Field Notes
(on
Daniel Boone, formally a hunter in the Kentucky Territory)
The Long Knife held this country
It was in blood, and hard days without number
A
brutal reminiscence uproots
Heritage displays, the guides
The
tourists with their souvenir beads, and sets them
In the fields
Outside the old encampments
The
Wyandot slice away the scalps
Waving them in the air, cat-calling
To the others in the fort, Mother
Mother save me
Tickets,
please
A
world turned from here
*
On
the apple-wood stock the knife-cut words
Boons best fren
Ticklicker
29 calibre rifled bore,
brass keep and horn inlay
Flint and bone his brother
Squire hand-tooled
May,
1769, Daniel is thirty-five
From
Carolina, a month walking west
To Red River and the
wilderness beyond
Hay-needle
in those million-acre mountains
Centuries of trails to the
deep woods
Each
animal fixed in memory, each salted carcass
In
spring
Across the mountains, the
others follow
*
Where is my son
In
the clearing near the cane-brake
James
Boone is in the clearing, his coarse shirt
Soaked in the arteries’
black blood
James is waiting in the
clearing
Slumped in a lap of black blood
His
bared skull a glaze the sun catches
A
gristle hank of hair
The Indian blade hacked
through
Where is my son
*
The
Shawnee come
Against
the palisades, English muskets − a diversion
Calloway’s
daughters, and Boone’s daughter
Taken fetching water outside
the fort
Across
his face, Boone drags a war-paint ash
A death-devotion, and tracking
The raiders two days, and
late the second day
Finds their camp
Killing
all who would stand
The
Shawnee remove their dead, fade
Into the hickory woods
Returning
through low meadow to the fort
The girls walking ahead,
hand in hand
Boone
following— at his belt
The tangle of braided scalps
*
With
the English peace, towns replace
The scrag of axe-cut
homesteads, the old fort deserted
Rotting
down to river silt, a black soil
Where the name of this place
was made
Forty years since
scalp-takers
Nailed trophies to a tree
Boone
dies in the Missouri country
Forgotten
in those generations
The
dead at Blue Licks, at Chillicothe
Stand with him, and
Blackfish, and Clark, and Mantour
The
bones of brothers and their wives
The bones of the Six Nations
Scattered in the earth, gathered
here in one grave, one
Memory
Alien now, a lost time
A
brochure of violent seasons
Managed for their market
share
Ice
cream is sold, cars come and go, where
The peeled corpse swelled
yellow in the sun
A world
turned through this place
This same horizon, skewered
on a spear
Each
step you take leads here
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