Grace

Grace
for James Welch

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose
and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox.
We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary
buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks.
The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated
broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams,
and we couldn't stand it one more time. So once again we lost
a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment
walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never
wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror
and clowned our way through a season of false midnights.
We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down
easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled
to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee
and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway So,
we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a
white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light
it was a promise of balance. We once again understood
the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry
with the hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up
and walked into the spring thaw. We didn't;
the next season was worse.
You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe
and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy.
I know there is something larger
than the memory of a dispossessed people.
We have seen it.

Joy Harjo