests of
the waters
that separate us.
This Desperate Threshhold
At this desperate threshold,
look how white my knuckles –I can’t face wine,
not like I used to.
Not anymore.Oh,
my most admired romancer
of the most strange and terrible nights,
where will I turn
if not to your sopping invitation?You have pulled me too far apart,
at my own request –
I could not ask you
to pull me back together.I have sought out your freeing waters,
often as I could,
for more than a century,
but I have grown weary
of raising your implements to my lips.Understand,
I have loved you more
than I have loved my women.At this desperate threshold,
my friend,
look how white my knuckles,
but look how clear my eyes.
Nearing the Base of West Mountain
In the foothills to the East
there is pollen.I am coming in the pollen.
The pollen falls upon my hair
and streams across my eyes,and in my hair
there is a breeze.
Spring Hills of Missouri
Over endless lakeside hills,
unfolding forests
show spring blossoms,
white lace
airing
among the dogwood
and the plum.
Penning Delicate Words
What fine silk
moves through these trembling
fingertips
but
what an array of dusty stallions
courses through my wrist.A timeless dripping sun
labors over me,
yet
I do not sweat as I pen these delicate
words for you.
Summer River Wildflowers
At riverside,
in the waning days of summer,
I part eight blossoms
from their stems.Later,
wearing the flowers,
I stand waist-deep
in Summer River,
gathering drifting leaves
from beyond Summer River’s bluffs.
Fall Valley
Out here,
all my crushes
are on
divine
sugar maple forests.It’s Fall.
Devastated,
I roam the valley
for a
Summer flower.
Parched
These three desperate throats,
in the wake of such a malignant sun,
where
in this endless brown valley
can we find wine?(These horses are but ashy silhouettes).
What a shabby and dissolute arrangement
has been laid out for us!
Is there left a cool breast
to appeal to?Oh, our dry and tongueless bellow!
Sweating at Meremec
What is there that can restrain joy?
Not me!
These pores on my back-
with what joy they sweat!What a time this is
to radiate with expansiveness and light.
These people around me,
these fine days we are spending together,
such laughter!Under these trees,
in this universe,
we are so small,
yet with joy look how long and wide we reach,
and how deep!
Humming In the Wind
All day
Beneath the hot sun
I thought of you.Thought of how
My love for you is likeTen thousand bright blossoms
Humming in the wind.
Horse Travel Through the Blues
My blue gaze rides
toward
her breast
like dusk
moves
between mountains:deeper,
wetter,
greener,
coller,
roaming and
loping
with heavy melancholia.This
is
the nature
of horse travel through the blues,
stepping through rivers,
noting the shorelines
flowered
and
hung,
bending in the saddle
to part blossom
from stem -true and desperate acts
performed
at dusk
during a cool and
loveless
summer.
Nectar
Isn't love, too,
proclaimed to be at it's most
dangerous
when new,
like the poison of a
young snake?And which is the greater danger?
Love, leaning nearby, musky and aromatic,
or the capable length of a snake?From either tongue
drips nectar from the body
like dew
from the bud.
The Long Limbed Day
She is a lean figure
curved against the window,
a limber boiugh
hung heavy with foliage in the sun,
lithe body drawn from
the sinew and supple muscle
of the
slender
forest deer.In her bare arms
and in her naked shoulders
I witness the
heightened
and tightened
awareness of a doe's limbs, prepared
at any instant
to bound off in a tremendous
single
leap
nine feet long
perhaps,
to go stretching into the
long limbed day,
young
strong
beautiful
forever.Yes.
Oh,
yes, yes, yes.
Jaguar Leaping in the Wind
My muse,
you
have liberated me from the rocks!Long reacher,
high stretcher,
you unfurl your body
a silk ribbon of skin
licking the midday wind,
and I look,oh how I look!
Woman,
it is a poet's duty,
aye,
a poet's pleasure,
to sing the tips of your fingers as claws,
the breadth of your hands as mitts,
the length of your limbs
outstretched and roaring
from your bosom,
as those of a jaguar in hunger
leaping from the rocks
toward
the hot neck of the sun.
Outrider
I unsheath
from my boot
3,000 wet tongues,
grim bladed
butterflies
sent out to riot in
the night,wing tips dark as hot razors
stained with the blood
of
a
long
haired
poet.I unsheath
these wet things,
hold them level
at sea,
one man standing
against
all comers,long haired, doublebraided,
point taken,
praying for hope against
the bellowing
sea
of
the
East.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Hangover Medicine
Coyote had been drinking too much whiskey when he left
the place where the group was camped.
He left because he wanted to go make pee.
He invited those who wished to attend
to come along.
Everybody said, "No!"
So coyote began to wander off
by himself
to go make his pee in private.
Then he turned around and told the others that
when his pee hardened,
it would become a solid lump of pure white gold,
but the others were wise to his tricks,
and so they said, "No! No way! Even we don't believe
you can turn your pee into riches.
Go along in your own peculiar way,
Coyote,
and make your pee without bothering us anymore.”So Coyote went along the tree line until
he found a nice clearing to put forth his water,
but he decided to rest
for a while before doing this,
and he passed out beneath the tree
he had been leaning on,
forgetting all about the necessity of putting out
the liquor he had poured into his belly.Next morning,
Coyote awoke with a pain in his innards.
"What is the trouble here?" he said,
"ohhh, why does my body ache so?"
He rubbed his belly all over and made several chants,
but nothing helped the aches go away.
Finally,
he got angry and grabbed hold of his member
and began to swing it around and choke it, saying,
"Look! What is wrong with me?
I feel so awful!
Help make me better!
Send the troublemaker who is giving me hell in my body
out your little hole so I can punish him!
Do it!"
Coyote flung his penis around
and threw it against some trees,he even caressed it and encouraged it to perform,
but not a thing was forthcoming.
He began to feel even worse,
but he was not worried yet.
He put some lotion on his member to heal the sores
and tucked it away in his pants.That is when he began talking to his anus.
"See here!" said Coyote to his anus,
"I have maligned and injured my own member
over this pain I feel in my body.
No matter what I do,
my penis,
my favorite,
won't even help rid me of my discomfort.
Help me, anus,
help me to expel the troublemaker at work in my body."
So saying,
Coyote dug a hole,
pulled down his trousers,
and squatted.
He began to strain with all his might.
He grunted. He waited.
He implored his anus to do its best,
and his face grew more red with each try.
Finally,
he grew tired from so much effort and rolled over onto his belly,
cursing his body for the weakness it showed
in expelling this nemesis from within him.By this time
Coyote could hardly move from the pain,
and his lower lip began to tremble,
and he could do nothing but try to cry.
He stayed that way for a while,
trying to cry,
but no tears came out either,
and he felt worse than ever.
He stayed that way for two whole days.After that,
he felt better,
and he got up and began moving around again.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
In the Avoidance of Women
ISidebelly had become aware of the moss on his belly
ever since the time of an early spring
twenty-six years ago when he was twenty-one years old
with a lean incisive body moving easily
through the pines,
running north,
as he had been doing without pause for water
or love
for six years in avoidance of the assumption of
responsibility
he was to take on as a man,
and what brought him down at the end of his youth
were the frequent and penetrating thrusts
of mental daggers being driven through his ear,
sharply and up to the hilt,
which upon further examination
would have proven only to have been
the thorns of wild roses fashioned into tiny darts
by the thin and nimble fingers of some
woman,
no doubt,
and he did, finally, break down smoothness of motion
of wind in hair
into fractured moments
of settling vertebrae and sharply distilled
moments of anxiety,
for he feared his people were yet on the trail
behind him.They weren't, of course,
they had failed to pursue five-and-a-half years back
after he had crossed the River of Separation,
the women moaning the loss of yet another
virile partner,
and he had come to rest slowly trembling,
driven down pointedly into supine immobility
by prayers and Wishes designed for his restraint.
By the Almighty Goddamn
they had caught up with him after all!
Hair by hair, finger by finger, toe by toe, cell by cell,
his breathing came deep
and the moss below his back gave way.
He could feel the breath of his bed exhale
near his ear telling him not to be afraid,
to rest,
that he needed rest,
and he closed his eyes and could feel the moss work
beneath his back and move up the sides of his belly,
taking over the responsibility of keeping him alive,
penetrating through his tissues,
extending through his veins, capillaries, arteries,
and enshrouding his heart
in the timeless revelatory muscle of the earth
as he slept.II
The terrifying complexity
of manufacturing a self contained internal reality
for nine still years spent while saddled motionless
to the back of the earth on a bed of soft spoken moss,
of course,
was not to be undertaken alone.But goddamn if the young Sidebelly was willing
to give up independence of strong, taut
manhood
without a fight for sole
or even partial possession of his tender mind,
no matter the teachers,
goddamn them all to hell with the
fruits and flowers they bring,
"I have been trying for six years to pound them
into dust,"
he told me, "six years to rid myself of their pursuit,
six years in avoidance of their mouths of
open and inviting tragedy,
six years spent hiding from their invasive minds,
six years working my muscles for prime
defense against their advancements,
I knew they would come too,
starting with Susie, of course,
goddamn her who kissed me first while pinning me
up against the wall
next to the garbage bin in the alley
behind the furniture store.
