This Indigenous man glories in the Shenandoah Valley. He lives
ten lives in the sun and two more in the starlight. With his kin.
With his history. In a radiance of autumn leaves he discovers
a salamander’s yellow spots. Among millions of brown shards
of deadwood and pine needles, he spots one tiny circle of dark.
A baby mud turtle. He carries his brother to the marsh, hurtless.
When he hears a pack of rabbit beagles howling, he howls back
and the dogs scatter crying black notes of homesick. He hates
hunting. Unless it’s for the hens of the woods and oyster
mushrooms that feed him. Gunsmoke conjures his other name.
Buffalo madman, U.S. tourists call him in Washington, DC,
when he drums up another ballad of the wood buffalo’s
extinction from European riflery in Shenandoah. He raises
a buffalo flag atop his pickup and sings in his language
to hot dog ‘n’ ice cream summer tourists. He sings a timbre
like low French horn and his audience shouts cusses cribbed
from the walls of bar johns. He speaks of reciprocity and love
in flat American English and they call him homeless. He silently
prays and they sic the cops on him. He asks for a white buffalo
to thunder down the peaks of Shenandoah and carve an alpine
stream of wisdom with its gallop. Sacred water for Washington.
—
John Dos Passos Coggin is a writer based in Alexandria, Virginia. His poetry has appeared in Pangyrus, Cathexis Northwest, and The Blue Mountain Review. He co-manages the John Dos Passos literary estate.
