Without Title
for my Father who lived without ceremony
by Diane Glancy
(published in her 1990 book, Iron Woman, New Rivers Press)
It’s hard you know without the buffalo,
the shaman, the arrow,
but my father went out each day to hunt
as though he had them.
He worked in the stockyards.
All his life he brought us meat.
No one marked his first kill,
no one sang his buffalo song.
Without a vision he had migrated to the city
and went to work in the packing house.
When he brought home his horns and hides
my mother said
get rid of them.
I remember the animal tracks of his car
backing out the drive in snow and mud,
the aerial on his old car waving
like a bow string.
I remember the silence of his lost power,
the red buffalo painted on his chest.
Oh, I couldn’t see it
but it was there, and in the night I heard
the buffalo grunts like a snore.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of Diane Glancy and her writing, and I am forever indebted to one of my mentors, poet Jay Meek, for introduing her poetry (and her!) to me. Her novel, Pushing the Bear, is on my list of books every American should read.
This poem is a particular favorite of mine. Diane is always able to mix colloquial language with beautiful descriptions that are both accessible and deeply meaningful.
Here, in this poem about her father, the poet also writes about the loss of culture; for her, this is specifically Cherokee. But this is also an American phenomenom for all of us, particularly those who are closer to their traditional ways. Here, however, the poet exploits the irony: a man whose Native culture included celebrating a first hunt and depended of those hunts for food now works in a stockyard, which do not require the kinds of skill hunting buffalo needed.
As readers, we also conjure up visuals with this information, leading to another contrast. The hunt of buffalo took place on grasslands, undeveloped areas that seemed to go on forever. Stockyards, on the other hand, are associated with urban places, far from the beauty of nature, clean air, and any traditional ways.
The father's sadness is evident throughout the poem in everything Diane shows us here. He hunts without his traditional weapons, his (white) wife does not want what the stockyard cannot use in the house, and his car becomes a horse, equiped for the hunt.
"I remember the silence of his lost power" is such a devastating line, followed by a visual--the red buffalo painted on her father's chest. But in the next line we learn the buffalo was imaginary, or there but unseeable, or something deep in the chest/the heart and not able to be seen.
The poem ends with that buffalo grunting/her father snoring. This ordinary action has so much significance after what has come before. It is a perfect ending to this heartbreaking poem by a great poet.
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