Six years,
six years,
goddamn them women, them witches,
them who spend the earnest moments before
the rise of the sun caressing,
oiling, and perfuming their legs and breasts
with their own juices,
combing and waiting to plait the magnificent length
of their hair under the beauty of the
polished crystal prism of mother’s making,
designed and crafted for the specific purpose
of dispersing the first rays of the morning throughout
the hair in the belief
that to hold the seven colors of the sun
was to hold the power necessary to enliven
the fibers of the hair which in turn,
when laid upon the pillow at night
and spread in imitation of the sun,
would successfully capture and blind a man
into meek submission of catering days;
days of heat and labor
spent under a malignant and difficult sun,
of strained breath spent through thin and dusty lips,
of brittle and confused moments
at the end of the day when conversation
with the woman
becomes necessary yet unavoidable and what is truly
needed is a cold beer
and an open window to the west –
a breeze would be too much for me to handle;
I would go insane in such pleasure of ease-
and goddamn
if she wouldn't then inhale the sun
into her belly at the close of the day,
swelling deeply
at the rush of performing
her daily admonition,
for she would have been stewing all day in her own
juices,
and speaking with the sun between her lips
of my failure to achieve the potency of manhood
in a dignified and respectful manner..."And of course,
it was worthless for Sidebelly to struggle,
dangerous even,
for he was being wrapped tighter to the back of
the Mother Earth
at each impulse of protest,
pulled in deeper to the Woman of all our fruits,
and he would eventually learn that to struggle
would be to relenquish an even greater part
of his masculinity,
but he succeeded in the end,thankfully,
in securing a bit of his manhood
down and away
in a sack between his legs where they could not
get at it,
the witches.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Pollen Storm Blessing
There he spurneth dust of glittering grains;
How joyous his neigh,
There in mist of sacred pollen hidden, all hidden he;
How joyous his neigh,
There his offspring many grow and thrive forevermore;
How joyous his neigh!
-- from Song of the Horse, NavajoBahe would go to the spring hills to pray against the war. He thought he would attend the war if he had to. He wouldn’t run away from it, even though there was a new woman. With the new woman he had made a child. The child was four months old. He was called Siggy, after Sigurd, the woman’s father. Bahe called the woman Haansh’Taye, which in the Apache means “butterfly.” Her other name was Susie, but Bahe called her Haansh’Taye because he thought of her well shaped hands as delicate wings of the butterfly, and when she held his face between her hands he imagined that this was his only place of brief repose in all the world.
With the war threatening he spent as much time between there as possible. At night he would cry sometimes about having to leave his woman and son and he would ask her to hold his face between her hands and pray against the war. And she, while comforting him with her good words, would begin to cry as well. Then baby Siggy would wake up and start in too. At times like this when the small room would echo with wailing the air would suddenly become cold and it was ghostly when the air became filled with their own visible breath. The haze of their breathing turned blue like there was a neon light from outside their window shining in but there was none and neither he nor the woman knew anything about the blue haze, only that it frightened them and caused them, all three, to huddle against the terror on the corner on the bed. Everything fell away at such times, the hum of engines and the gears shifting over the streets, the sirens, the horns, the rough voices of the kids on the walk and the drunk rantings of husbands heavy on the bottle, everything, everything fell away into the heavy silence and then it was terribly lonely because they felt like they didn’t even have each other then. Bahe thought that this was the way it would be for his family if the war called him out.
There were always images that appeared in the blue haze. All the images were of men, brown men like Bahe himself, and young yet with hair like jet. The men would be stripped to the waist, their torsos lithe and tawny and shining with sweat as they danced around to old drums and sang. But neither Haansh’Taye nor Bahe could hear the drums or hear the men singing. There was just that silence. Bahe and his woman would look across that silence at each other and down at the baby like there was a wide and dark blue sea that separated them finally and completely and made communication impossible. They could only cry and watch the men dance. From the waist down they could see that the men wore fatigues and high black boots, army issue. Bahe knew the men. They were his relations, his ancestors, his uncles and great uncles, his grandfathers and his grandfathers’ brothers, all dead, all passed on in other wars. Only when Bahe and his family stopped crying would the images be gone. The haze would dissipate slowly and the room become warm again, like it ought to be on a spring evening.
So Bahe would go to the hills to pray against the war. He’d take Haansh’Taye with him, and she would place little Siggy into the cradle that Bahe was placed in when he was a baby, and she would strap this onto her back when they struck out onto the trail that led to the meadow where there was a stream and a falls that came down the hills.
One morning after crying all nigh long Bahe called into work and told them that he couldn’t make it, that he was sick. Then he rolled over and shook Haansh’Taye gently on the shoulder. “Haansh’Taye. It looks nice out there today. Let’s take a lunch and go to the hills.”
Haansh’Taye rolled over to face Bahe. Little Siggy lay between them. She stroked the baby’s face and looked up at Bahe. “Okay sweetie. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Did you call into work?”
“I called. I had to lie again, but they wouldn’t understand if I said the truth.”
“I know, sweets, I know.”
Baby didn’t wake until they were already in the truck. When he woke he began to cry. Haansh’Taye just placed a breast in his mouth. After a while he became full and yawned and was burped, then placed back into his special seat. The movement of the truck made him sleepy and pretty soon his head fell to one side.
Haansh’Taye had made for them a dinner of thick sliced cold roast beef along with some fried bread and roasted and peeled green chilis. They also had some coffee and an old percolator which was placed over the fire to heat. All this was placed into the backpack that Bahe carried, as well as a blanket and diapers for Siggy. They never ate breakfast on days they went to pray in the hills and always ate toward the evening when they were finished.
At the woods it was a warm day, and the sun was out high and strong. There was a breeze, and on the breeze there were fresh scents of pines and grasses and flowers. Bahe and Haansh’Taye got out of the truck and looked across the cab at each other and smiled. Haansh’Taye came around to where Bahe was leaning up against the hood and put her arms around him. She kissed him long and deep and their faces lingered next to each other and brought out new scents of skin against skin. This was a vital time for them, to be together like this in the morning air of the country after such a night as had passed where they each had been gripped and stifled in fear and an insurmountable loneliness that left them feeling they were 10,000 miles apart.
Bahe and Haansh’Taye had not planned to bear a child together. In fact, they had seen very little of each other after the first few times of love making, and even after Haansh’Taye was into the initial terms of her pregnancy they rarely spoke about establishing a life together. They found it difficult at first; it was a tremendous burden coming to appreciate one another. The love was not there. Only the sex and the anger and the fear. But now, they found themselves to be deeply wed, and the love had come and the baby had come and the commitment had come and then the war came and it all pressed them deeper into one another so they thought they could never be pried apart again. And then with the war came the cold blue hazes and the awful visions.
Baby Siggy let out a small gurgle from the cab of the truck. Bahe and Haansh’Taye parted with a final kiss and went about preparing for the hike into the woods. This was never a solemn affair for them. There was only joy and a deep sense of wonder and appreciation for life. With the spring there was always life renewed and this was a common bond between Bahe and Haansh’Taye and the land they walked on. Each day after every terrible night their little procession moved along the trail through the woods. They found themselves to be a part of a constant cycle of loss and coming together, of death and rebirth, and it made them feel as if nothing could touch them, that they had been make privy to an eternal secret. Even if Bahe were to go off to the war and die, maybe he wouldn’t really die after all, just go off to some other place to rest before coming back. But still, there were those terrible visions, and they came time and time again. Bahe thought that even if there were an ounce of fear left within him the visions would return again and again and perhaps he would find himself with his ancestors, dancing in the haze. So he prayed to let go of his fear. He prayed to be strong. He prayed against the war.
At the place where they make their camp near the stream there was a young and sturdy dogwood where Haansh’Taye hung baby Siggy in his cradle. The blossoms were just starting to form on the tree. Haansh’Taye stayed within earshot of the baby while she moved about the area in search of wood for the fire. Bahe went off alone towards to stream where the little waterfall was. He sat on a flat slab of granite which overlooked the small pool of water that the falls fell into. He produced a pouch which held his smoking mixture and from this rolled four cigarettes while making a song.
In times past when they had come to the hills it had been peaceful and serene but these days it was not so quiet. Fort Leonardrock was nearby and in full swing; all the troops were in heavy rotation. As Bahe smoked he could hear the heavy trucks rattle and heave over the washboard roads that criss-crossed the area they were camped in. The jets screamed around overhead and the explosions went off constantly. Bahe smoked and prayed while all this was going on, almost expecting to see from over the crest of the hill a movement of troops hupping doubletime through the woods. These things didn’t sit well with Bahe, but he felt it important that he place himself there in the midst of wartime preparations where his fear was at its strongest, thereby confronting the greatest looming cloud of his life at the place where it resided.
At pool’s edge beneath and across the way from where Bahe sat grew a wide ring of cattails. Beyond the cattails at the far edge was the meadow. The meadow sloped gently uphill from the stream bed and there on the hill the grasses waved in the breeze drawing Bahe’s attention gently and slowly and rhythmically so that everything, everything fell away like in the cold blue haze. The trucks, gone. The jets, gone. The explosions, gone. The troops, gone. Everything, gone. But this was no cold blue haze in a tiny room in a corner of the city. Here the canopy rose up high and spread out beneath the sky like a green wing, the tip of which brushed up against the meadow and rested there on the downstroke like the gesture of a mother protecting her young. From here Bahe peered out onto the meadow. He smoked his fourth cigarette. The grasses waved. The wildflowers nodded beneath the fat yellow glory of the afternoon sun and from the spaces between the leaves of the canopy shone the fat glory in wide bright angular beams down onto the edge of the stream on the forest floor. On the beams on the sun there came the pollen from the meadow. Slow, heavy, steady, a pollen storm blessing. Bahe breathed it in, and he breathed it out, smoking.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
The Barn Where It Was Dry
Spring was an awful time to be sick about losing a girl, especially after you let yourself get all caught up in it and gave yourself away by letting her get too close inside you where it started to matter what she said or did. It was something that couldn’t be gone back over and fixed so you were there on the edge of the land in the rain sleeping alone in a goddamned barn with the poison hurt of it. But in your pocket there was some money and a ticket back to the reservation at Mescalero even though it made you feel less of a man to be running away from it. The only token from the whole mess of the situation was the scar you carried away that showed you were capable of an emotional investment in somebody other than yourself. Up until then you were too chickenshit to bring anything up from within you that might lay you open to slaughter and yes, you were a fool to open up but you did it because you finally could and you wanted to be loved but were cut down and gored through instead.
