Like farmers counting their first
harvest won from the hardscrabble West,
like homesteaders hammering the last
nail of their prairie cabin before winter,
these men glory in their self-reliance.
Adjusting, readjusting their trophy stance.
Stepping onto a skull for stability.
Atop their necropolis, they remember
when the nation’s fathers blew the bugle
charging them west. Their .50 caliber rifle
barrage from trains, from horseback, from
prone position on a prairie dog mound.
It snuffed out their directional hearing and
broke their collar bones, but damn, the stories.
Saloons rolling with gawkers at the buffalo guns.
From Shenandoah to the Pacific ranges,
the geyser of buffalo blood erupted higher
than any Texas oil gusher. The prairie,
once a caravan of mothers, calves, and bulls
thundering, bellowing for their territory,
now steeped in pools of red silence.
Then another harvest. Of skeletons.
Ten dollars for one ton of dried bones,
the fuel for sugar and fertilizer factories.
Children picking light bones for pennies.
After they’re kings of Michigan and gods of capital,
these men will see Lakota hauntings. Bedridden,
suckin’ bootleg whiskey through a hose, they’ll
fight off the ghost of a wolf that died of hunger.
Searching for buffalo, the wolf found a fawn
skeleton picked clean by turkey vultures.
Now though, in the camera flash, they feel a soul
stronger than the buffalo’s. They take a knee
before the halo of Manifest Destiny.
—
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.
