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.