Sometimes when it rained the horses would come up the hill across the meadow to be in the barn where it was dry. You could smell the oats and see the hay spread across the floor of the barn and underfoot the ground was clumpy and uneven with excrement. You hoped the horses would come but they didn’t come. Maybe the rain was not heavy enough. But the rain kept on. The rain kept on and didn’t let up. The horses stayed away.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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Poems from a Friend
posted in Teachings on 7th Feb, 2021KEITH JAMES HAINES
Keith Haines, an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache tribe of south central New Mexico, was born in 1968 in Farmington, New Mexico to Jodee Yazza and Bruce Haines. When he was five years of age his biological mother passed away. Two years later, his father married Charlotte Hara, a Japanese American from Hawaii.
Growing up in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and spending a significant amount of time as a youth in Minnesota, Arizona, and Montana, he left home at seventeen after graduating high school to study art and literature at several universities.
Since leaving the trailer he grew up in, he has traveled extensively throughout the west and mid-west, supporting himself, among various occupations, as laborer, student, cook, pipe maker, ranch-hand, and mill worker. Keith passed away January 28, 2020; yet the legacy of his beautiful spirit through his art and poetry lives on.
Welcome. Here you will find several poems and stories I have written over the last several years, the earliest being The Dirt and the Weeds, and the latest, A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go. I am currently at work on a longer fictional piece entitled Horse of the Sun, same as the headline for this website. In addition, I have included a few pencil sketches of various subjects and plan to add several larger, more fully developed pieces when time and circumstance permit.Enjoy,Keith J. HainesPoetry
Hangover Medicine | In the Avoidance of Women | Fall Valley | The Dirt and the Weeds | On the Forest Floor | Amaranths In Dew | Poet Taking Rest | Second Note to a Past Lover | Under a Feeble Sun | This Desperate Threshhold | Nearing the Base of West Mountain | Spring Hills of Missouri | Penning Delicate Words | Summer River Wildflowers | Parched | Sweating at Meremec | Humming in the Wind | Horse Travel Through the Blues | Nectar | The Long Limbed Day | Jaguar Leaping in the Wind | Outrider
Stories
Pollen Storm Blessing | The Morning World | The Barn Where It Was Dry | A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go | Dog's Neck | Games of Chance and Get Even | Waterbug | Seven Colors of the Sun
Chap Books
The Barn Where It Was Dry, A Collection of short stories from a contemporary Native American artist
Drinking With the Women, Poems. Love, despair, and the ultimate joy of passionate living
The Dirt and the Weeds
This is my father's room.
He likes to call it his tiny box of bitter contemplation.
It rests here,
on the five hundredth and third floor
of a five hundred and three story building.
This blanket is the place where my father sits.
All but him are forbidden to rest here.
This blanket comes from the time when he lived
on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
when he held sway over the broad expanse of this area,
sitting in comfortable ease
and directing with subtle gestures of lips and fingers,
who should pull forth the sun across the sky,
who should govern the revolution of the seasons,
who should provide for the rebirth of the harvests,
and who should lead the flight of the bird across the arc of the sun
and back..It is from here
that my father once motioned for me to bend nearer his lips,
and I did so,
and he began to tell me of the time
when he lived on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
and what happened at dawn one morning
while he was preparing for the day.Long time ago, he told me,
some people who he had never seen came to him
and asked him to leave the spot where he was camped,
but he said, "No. I have been here such a long time already."
One of them then replied, "Well, old man, it is no matter.
We are a gracious people, and we have decided
that we will allow you to remain in the spot you have chosen.
But since you refuse to be displaced outward,"
he told my father,
“we shall simply displace you upward.
In addition,
we have decided that we must lay down our cement rug beneath you
and your blanket,
so if you'll step aside, please, thank you."
My father stepped aside, bewildered.
"Larry," said the man,
get your men over here and lay down a cement slab."
Turning back to my father, he said,
"As well, we have decided that we would like to
build up our walls
around you, and in so doing,
we will raise you to a place
where neither you nor your people have ever been."
"Where is that?" my father asked.
“Old man," he was told,
“prepare for your ascent into heaven. Frank?
Gather your men.
Four walls and a ceiling, please."
My father folded his blanket over the wet cement
and sat down on top of it.
"I am fine here," he said,
and the four walls and the ceiling
began to close in around him.The people who were gathered near,
becoming more and more by the minute,
then raised their hands to the sky
and summoned forth from the ground beneath my
father a powerful movement,
setting into motion the rise of a massive
four-cornered structure made of brick and steel.The tremendous rumbling caused by such an event
was said to have been felt across the plains,
where a sleeping cloud mistook the rumble for
thunder and began to pour forth its rain,
over the mountains,
where the Spine of God is said to have trembled,
through the basins,
where the fruits of the trees
were moved to fall from their branches,
and down into the sea
where the dust was shaken from the shoulder of
the land.And so began the ascension of my father
into this place called heaven.
Now,
when I sit with him,
he likes to tell me that he is still able,
when he closes his eyes,
to hear the weeds in the wind,
blowing their music close to the ground.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
On the Forest Floor
Now,
even the most gentle of female rains
brings down the early dogwood
blossoms,
once white,
now stained pink and red
as if bruised and wounded,
sent to the forest floor
to bleed quietly in the shade.The petals are dirty
are cut and bleeding,
and looking closely,
their hurt faces plead into mine.But what can I do?
I gather a handful,
six or seven,
and begin to shout around about the glory of these
fallen criers of
Spring’s army of joy,
naming the days of their bannered and heralded births,
touting the courage of first blossoms,
and going on about their short lives of timeless purity.Afterward,
I let the petals drop from my fingers,
watch them come to rest
on last Autumn’s leaves,
now dead one full season
and resting with new stories
of the Winterfor the telling to
the freshly fallen dead
of Spring’s army of joy.
Amaranths In Dew
I am a whisperer of the moment,
a piner at the edge of gardens,
a drunk gaper of endless petals,in whose curves
I see the hearts
of potential lovers,wet amaranths
in dew.
Poet Taking Rest
My lover,
I admire the length
and grace
of your well-shaped hands,
delicate wings of the butterfly
pressed tightly together
in prayer,
and in between them,
my only thin asylum
of brief repose.
Second Note to a Past Lover
I do not think of it as folly
to spend all my time dreaming
of your touch,
but I do suffer terrible embarrassment from
those who would say I am
foolishly enamoured with one
whom I am not familiar with
in the least.Nevertheless,
I will continue
to persist in this behavior,
foolish as it may appear to
those lacking in any sense
of romantic abandon, and
it would be to them that I
would simply say that I take
extreme pleasure in the
weaving of this thought of silk
through the 10,000 crests of
the waters
that separate us.
This Desperate Threshhold
At this desperate threshold,
look how white my knuckles –I can’t face wine,
not like I used to.
Not anymore.Oh,
my most admired romancer
of the most strange and terrible nights,
where will I turn
if not to your sopping invitation?You have pulled me too far apart,
at my own request –
I could not ask you
to pull me back together.I have sought out your freeing waters,
often as I could,
for more than a century,
but I have grown weary
of raising your implements to my lips.Understand,
I have loved you more
than I have loved my women.At this desperate threshold,
my friend,
look how white my knuckles,
but look how clear my eyes.
Nearing the Base of West Mountain
In the foothills to the East
there is pollen.I am coming in the pollen.
The pollen falls upon my hair
and streams across my eyes,and in my hair
there is a breeze.
Spring Hills of Missouri
Over endless lakeside hills,
unfolding forests
show spring blossoms,
white lace
airing
among the dogwood
and the plum.
Penning Delicate Words
What fine silk
moves through these trembling
fingertips
but
what an array of dusty stallions
courses through my wrist.A timeless dripping sun
labors over me,
yet
I do not sweat as I pen these delicate
words for you.
Summer River Wildflowers
At riverside,
in the waning days of summer,
I part eight blossoms
from their stems.Later,
wearing the flowers,
I stand waist-deep
in Summer River,
gathering drifting leaves
from beyond Summer River’s bluffs.
Fall Valley
Out here,
all my crushes
are on
divine
sugar maple forests.It’s Fall.
Devastated,
I roam the valley
for a
Summer flower.
Parched
These three desperate throats,
in the wake of such a malignant sun,
where
in this endless brown valley
can we find wine?(These horses are but ashy silhouettes).
What a shabby and dissolute arrangement
has been laid out for us!
Is there left a cool breast
to appeal to?Oh, our dry and tongueless bellow!
Sweating at Meremec
What is there that can restrain joy?
Not me!
These pores on my back-
with what joy they sweat!What a time this is
to radiate with expansiveness and light.
