Minnesota Poem

Here where space and place collide, on the Great Plains, America's tabula rasa, the territory is a map to be erased, the past is history to HIGHLIGHT - Delete - Delete - Delete from memory, - Delete from collective consciousness.  But what are these bones I see embedded in the permafrost? Whose blood do I smell in the ice melting across our bleeding Heartland? Highlight the INDIAN BURIAL MOUNDS built on high ground above running water,  - deleted by malls and highways . Highlight the spirits of 38 LAKOTAH WARRIORS - deleted by mass execution. The defiant dreams of generations of immigrant ANARCHISTS and SOCIALISTS, - deleted by a brooding constipated Nord who stealthily fingers his liberal guilt through the pocket of his designer jeans. Here in Minneapolis, whose very name reveals the forced conjugation of Hellenic upon Lakotah, the streets run to endless horizons to peter out in stubble grasses still wet with the blood of the conquered. Here all things cry and bleed in silence. Telephone posts weep a tarry sap remembering when they were a forest. An old man cries at bar closing time. Outside the cold air drops him like a mugger. Why have I returned to this land, still raw from glacial scouring? where we scratch at the thin spaces between the ice and the clouds closing in, between mystery and paranoia? Because the very cold and emptiness engender a horror vacui which forces us to connect and to create. We clutch at each other for warmth. Portraits of my drunken ancestors tilt askew in the respectable homes of strangers. So for a moment the houses and streets grow rich from our unlikely exchanges. As when, in that frozen night my car sat dead on Lake Street under a pink fluorescent sky. Two strangers in a pickup truck stopped and hauled forth twinned cables of orange and black. An electrical surge passed to this jaded hipster. and my car came back to life with an apologetic cough.