As if never
over night-bound northern land had hunters come,
arriving in this antlered continent
gladdened by the southward reach of land
and by the thrill of apocalyptic thaw
rippling peak to peak up the rocky mountain spine;
as if never
a hungry, weary people—refugees of an ice age—
had spilled like water melting from a glacial tongue
in human rivulets down sun-warmed rocks,
from scree to hanging valley to meadow and plain;
as if these early peoples,
themselves aged early by sun and wind
—skin cracked and joints inflamed
by forced-march tracking of their mammoth prey,
guts knotted by sparse or glutted eating from sporadic kills—
as if they had never arced like sprays of willow spears and stone-shod arrows
over mountain, prairie and furthest watershed;
had never netted herds of buffalo,
corralled from headstrong, head-run stampedes
to pour like spent salmon over blind bluffs,
their hard-hooved legs pummeling the air
as though they swam for new life to the stream of death;
as though the curling circles of trap-line routes
were, for forest peoples, unconnected to their need
but traced no more than idle wanderings,
a restless search for what the white man would, much later, bring;
as though their generations in ancient relay
had never struck, from stone and sinew and bone,
the instruments of survival through millenia,
instruments no less inspired for their closeness to the fingertip
than those remote from self
—those separated from the modern hand's dexterity
by leagues of science
and legions of designers, engineers and sweat-line fabricators;
as though the European hunger for the furs, the robes of the Americas
had not been sated by the sweat
of countless bands of hunters and canoemen
and skilled and burdened women,
clashing early over tribal trapping grounds,
then at centuries-long-last consolidating for defense;
as though no increment of progress
—no careful observation of budding and florescence,
of weather, water, the moon and stars,
had been followed by analysis or planning
—no stopping, where sun and rain allowed,
to cultivate the stubborn soil,
to net the rippling fish,
to build resistant dwellings,
to etch and sew their dreams on all that came to hand
—no sifting of abilities through the fingers of the clans
to winnow task from task, role from role, surplus from subsistence
—no new contending for that surplus,
fingers grappling as though for one another's sweat,
skimming grit from grease, class from class, slaves from overlords:
a division weighed with wider terror and injustice
yet also with the engine of an intermediate advance;
the grope for more, the move to trade, the tendency to grow;
as though no increment of progress
marked off the rolling centuries of pre-Columbian America;
as though the people of this land were not relentless in their march;
as though there were some reason
—an even small though tripping reason—
to deny acknowledgment,
to refuse their rights
to people of the Lubicon.
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