These people around me,
these fine days we are spending together,
such laughter!Under these trees,
in this universe,
we are so small,
yet with joy look how long and wide we reach,
and how deep!
Humming In the Wind
All day
Beneath the hot sun
I thought of you.Thought of how
My love for you is likeTen thousand bright blossoms
Humming in the wind.
Horse Travel Through the Blues
My blue gaze rides
toward
her breast
like dusk
moves
between mountains:deeper,
wetter,
greener,
coller,
roaming and
loping
with heavy melancholia.This
is
the nature
of horse travel through the blues,
stepping through rivers,
noting the shorelines
flowered
and
hung,
bending in the saddle
to part blossom
from stem -true and desperate acts
performed
at dusk
during a cool and
loveless
summer.
Nectar
Isn't love, too,
proclaimed to be at it's most
dangerous
when new,
like the poison of a
young snake?And which is the greater danger?
Love, leaning nearby, musky and aromatic,
or the capable length of a snake?From either tongue
drips nectar from the body
like dew
from the bud.
The Long Limbed Day
She is a lean figure
curved against the window,
a limber boiugh
hung heavy with foliage in the sun,
lithe body drawn from
the sinew and supple muscle
of the
slender
forest deer.In her bare arms
and in her naked shoulders
I witness the
heightened
and tightened
awareness of a doe's limbs, prepared
at any instant
to bound off in a tremendous
single
leap
nine feet long
perhaps,
to go stretching into the
long limbed day,
young
strong
beautiful
forever.Yes.
Oh,
yes, yes, yes.
Jaguar Leaping in the Wind
My muse,
you
have liberated me from the rocks!Long reacher,
high stretcher,
you unfurl your body
a silk ribbon of skin
licking the midday wind,
and I look,oh how I look!
Woman,
it is a poet's duty,
aye,
a poet's pleasure,
to sing the tips of your fingers as claws,
the breadth of your hands as mitts,
the length of your limbs
outstretched and roaring
from your bosom,
as those of a jaguar in hunger
leaping from the rocks
toward
the hot neck of the sun.
Outrider
I unsheath
from my boot
3,000 wet tongues,
grim bladed
butterflies
sent out to riot in
the night,wing tips dark as hot razors
stained with the blood
of
a
long
haired
poet.I unsheath
these wet things,
hold them level
at sea,
one man standing
against
all comers,long haired, doublebraided,
point taken,
praying for hope against
the bellowing
sea
of
the
East.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Hangover Medicine
Coyote had been drinking too much whiskey when he left
the place where the group was camped.
He left because he wanted to go make pee.
He invited those who wished to attend
to come along.
Everybody said, "No!"
So coyote began to wander off
by himself
to go make his pee in private.
Then he turned around and told the others that
when his pee hardened,
it would become a solid lump of pure white gold,
but the others were wise to his tricks,
and so they said, "No! No way! Even we don't believe
you can turn your pee into riches.
Go along in your own peculiar way,
Coyote,
and make your pee without bothering us anymore.”So Coyote went along the tree line until
he found a nice clearing to put forth his water,
but he decided to rest
for a while before doing this,
and he passed out beneath the tree
he had been leaning on,
forgetting all about the necessity of putting out
the liquor he had poured into his belly.Next morning,
Coyote awoke with a pain in his innards.
"What is the trouble here?" he said,
"ohhh, why does my body ache so?"
He rubbed his belly all over and made several chants,
but nothing helped the aches go away.
Finally,
he got angry and grabbed hold of his member
and began to swing it around and choke it, saying,
"Look! What is wrong with me?
I feel so awful!
Help make me better!
Send the troublemaker who is giving me hell in my body
out your little hole so I can punish him!
Do it!"
Coyote flung his penis around
and threw it against some trees,he even caressed it and encouraged it to perform,
but not a thing was forthcoming.
He began to feel even worse,
but he was not worried yet.
He put some lotion on his member to heal the sores
and tucked it away in his pants.That is when he began talking to his anus.
"See here!" said Coyote to his anus,
"I have maligned and injured my own member
over this pain I feel in my body.
No matter what I do,
my penis,
my favorite,
won't even help rid me of my discomfort.
Help me, anus,
help me to expel the troublemaker at work in my body."
So saying,
Coyote dug a hole,
pulled down his trousers,
and squatted.
He began to strain with all his might.
He grunted. He waited.
He implored his anus to do its best,
and his face grew more red with each try.
Finally,
he grew tired from so much effort and rolled over onto his belly,
cursing his body for the weakness it showed
in expelling this nemesis from within him.By this time
Coyote could hardly move from the pain,
and his lower lip began to tremble,
and he could do nothing but try to cry.
He stayed that way for a while,
trying to cry,
but no tears came out either,
and he felt worse than ever.
He stayed that way for two whole days.After that,
he felt better,
and he got up and began moving around again.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
In the Avoidance of Women
ISidebelly had become aware of the moss on his belly
ever since the time of an early spring
twenty-six years ago when he was twenty-one years old
with a lean incisive body moving easily
through the pines,
running north,
as he had been doing without pause for water
or love
for six years in avoidance of the assumption of
responsibility
he was to take on as a man,
and what brought him down at the end of his youth
were the frequent and penetrating thrusts
of mental daggers being driven through his ear,
sharply and up to the hilt,
which upon further examination
would have proven only to have been
the thorns of wild roses fashioned into tiny darts
by the thin and nimble fingers of some
woman,
no doubt,
and he did, finally, break down smoothness of motion
of wind in hair
into fractured moments
of settling vertebrae and sharply distilled
moments of anxiety,
for he feared his people were yet on the trail
behind him.They weren't, of course,
they had failed to pursue five-and-a-half years back
after he had crossed the River of Separation,
the women moaning the loss of yet another
virile partner,
and he had come to rest slowly trembling,
driven down pointedly into supine immobility
by prayers and Wishes designed for his restraint.
By the Almighty Goddamn
they had caught up with him after all!
Hair by hair, finger by finger, toe by toe, cell by cell,
his breathing came deep
and the moss below his back gave way.
He could feel the breath of his bed exhale
near his ear telling him not to be afraid,
to rest,
that he needed rest,
and he closed his eyes and could feel the moss work
beneath his back and move up the sides of his belly,
taking over the responsibility of keeping him alive,
penetrating through his tissues,
extending through his veins, capillaries, arteries,
and enshrouding his heart
in the timeless revelatory muscle of the earth
as he slept.II
The terrifying complexity
of manufacturing a self contained internal reality
for nine still years spent while saddled motionless
to the back of the earth on a bed of soft spoken moss,
of course,
was not to be undertaken alone.But goddamn if the young Sidebelly was willing
to give up independence of strong, taut
manhood
without a fight for sole
or even partial possession of his tender mind,
no matter the teachers,
goddamn them all to hell with the
fruits and flowers they bring,
"I have been trying for six years to pound them
into dust,"
he told me, "six years to rid myself of their pursuit,
six years in avoidance of their mouths of
open and inviting tragedy,
six years spent hiding from their invasive minds,
six years working my muscles for prime
defense against their advancements,
I knew they would come too,
starting with Susie, of course,
goddamn her who kissed me first while pinning me
up against the wall
next to the garbage bin in the alley
behind the furniture store.
Six years,
six years,
goddamn them women, them witches,
them who spend the earnest moments before
the rise of the sun caressing,
oiling, and perfuming their legs and breasts
with their own juices,
combing and waiting to plait the magnificent length
of their hair under the beauty of the
polished crystal prism of mother’s making,
designed and crafted for the specific purpose
of dispersing the first rays of the morning throughout
the hair in the belief
that to hold the seven colors of the sun
was to hold the power necessary to enliven
the fibers of the hair which in turn,
when laid upon the pillow at night
and spread in imitation of the sun,
would successfully capture and blind a man
into meek submission of catering days;
days of heat and labor
spent under a malignant and difficult sun,
of strained breath spent through thin and dusty lips,
of brittle and confused moments
at the end of the day when conversation
with the woman
becomes necessary yet unavoidable and what is truly
needed is a cold beer
and an open window to the west –
a breeze would be too much for me to handle;
I would go insane in such pleasure of ease-
and goddamn
if she wouldn't then inhale the sun
into her belly at the close of the day,
swelling deeply
at the rush of performing
her daily admonition,
for she would have been stewing all day in her own
juices,
and speaking with the sun between her lips
of my failure to achieve the potency of manhood
in a dignified and respectful manner..."And of course,
it was worthless for Sidebelly to struggle,
dangerous even,
for he was being wrapped tighter to the back of
the Mother Earth
at each impulse of protest,
pulled in deeper to the Woman of all our fruits,
and he would eventually learn that to struggle
would be to relenquish an even greater part
of his masculinity,
but he succeeded in the end,thankfully,
in securing a bit of his manhood
down and away
in a sack between his legs where they could not
get at it,
the witches.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Pollen Storm Blessing
There he spurneth dust of glittering grains;
How joyous his neigh,
There in mist of sacred pollen hidden, all hidden he;
How joyous his neigh,
There his offspring many grow and thrive forevermore;
How joyous his neigh!
-- from Song of the Horse, NavajoBahe would go to the spring hills to pray against the war. He thought he would attend the war if he had to. He wouldn’t run away from it, even though there was a new woman. With the new woman he had made a child. The child was four months old. He was called Siggy, after Sigurd, the woman’s father. Bahe called the woman Haansh’Taye, which in the Apache means “butterfly.” Her other name was Susie, but Bahe called her Haansh’Taye because he thought of her well shaped hands as delicate wings of the butterfly, and when she held his face between her hands he imagined that this was his only place of brief repose in all the world.
