Feathers

Feathers

Not just pots of machu soup bubbling over,
fry bread sizzling in long-handled fire pit
pans at the Julyamsh Powwow campgrounds
in Post Falls, Idaho, but—harder to sniff out—
J.J. Lonelodge’s large ice chest with trays
of raptor heads, wings, and claws.

Bored with every other vendor’s cheap
souvenirs—hand-made leather moccasins,
traditional woven blankets, hand-carved
wooden flutes—dancers, looking for an edge,
are thrilled with his feathers—young golden
eagles, balds, red-tail hawks, northern harrier
hawks, and red-shafted flickers. He tells them
he finds them like arrowheads in a plowed
field, they fall out of the sky on the path
he walks—it’s his gift.

J.J. doesn’t talk about shooting eagles,
but he sells their feathers. Their weakness for
wild mustang laid out in a clearing lures
them; one volplanes down from the thermals,
the kettle of eagles won’t hear the shot.

From his truck-bed perch, he hears the powwow’s
strong drumbeats, the ancestral songs calling
the dancers in their feathered regalia.
J.J. and his son wait for the jaded,
the ignoble, knowing you can’t make
a crow fly like an eagle—or look like one—
counting on the powwow hustlers to finger
his bags of feathers.

It’s understood some will buy illegal
feathers for their dancing regalia,
hoping the big-shot circuit judges will
notice them. Nowadays they have no more
choice than characters in a folktale.

How much they owe the ah-hey-yah-ho
vocables, connecting the old spirit
words, has to be forgotten to be somebody
at the Seven Feathers Casino.
Honor is just a feathered headdress
money puts on, says J.J.

Place your bets when the host drum’s sudden
hard pattern beats a warning: on the feather-
glistening top-paid dancer, or an eagle
messenger from the Creator
in the money circle.

1957 Ferrari 315 S

Notes for Le Mille Miglia Libretto

--The Italian Grand Prix road race was banned after
the 1957 accident.

Overture

Harmonic suspensions of the bone saw
behind energetic flutes, violins, and tympani.

Act 1

Urgent surgeons and nurses around
the dying racer, and the coloratura
of their choral voices in the theatre,
rising to revive the quaint belief that
it is good to be alive.

The chaplain peers in, and he feels a
compassionate disgust toward those serving
the illusion of earthly health, as tragic
a burden as those who wait for ease of
suffering or the day without addiction,
body brokers and underground traders
in human remains seem as heroic in
his aria of ill will.

The waiting room is like purgatory—
with radio—white noise for the parents
of the injured still in surgery that
lasts longer than they expected.

The father’s baritone recitative
declares that to be helped without God’s help
will cost you more than to be healed.

Act 2

Dolore (Pain), in the slumgullion
of the recovery ward, begins his aria
with two chords featuring the devil’s
interval.

No nurse on her rounds sees him,
but smells something like primitive fear mixed
with hothouse flowers and body fluids,
as he sings in bass bel canto to his
victim that the pain he does not want
to stop is himself, the pain that hurts him
perfectly is the one he will love
the most—irresistible words, effortlessly
sung above violins and bassoons.

Will the injured give in to Dolore?
Will he die and leave everything to
the ex-wife listening at his door
to the beautiful aria and monitors
beeping and clicking?

No, sings Morfina (Morphine), she will be his deus
ex machina, she will bring him red flowers
and the comfort of dreamless sleep, singing
that if he accepts his suffering he will
be human, but it will not bring the peace
he needs.

The orchestra begins a romantic
melody to introduce the injured’s
girlfriend who caresses his face and gazes
sorrowfully on his broken body,
hoping he can hear her dream song from
the night of the crash.

Competing with elevator hydraulics
and flushing toilets, she sings that they cut
the race car out around him, and rain fell
through the windshield on his face, and his eyes
opened on darkness flickering with lightning
and emergency flashers, and his ears
unstopped to indecipherable
walkie-talkies and thunder, but he was
late now, so he left his body in Montova,
found his way home and climbed into bed next
to her.

Already asleep, she turned into him,
pinned him fiercely as though she could crush him
with her arms and legs, and kissed him hard,
as though she could make his lips bleed, and called
his name as though he could never hear
her again.

Act 3

But he does hear her, echoing in some dark,
liminal place like a mountain tunnel—
that sweet soprano he loves—and he inches
toward her, inspite of being whipsawed by
pain and morphine, slowly backward mapping
the mille miglia to champagne nights
in Rome.

What had turned him into a slobberer,
a drooler, a slaverer he slowly
belts out in elongated baritone
wails in front of plaintive flutes and violins.

Finally putting it together that like it
or not, ribs and vital organs heal the same,
with or without the dark song of the injured,
trying to find comfort, unobliged to
resume a supporting role, unconvinced
the accident was not reckless squander,
they pronounce the painful sentence the nerves
carry out. Why can’t they become wings,
the broken ribs seem to sing.

Cradled in the arms of his beloved,
his aria ends with the god of sleep,
Hypnos, casting the net of coma over
the stage, bringing on a week of dreamless
healing.

The bold chordal cadences, introduced
in the overture, are now resolved by
violins and cellos, as he awakes,
surrounded by a chorus of family,
crew, and fans there to sing, applaud, and roll
him out in a Ferrari red wheelchair.

They happily sing that in no time Signori
Corridore, their grand prix miracle boy,
will resume his blind, Gadarene rush through
life, having learned nothing from his accident
if not that we can never end our own pain—
that life is an opera verismo
about four-wheel drift and the flat-out
race to the finish.