Richard Long
The Afterward
I didn’t know my circumstance
when the rain began
falling through me
and the pooling was visible
under the soles of my feet
until the sky cleared
and I held my hands up
to block the sun
but all I could do was cup
light to harness to my handlebar
for use later when the dark
arrived in the afterward
and at some point, my bike
wouldn’t carry me anymore.
The Battle of White Hill Canyon
There was a beauty
in the way my ghost
bike spoke to me—
the headset rattled,
the bracket thumped—
when in Idaho it said
Follow the humming heart
of the bird up the mountain
until your handlebar drops
the hint to let it go,
to let go—in White Hill
Canyon, I let go—
the heart of the Appaloosa
armed with lances and bows and arrows.
Remembering Heartland
That was the summer I biked
across the Niobrara River
and through the sandhills
to drink the Kool-Aid in Hastings,
afterwards along the Platte
of a million hallucinatory trees
sprouting across Nebraska
since 1872 when towns fought
to best the planting of the other
all while the heartland beat—
Otoe Indians who called the land
Flat Water, 86 Sioux with white flags
at Ash Hollow, a massacred girl
limping along with a bullet in her foot.
The Land of the Unassigned
Mules were bleeding
in the dust of Fort Reno
even as the voices of buffalo
soldiers lifted from the cemetery,
one of whom said Black Horse
wouldn’t be shackled, arms
were fired, we buried
the Quartermaster horse
beneath the flag at half mast,
then trailed a belly of hunger
to Punished Woman’s Fork
where the Cheyenne children
in this Oklahoma were waiting
for us to take our dying breath.
Richard Long is a Professor Emeritus of English in Santa Rosa, California. For the last 27 years, he has edited 2River (www.2River.org) quarterly publishing The 2River View and occasionally publishing individual writers in the 2River Chapbook Series.