With the war threatening he spent as much time between there as possible. At night he would cry sometimes about having to leave his woman and son and he would ask her to hold his face between her hands and pray against the war. And she, while comforting him with her good words, would begin to cry as well. Then baby Siggy would wake up and start in too. At times like this when the small room would echo with wailing the air would suddenly become cold and it was ghostly when the air became filled with their own visible breath. The haze of their breathing turned blue like there was a neon light from outside their window shining in but there was none and neither he nor the woman knew anything about the blue haze, only that it frightened them and caused them, all three, to huddle against the terror on the corner on the bed. Everything fell away at such times, the hum of engines and the gears shifting over the streets, the sirens, the horns, the rough voices of the kids on the walk and the drunk rantings of husbands heavy on the bottle, everything, everything fell away into the heavy silence and then it was terribly lonely because they felt like they didn’t even have each other then. Bahe thought that this was the way it would be for his family if the war called him out.
There were always images that appeared in the blue haze. All the images were of men, brown men like Bahe himself, and young yet with hair like jet. The men would be stripped to the waist, their torsos lithe and tawny and shining with sweat as they danced around to old drums and sang. But neither Haansh’Taye nor Bahe could hear the drums or hear the men singing. There was just that silence. Bahe and his woman would look across that silence at each other and down at the baby like there was a wide and dark blue sea that separated them finally and completely and made communication impossible. They could only cry and watch the men dance. From the waist down they could see that the men wore fatigues and high black boots, army issue. Bahe knew the men. They were his relations, his ancestors, his uncles and great uncles, his grandfathers and his grandfathers’ brothers, all dead, all passed on in other wars. Only when Bahe and his family stopped crying would the images be gone. The haze would dissipate slowly and the room become warm again, like it ought to be on a spring evening.
So Bahe would go to the hills to pray against the war. He’d take Haansh’Taye with him, and she would place little Siggy into the cradle that Bahe was placed in when he was a baby, and she would strap this onto her back when they struck out onto the trail that led to the meadow where there was a stream and a falls that came down the hills.
One morning after crying all nigh long Bahe called into work and told them that he couldn’t make it, that he was sick. Then he rolled over and shook Haansh’Taye gently on the shoulder. “Haansh’Taye. It looks nice out there today. Let’s take a lunch and go to the hills.”
Haansh’Taye rolled over to face Bahe. Little Siggy lay between them. She stroked the baby’s face and looked up at Bahe. “Okay sweetie. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Did you call into work?”
“I called. I had to lie again, but they wouldn’t understand if I said the truth.”
“I know, sweets, I know.”
Baby didn’t wake until they were already in the truck. When he woke he began to cry. Haansh’Taye just placed a breast in his mouth. After a while he became full and yawned and was burped, then placed back into his special seat. The movement of the truck made him sleepy and pretty soon his head fell to one side.
Haansh’Taye had made for them a dinner of thick sliced cold roast beef along with some fried bread and roasted and peeled green chilis. They also had some coffee and an old percolator which was placed over the fire to heat. All this was placed into the backpack that Bahe carried, as well as a blanket and diapers for Siggy. They never ate breakfast on days they went to pray in the hills and always ate toward the evening when they were finished.
At the woods it was a warm day, and the sun was out high and strong. There was a breeze, and on the breeze there were fresh scents of pines and grasses and flowers. Bahe and Haansh’Taye got out of the truck and looked across the cab at each other and smiled. Haansh’Taye came around to where Bahe was leaning up against the hood and put her arms around him. She kissed him long and deep and their faces lingered next to each other and brought out new scents of skin against skin. This was a vital time for them, to be together like this in the morning air of the country after such a night as had passed where they each had been gripped and stifled in fear and an insurmountable loneliness that left them feeling they were 10,000 miles apart.
Bahe and Haansh’Taye had not planned to bear a child together. In fact, they had seen very little of each other after the first few times of love making, and even after Haansh’Taye was into the initial terms of her pregnancy they rarely spoke about establishing a life together. They found it difficult at first; it was a tremendous burden coming to appreciate one another. The love was not there. Only the sex and the anger and the fear. But now, they found themselves to be deeply wed, and the love had come and the baby had come and the commitment had come and then the war came and it all pressed them deeper into one another so they thought they could never be pried apart again. And then with the war came the cold blue hazes and the awful visions.
Baby Siggy let out a small gurgle from the cab of the truck. Bahe and Haansh’Taye parted with a final kiss and went about preparing for the hike into the woods. This was never a solemn affair for them. There was only joy and a deep sense of wonder and appreciation for life. With the spring there was always life renewed and this was a common bond between Bahe and Haansh’Taye and the land they walked on. Each day after every terrible night their little procession moved along the trail through the woods. They found themselves to be a part of a constant cycle of loss and coming together, of death and rebirth, and it made them feel as if nothing could touch them, that they had been make privy to an eternal secret. Even if Bahe were to go off to the war and die, maybe he wouldn’t really die after all, just go off to some other place to rest before coming back. But still, there were those terrible visions, and they came time and time again. Bahe thought that even if there were an ounce of fear left within him the visions would return again and again and perhaps he would find himself with his ancestors, dancing in the haze. So he prayed to let go of his fear. He prayed to be strong. He prayed against the war.
At the place where they make their camp near the stream there was a young and sturdy dogwood where Haansh’Taye hung baby Siggy in his cradle. The blossoms were just starting to form on the tree. Haansh’Taye stayed within earshot of the baby while she moved about the area in search of wood for the fire. Bahe went off alone towards to stream where the little waterfall was. He sat on a flat slab of granite which overlooked the small pool of water that the falls fell into. He produced a pouch which held his smoking mixture and from this rolled four cigarettes while making a song.
In times past when they had come to the hills it had been peaceful and serene but these days it was not so quiet. Fort Leonardrock was nearby and in full swing; all the troops were in heavy rotation. As Bahe smoked he could hear the heavy trucks rattle and heave over the washboard roads that criss-crossed the area they were camped in. The jets screamed around overhead and the explosions went off constantly. Bahe smoked and prayed while all this was going on, almost expecting to see from over the crest of the hill a movement of troops hupping doubletime through the woods. These things didn’t sit well with Bahe, but he felt it important that he place himself there in the midst of wartime preparations where his fear was at its strongest, thereby confronting the greatest looming cloud of his life at the place where it resided.
At pool’s edge beneath and across the way from where Bahe sat grew a wide ring of cattails. Beyond the cattails at the far edge was the meadow. The meadow sloped gently uphill from the stream bed and there on the hill the grasses waved in the breeze drawing Bahe’s attention gently and slowly and rhythmically so that everything, everything fell away like in the cold blue haze. The trucks, gone. The jets, gone. The explosions, gone. The troops, gone. Everything, gone. But this was no cold blue haze in a tiny room in a corner of the city. Here the canopy rose up high and spread out beneath the sky like a green wing, the tip of which brushed up against the meadow and rested there on the downstroke like the gesture of a mother protecting her young. From here Bahe peered out onto the meadow. He smoked his fourth cigarette. The grasses waved. The wildflowers nodded beneath the fat yellow glory of the afternoon sun and from the spaces between the leaves of the canopy shone the fat glory in wide bright angular beams down onto the edge of the stream on the forest floor. On the beams on the sun there came the pollen from the meadow. Slow, heavy, steady, a pollen storm blessing. Bahe breathed it in, and he breathed it out, smoking.
Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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Poems from a Friend
posted in Teachings on 7th Feb, 2021KEITH JAMES HAINES
Keith Haines, an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache tribe of south central New Mexico, was born in 1968 in Farmington, New Mexico to Jodee Yazza and Bruce Haines. When he was five years of age his biological mother passed away. Two years later, his father married Charlotte Hara, a Japanese American from Hawaii.
Growing up in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and spending a significant amount of time as a youth in Minnesota, Arizona, and Montana, he left home at seventeen after graduating high school to study art and literature at several universities.
Since leaving the trailer he grew up in, he has traveled extensively throughout the west and mid-west, supporting himself, among various occupations, as laborer, student, cook, pipe maker, ranch-hand, and mill worker. Keith passed away January 28, 2020; yet the legacy of his beautiful spirit through his art and poetry lives on.
Welcome. Here you will find several poems and stories I have written over the last several years, the earliest being The Dirt and the Weeds, and the latest, A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go. I am currently at work on a longer fictional piece entitled Horse of the Sun, same as the headline for this website. In addition, I have included a few pencil sketches of various subjects and plan to add several larger, more fully developed pieces when time and circumstance permit.Enjoy,Keith J. HainesPoetry
Hangover Medicine | In the Avoidance of Women | Fall Valley | The Dirt and the Weeds | On the Forest Floor | Amaranths In Dew | Poet Taking Rest | Second Note to a Past Lover | Under a Feeble Sun | This Desperate Threshhold | Nearing the Base of West Mountain | Spring Hills of Missouri | Penning Delicate Words | Summer River Wildflowers | Parched | Sweating at Meremec | Humming in the Wind | Horse Travel Through the Blues | Nectar | The Long Limbed Day | Jaguar Leaping in the Wind | Outrider
Stories
Pollen Storm Blessing | The Morning World | The Barn Where It Was Dry | A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go | Dog's Neck | Games of Chance and Get Even | Waterbug | Seven Colors of the Sun
Chap Books
The Barn Where It Was Dry, A Collection of short stories from a contemporary Native American artist
Drinking With the Women, Poems. Love, despair, and the ultimate joy of passionate living
The Dirt and the Weeds
This is my father's room.
He likes to call it his tiny box of bitter contemplation.
It rests here,
on the five hundredth and third floor
of a five hundred and three story building.
This blanket is the place where my father sits.
All but him are forbidden to rest here.
This blanket comes from the time when he lived
on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
when he held sway over the broad expanse of this area,
sitting in comfortable ease
and directing with subtle gestures of lips and fingers,
who should pull forth the sun across the sky,
who should govern the revolution of the seasons,
who should provide for the rebirth of the harvests,
and who should lead the flight of the bird across the arc of the sun
and back..It is from here
that my father once motioned for me to bend nearer his lips,
and I did so,
and he began to tell me of the time
when he lived on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
and what happened at dawn one morning
while he was preparing for the day.Long time ago, he told me,
some people who he had never seen came to him
and asked him to leave the spot where he was camped,
but he said, "No. I have been here such a long time already."
One of them then replied, "Well, old man, it is no matter.
We are a gracious people, and we have decided
that we will allow you to remain in the spot you have chosen.
But since you refuse to be displaced outward,"
he told my father,
“we shall simply displace you upward.
In addition,
we have decided that we must lay down our cement rug beneath you
and your blanket,
so if you'll step aside, please, thank you."
My father stepped aside, bewildered.
"Larry," said the man,
get your men over here and lay down a cement slab."
Turning back to my father, he said,
"As well, we have decided that we would like to
build up our walls
around you, and in so doing,
we will raise you to a place
where neither you nor your people have ever been."
"Where is that?" my father asked.
“Old man," he was told,
“prepare for your ascent into heaven. Frank?
Gather your men.
Four walls and a ceiling, please."
My father folded his blanket over the wet cement
and sat down on top of it.
"I am fine here," he said,
and the four walls and the ceiling
began to close in around him.The people who were gathered near,
becoming more and more by the minute,
then raised their hands to the sky
and summoned forth from the ground beneath my
father a powerful movement,
setting into motion the rise of a massive
four-cornered structure made of brick and steel.The tremendous rumbling caused by such an event
was said to have been felt across the plains,
where a sleeping cloud mistook the rumble for
thunder and began to pour forth its rain,
over the mountains,
where the Spine of God is said to have trembled,
through the basins,
where the fruits of the trees
were moved to fall from their branches,
and down into the sea
where the dust was shaken from the shoulder of
the land.And so began the ascension of my father
into this place called heaven.
Now,
when I sit with him,
he likes to tell me that he is still able,
when he closes his eyes,
to hear the weeds in the wind,
blowing their music close to the ground.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
On the Forest Floor
Now,
even the most gentle of female rains
brings down the early dogwood
blossoms,
once white,
now stained pink and red
as if bruised and wounded,
sent to the forest floor
to bleed quietly in the shade.The petals are dirty
are cut and bleeding,
and looking closely,
their hurt faces plead into mine.But what can I do?
I gather a handful,
six or seven,
and begin to shout around about the glory of these
fallen criers of
Spring’s army of joy,
naming the days of their bannered and heralded births,
touting the courage of first blossoms,
and going on about their short lives of timeless purity.Afterward,
I let the petals drop from my fingers,
watch them come to rest
on last Autumn’s leaves,
now dead one full season
and resting with new stories
of the Winterfor the telling to
the freshly fallen dead
of Spring’s army of joy.
Amaranths In Dew
I am a whisperer of the moment,
a piner at the edge of gardens,
a drunk gaper of endless petals,in whose curves
I see the hearts
of potential lovers,wet amaranths
in dew.
Poet Taking Rest
My lover,
I admire the length
and grace
of your well-shaped hands,
delicate wings of the butterfly
pressed tightly together
in prayer,
and in between them,
my only thin asylum
of brief repose.
Second Note to a Past Lover
I do not think of it as folly
to spend all my time dreaming
of your touch,
but I do suffer terrible embarrassment from
those who would say I am
foolishly enamoured with one
whom I am not familiar with
in the least.Nevertheless,
I will continue
to persist in this behavior,
foolish as it may appear to
those lacking in any sense
of romantic abandon, and
it would be to them that I
would simply say that I take
extreme pleasure in the
weaving of this thought of silk
through the 10,000 crests of
the waters
that separate us.
This Desperate Threshhold
At this desperate threshold,
look how white my knuckles –I can’t face wine,
not like I used to.
Not anymore.Oh,
my most admired romancer
of the most strange and terrible nights,
where will I turn
if not to your sopping invitation?You have pulled me too far apart,
at my own request –
I could not ask you
to pull me back together.I have sought out your freeing waters,
often as I could,
for more than a century,
but I have grown weary
of raising your implements to my lips.Understand,
I have loved you more
than I have loved my women.At this desperate threshold,
my friend,
look how white my knuckles,
but look how clear my eyes.
Nearing the Base of West Mountain
In the foothills to the East
there is pollen.I am coming in the pollen.
The pollen falls upon my hair
and streams across my eyes,and in my hair
there is a breeze.
Spring Hills of Missouri
Over endless lakeside hills,
unfolding forests
show spring blossoms,
white lace
airing
among the dogwood
and the plum.
Penning Delicate Words
What fine silk
moves through these trembling
fingertips
but
what an array of dusty stallions
courses through my wrist.A timeless dripping sun
labors over me,
yet
I do not sweat as I pen these delicate
words for you.
Summer River Wildflowers
At riverside,
in the waning days of summer,
I part eight blossoms
from their stems.Later,
wearing the flowers,
I stand waist-deep
in Summer River,
gathering drifting leaves
from beyond Summer River’s bluffs.
Fall Valley
Out here,
all my crushes
are on
divine
sugar maple forests.It’s Fall.
Devastated,
I roam the valley
for a
Summer flower.
Parched
These three desperate throats,
in the wake of such a malignant sun,
where
in this endless brown valley
can we find wine?(These horses are but ashy silhouettes).
What a shabby and dissolute arrangement
has been laid out for us!
Is there left a cool breast
to appeal to?Oh, our dry and tongueless bellow!
Sweating at Meremec
What is there that can restrain joy?
Not me!
These pores on my back-
with what joy they sweat!What a time this is
to radiate with expansiveness and light.
These people around me,
these fine days we are spending together,
such laughter!Under these trees,
in this universe,
we are so small,
yet with joy look how long and wide we reach,
and how deep!
Humming In the Wind
All day
Beneath the hot sun
I thought of you.Thought of how
My love for you is likeTen thousand bright blossoms
Humming in the wind.
Horse Travel Through the Blues
My blue gaze rides
toward
her breast
like dusk
moves
between mountains:deeper,
wetter,
greener,
coller,
roaming and
loping
with heavy melancholia.This
is
the nature
of horse travel through the blues,
stepping through rivers,
noting the shorelines
flowered
and
hung,
bending in the saddle
to part blossom
from stem -true and desperate acts
performed
at dusk
during a cool and
loveless
summer.
Nectar
Isn't love, too,
proclaimed to be at it's most
dangerous
when new,
like the poison of a
young snake?And which is the greater danger?
Love, leaning nearby, musky and aromatic,
or the capable length of a snake?From either tongue
drips nectar from the body
like dew
from the bud.
The Long Limbed Day
She is a lean figure
curved against the window,
a limber boiugh
hung heavy with foliage in the sun,
lithe body drawn from
the sinew and supple muscle
of the
slender
forest deer.In her bare arms
and in her naked shoulders
I witness the
heightened
and tightened
awareness of a doe's limbs, prepared
at any instant
to bound off in a tremendous
single
leap
nine feet long
perhaps,
to go stretching into the
long limbed day,
young
strong
beautiful
forever.Yes.
Oh,
yes, yes, yes.
Jaguar Leaping in the Wind
My muse,
you
have liberated me from the rocks!Long reacher,
high stretcher,
you unfurl your body
a silk ribbon of skin
licking the midday wind,
and I look,oh how I look!
Woman,
it is a poet's duty,
aye,
a poet's pleasure,
to sing the tips of your fingers as claws,
the breadth of your hands as mitts,
the length of your limbs
outstretched and roaring
from your bosom,
as those of a jaguar in hunger
leaping from the rocks
toward
the hot neck of the sun.
Outrider
I unsheath
from my boot
3,000 wet tongues,
grim bladed
butterflies
sent out to riot in
the night,wing tips dark as hot razors
stained with the blood
of
a
long
haired
poet.I unsheath
these wet things,
hold them level
at sea,
one man standing
against
all comers,long haired, doublebraided,
point taken,
praying for hope against
the bellowing
sea
of
the
East.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Hangover Medicine
Coyote had been drinking too much whiskey when he left
the place where the group was camped.
He left because he wanted to go make pee.
He invited those who wished to attend
to come along.
Everybody said, "No!"
So coyote began to wander off
by himself
to go make his pee in private.
Then he turned around and told the others that
when his pee hardened,
it would become a solid lump of pure white gold,
but the others were wise to his tricks,
and so they said, "No! No way! Even we don't believe
you can turn your pee into riches.
Go along in your own peculiar way,
Coyote,
and make your pee without bothering us anymore.”So Coyote went along the tree line until
he found a nice clearing to put forth his water,
but he decided to rest
for a while before doing this,
and he passed out beneath the tree
he had been leaning on,
forgetting all about the necessity of putting out
the liquor he had poured into his belly.Next morning,
Coyote awoke with a pain in his innards.
"What is the trouble here?" he said,
"ohhh, why does my body ache so?"
He rubbed his belly all over and made several chants,
but nothing helped the aches go away.
Finally,
he got angry and grabbed hold of his member
and began to swing it around and choke it, saying,
"Look! What is wrong with me?
I feel so awful!
Help make me better!
Send the troublemaker who is giving me hell in my body
out your little hole so I can punish him!
Do it!"
Coyote flung his penis around
and threw it against some trees,he even caressed it and encouraged it to perform,
but not a thing was forthcoming.
He began to feel even worse,
but he was not worried yet.
He put some lotion on his member to heal the sores
and tucked it away in his pants.That is when he began talking to his anus.
"See here!" said Coyote to his anus,
"I have maligned and injured my own member
over this pain I feel in my body.
No matter what I do,
my penis,
my favorite,
won't even help rid me of my discomfort.
Help me, anus,
help me to expel the troublemaker at work in my body."
So saying,
Coyote dug a hole,
pulled down his trousers,
and squatted.
He began to strain with all his might.
He grunted. He waited.
He implored his anus to do its best,
and his face grew more red with each try.
Finally,
he grew tired from so much effort and rolled over onto his belly,
cursing his body for the weakness it showed
in expelling this nemesis from within him.By this time
Coyote could hardly move from the pain,
and his lower lip began to tremble,
and he could do nothing but try to cry.
He stayed that way for a while,
trying to cry,
but no tears came out either,
and he felt worse than ever.
He stayed that way for two whole days.After that,
he felt better,
and he got up and began moving around again.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
In the Avoidance of Women
ISidebelly had become aware of the moss on his belly
ever since the time of an early spring
twenty-six years ago when he was twenty-one years old
with a lean incisive body moving easily
through the pines,
running north,
as he had been doing without pause for water
or love
for six years in avoidance of the assumption of
responsibility
he was to take on as a man,
and what brought him down at the end of his youth
were the frequent and penetrating thrusts
of mental daggers being driven through his ear,
sharply and up to the hilt,
which upon further examination
would have proven only to have been
the thorns of wild roses fashioned into tiny darts
by the thin and nimble fingers of some
woman,
no doubt,
and he did, finally, break down smoothness of motion
of wind in hair
into fractured moments
of settling vertebrae and sharply distilled
moments of anxiety,
for he feared his people were yet on the trail
behind him.They weren't, of course,
they had failed to pursue five-and-a-half years back
after he had crossed the River of Separation,
the women moaning the loss of yet another
virile partner,
and he had come to rest slowly trembling,
driven down pointedly into supine immobility
by prayers and Wishes designed for his restraint.
By the Almighty Goddamn
they had caught up with him after all!
Hair by hair, finger by finger, toe by toe, cell by cell,
his breathing came deep
and the moss below his back gave way.
He could feel the breath of his bed exhale
near his ear telling him not to be afraid,
to rest,
that he needed rest,
and he closed his eyes and could feel the moss work
beneath his back and move up the sides of his belly,
taking over the responsibility of keeping him alive,
penetrating through his tissues,
extending through his veins, capillaries, arteries,
and enshrouding his heart
in the timeless revelatory muscle of the earth
as he slept.II
The terrifying complexity
of manufacturing a self contained internal reality
for nine still years spent while saddled motionless
to the back of the earth on a bed of soft spoken moss,
of course,
was not to be undertaken alone.But goddamn if the young Sidebelly was willing
to give up independence of strong, taut
manhood
without a fight for sole
or even partial possession of his tender mind,
no matter the teachers,
goddamn them all to hell with the
fruits and flowers they bring,
"I have been trying for six years to pound them
into dust,"
he told me, "six years to rid myself of their pursuit,
six years in avoidance of their mouths of
open and inviting tragedy,
six years spent hiding from their invasive minds,
six years working my muscles for prime
defense against their advancements,
I knew they would come too,
starting with Susie, of course,
goddamn her who kissed me first while pinning me
up against the wall
next to the garbage bin in the alley
behind the furniture store.
Six years,
six years,
goddamn them women, them witches,
them who spend the earnest moments before
the rise of the sun caressing,
oiling, and perfuming their legs and breasts
with their own juices,
combing and waiting to plait the magnificent length
of their hair under the beauty of the
polished crystal prism of mother’s making,
designed and crafted for the specific purpose
of dispersing the first rays of the morning throughout
the hair in the belief
that to hold the seven colors of the sun
was to hold the power necessary to enliven
the fibers of the hair which in turn,
when laid upon the pillow at night
and spread in imitation of the sun,
would successfully capture and blind a man
into meek submission of catering days;
days of heat and labor
spent under a malignant and difficult sun,
of strained breath spent through thin and dusty lips,
of brittle and confused moments
at the end of the day when conversation
with the woman
becomes necessary yet unavoidable and what is truly
needed is a cold beer
and an open window to the west –
a breeze would be too much for me to handle;
I would go insane in such pleasure of ease-
and goddamn
if she wouldn't then inhale the sun
into her belly at the close of the day,
swelling deeply
at the rush of performing
her daily admonition,
for she would have been stewing all day in her own
juices,
and speaking with the sun between her lips
of my failure to achieve the potency of manhood
in a dignified and respectful manner..."And of course,
it was worthless for Sidebelly to struggle,
dangerous even,
for he was being wrapped tighter to the back of
the Mother Earth
at each impulse of protest,
pulled in deeper to the Woman of all our fruits,
and he would eventually learn that to struggle
would be to relenquish an even greater part
of his masculinity,
but he succeeded in the end,thankfully,
in securing a bit of his manhood
down and away
in a sack between his legs where they could not
get at it,
the witches.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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Poems from a Friend
posted in Teachings on 7th Feb, 2021KEITH JAMES HAINES
Keith Haines, an enrolled member of the Mescalero Apache tribe of south central New Mexico, was born in 1968 in Farmington, New Mexico to Jodee Yazza and Bruce Haines. When he was five years of age his biological mother passed away. Two years later, his father married Charlotte Hara, a Japanese American from Hawaii.
Growing up in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and spending a significant amount of time as a youth in Minnesota, Arizona, and Montana, he left home at seventeen after graduating high school to study art and literature at several universities.
Since leaving the trailer he grew up in, he has traveled extensively throughout the west and mid-west, supporting himself, among various occupations, as laborer, student, cook, pipe maker, ranch-hand, and mill worker. Keith passed away January 28, 2020; yet the legacy of his beautiful spirit through his art and poetry lives on.
Welcome. Here you will find several poems and stories I have written over the last several years, the earliest being The Dirt and the Weeds, and the latest, A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go. I am currently at work on a longer fictional piece entitled Horse of the Sun, same as the headline for this website. In addition, I have included a few pencil sketches of various subjects and plan to add several larger, more fully developed pieces when time and circumstance permit.Enjoy,Keith J. HainesPoetry
Hangover Medicine | In the Avoidance of Women | Fall Valley | The Dirt and the Weeds | On the Forest Floor | Amaranths In Dew | Poet Taking Rest | Second Note to a Past Lover | Under a Feeble Sun | This Desperate Threshhold | Nearing the Base of West Mountain | Spring Hills of Missouri | Penning Delicate Words | Summer River Wildflowers | Parched | Sweating at Meremec | Humming in the Wind | Horse Travel Through the Blues | Nectar | The Long Limbed Day | Jaguar Leaping in the Wind | Outrider
Stories
Pollen Storm Blessing | The Morning World | The Barn Where It Was Dry | A Pure Blue Flame Where the Hawks Go | Dog's Neck | Games of Chance and Get Even | Waterbug | Seven Colors of the Sun
Chap Books
The Barn Where It Was Dry, A Collection of short stories from a contemporary Native American artist
Drinking With the Women, Poems. Love, despair, and the ultimate joy of passionate living
The Dirt and the Weeds
This is my father's room.
He likes to call it his tiny box of bitter contemplation.
It rests here,
on the five hundredth and third floor
of a five hundred and three story building.
This blanket is the place where my father sits.
All but him are forbidden to rest here.
This blanket comes from the time when he lived
on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
when he held sway over the broad expanse of this area,
sitting in comfortable ease
and directing with subtle gestures of lips and fingers,
who should pull forth the sun across the sky,
who should govern the revolution of the seasons,
who should provide for the rebirth of the harvests,
and who should lead the flight of the bird across the arc of the sun
and back..It is from here
that my father once motioned for me to bend nearer his lips,
and I did so,
and he began to tell me of the time
when he lived on the ground below,
with the dirt and the weeds,
and what happened at dawn one morning
while he was preparing for the day.Long time ago, he told me,
some people who he had never seen came to him
and asked him to leave the spot where he was camped,
but he said, "No. I have been here such a long time already."
One of them then replied, "Well, old man, it is no matter.
We are a gracious people, and we have decided
that we will allow you to remain in the spot you have chosen.
But since you refuse to be displaced outward,"
he told my father,
“we shall simply displace you upward.
In addition,
we have decided that we must lay down our cement rug beneath you
and your blanket,
so if you'll step aside, please, thank you."
My father stepped aside, bewildered.
"Larry," said the man,
get your men over here and lay down a cement slab."
Turning back to my father, he said,
"As well, we have decided that we would like to
build up our walls
around you, and in so doing,
we will raise you to a place
where neither you nor your people have ever been."
"Where is that?" my father asked.
“Old man," he was told,
“prepare for your ascent into heaven. Frank?
Gather your men.
Four walls and a ceiling, please."
My father folded his blanket over the wet cement
and sat down on top of it.
"I am fine here," he said,
and the four walls and the ceiling
began to close in around him.The people who were gathered near,
becoming more and more by the minute,
then raised their hands to the sky
and summoned forth from the ground beneath my
father a powerful movement,
setting into motion the rise of a massive
four-cornered structure made of brick and steel.The tremendous rumbling caused by such an event
was said to have been felt across the plains,
where a sleeping cloud mistook the rumble for
thunder and began to pour forth its rain,
over the mountains,
where the Spine of God is said to have trembled,
through the basins,
where the fruits of the trees
were moved to fall from their branches,
and down into the sea
where the dust was shaken from the shoulder of
the land.And so began the ascension of my father
into this place called heaven.
Now,
when I sit with him,
he likes to tell me that he is still able,
when he closes his eyes,
to hear the weeds in the wind,
blowing their music close to the ground.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
On the Forest Floor
Now,
even the most gentle of female rains
brings down the early dogwood
blossoms,
once white,
now stained pink and red
as if bruised and wounded,
sent to the forest floor
to bleed quietly in the shade.The petals are dirty
are cut and bleeding,
and looking closely,
their hurt faces plead into mine.But what can I do?
I gather a handful,
six or seven,
and begin to shout around about the glory of these
fallen criers of
Spring’s army of joy,
naming the days of their bannered and heralded births,
touting the courage of first blossoms,
and going on about their short lives of timeless purity.Afterward,
I let the petals drop from my fingers,
watch them come to rest
on last Autumn’s leaves,
now dead one full season
and resting with new stories
of the Winterfor the telling to
the freshly fallen dead
of Spring’s army of joy.
Amaranths In Dew
I am a whisperer of the moment,
a piner at the edge of gardens,
a drunk gaper of endless petals,in whose curves
I see the hearts
of potential lovers,wet amaranths
in dew.
Poet Taking Rest
My lover,
I admire the length
and grace
of your well-shaped hands,
delicate wings of the butterfly
pressed tightly together
in prayer,
and in between them,
my only thin asylum
of brief repose.
Second Note to a Past Lover
I do not think of it as folly
to spend all my time dreaming
of your touch,
but I do suffer terrible embarrassment from
those who would say I am
foolishly enamoured with one
whom I am not familiar with
in the least.Nevertheless,
I will continue
to persist in this behavior,
foolish as it may appear to
those lacking in any sense
of romantic abandon, and
it would be to them that I
would simply say that I take
extreme pleasure in the
weaving of this thought of silk
through the 10,000 crests of
the waters
that separate us.
This Desperate Threshhold
At this desperate threshold,
look how white my knuckles –I can’t face wine,
not like I used to.
Not anymore.Oh,
my most admired romancer
of the most strange and terrible nights,
where will I turn
if not to your sopping invitation?You have pulled me too far apart,
at my own request –
I could not ask you
to pull me back together.I have sought out your freeing waters,
often as I could,
for more than a century,
but I have grown weary
of raising your implements to my lips.Understand,
I have loved you more
than I have loved my women.At this desperate threshold,
my friend,
look how white my knuckles,
but look how clear my eyes.
Nearing the Base of West Mountain
In the foothills to the East
there is pollen.I am coming in the pollen.
The pollen falls upon my hair
and streams across my eyes,and in my hair
there is a breeze.
Spring Hills of Missouri
Over endless lakeside hills,
unfolding forests
show spring blossoms,
white lace
airing
among the dogwood
and the plum.
Penning Delicate Words
What fine silk
moves through these trembling
fingertips
but
what an array of dusty stallions
courses through my wrist.A timeless dripping sun
labors over me,
yet
I do not sweat as I pen these delicate
words for you.
Summer River Wildflowers
At riverside,
in the waning days of summer,
I part eight blossoms
from their stems.Later,
wearing the flowers,
I stand waist-deep
in Summer River,
gathering drifting leaves
from beyond Summer River’s bluffs.
Fall Valley
Out here,
all my crushes
are on
divine
sugar maple forests.It’s Fall.
Devastated,
I roam the valley
for a
Summer flower.
Parched
These three desperate throats,
in the wake of such a malignant sun,
where
in this endless brown valley
can we find wine?(These horses are but ashy silhouettes).
What a shabby and dissolute arrangement
has been laid out for us!
Is there left a cool breast
to appeal to?Oh, our dry and tongueless bellow!
Sweating at Meremec
What is there that can restrain joy?
Not me!
These pores on my back-
with what joy they sweat!What a time this is
to radiate with expansiveness and light.
These people around me,
these fine days we are spending together,
such laughter!Under these trees,
in this universe,
we are so small,
yet with joy look how long and wide we reach,
and how deep!
Humming In the Wind
All day
Beneath the hot sun
I thought of you.Thought of how
My love for you is likeTen thousand bright blossoms
Humming in the wind.
Horse Travel Through the Blues
My blue gaze rides
toward
her breast
like dusk
moves
between mountains:deeper,
wetter,
greener,
coller,
roaming and
loping
with heavy melancholia.This
is
the nature
of horse travel through the blues,
stepping through rivers,
noting the shorelines
flowered
and
hung,
bending in the saddle
to part blossom
from stem -true and desperate acts
performed
at dusk
during a cool and
loveless
summer.
Nectar
Isn't love, too,
proclaimed to be at it's most
dangerous
when new,
like the poison of a
young snake?And which is the greater danger?
Love, leaning nearby, musky and aromatic,
or the capable length of a snake?From either tongue
drips nectar from the body
like dew
from the bud.
The Long Limbed Day
She is a lean figure
curved against the window,
a limber boiugh
hung heavy with foliage in the sun,
lithe body drawn from
the sinew and supple muscle
of the
slender
forest deer.In her bare arms
and in her naked shoulders
I witness the
heightened
and tightened
awareness of a doe's limbs, prepared
at any instant
to bound off in a tremendous
single
leap
nine feet long
perhaps,
to go stretching into the
long limbed day,
young
strong
beautiful
forever.Yes.
Oh,
yes, yes, yes.
Jaguar Leaping in the Wind
My muse,
you
have liberated me from the rocks!Long reacher,
high stretcher,
you unfurl your body
a silk ribbon of skin
licking the midday wind,
and I look,oh how I look!
Woman,
it is a poet's duty,
aye,
a poet's pleasure,
to sing the tips of your fingers as claws,
the breadth of your hands as mitts,
the length of your limbs
outstretched and roaring
from your bosom,
as those of a jaguar in hunger
leaping from the rocks
toward
the hot neck of the sun.
Outrider
I unsheath
from my boot
3,000 wet tongues,
grim bladed
butterflies
sent out to riot in
the night,wing tips dark as hot razors
stained with the blood
of
a
long
haired
poet.I unsheath
these wet things,
hold them level
at sea,
one man standing
against
all comers,long haired, doublebraided,
point taken,
praying for hope against
the bellowing
sea
of
the
East.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
Hangover Medicine
Coyote had been drinking too much whiskey when he left
the place where the group was camped.
He left because he wanted to go make pee.
He invited those who wished to attend
to come along.
Everybody said, "No!"
So coyote began to wander off
by himself
to go make his pee in private.
Then he turned around and told the others that
when his pee hardened,
it would become a solid lump of pure white gold,
but the others were wise to his tricks,
and so they said, "No! No way! Even we don't believe
you can turn your pee into riches.
Go along in your own peculiar way,
Coyote,
and make your pee without bothering us anymore.”So Coyote went along the tree line until
he found a nice clearing to put forth his water,
but he decided to rest
for a while before doing this,
and he passed out beneath the tree
he had been leaning on,
forgetting all about the necessity of putting out
the liquor he had poured into his belly.Next morning,
Coyote awoke with a pain in his innards.
"What is the trouble here?" he said,
"ohhh, why does my body ache so?"
He rubbed his belly all over and made several chants,
but nothing helped the aches go away.
Finally,
he got angry and grabbed hold of his member
and began to swing it around and choke it, saying,
"Look! What is wrong with me?
I feel so awful!
Help make me better!
Send the troublemaker who is giving me hell in my body
out your little hole so I can punish him!
Do it!"
Coyote flung his penis around
and threw it against some trees,he even caressed it and encouraged it to perform,
but not a thing was forthcoming.
He began to feel even worse,
but he was not worried yet.
He put some lotion on his member to heal the sores
and tucked it away in his pants.That is when he began talking to his anus.
"See here!" said Coyote to his anus,
"I have maligned and injured my own member
over this pain I feel in my body.
No matter what I do,
my penis,
my favorite,
won't even help rid me of my discomfort.
Help me, anus,
help me to expel the troublemaker at work in my body."
So saying,
Coyote dug a hole,
pulled down his trousers,
and squatted.
He began to strain with all his might.
He grunted. He waited.
He implored his anus to do its best,
and his face grew more red with each try.
Finally,
he grew tired from so much effort and rolled over onto his belly,
cursing his body for the weakness it showed
in expelling this nemesis from within him.By this time
Coyote could hardly move from the pain,
and his lower lip began to tremble,
and he could do nothing but try to cry.
He stayed that way for a while,
trying to cry,
but no tears came out either,
and he felt worse than ever.
He stayed that way for two whole days.After that,
he felt better,
and he got up and began moving around again.Copyright © Horse of the Sun and Keith Haines 1999-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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