Atlas

Tonight, I draw a raven’s wing inside a circle
measured a half second 
before it expands into a hand.
I wrap its worn grip over our feet 
As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot.

He sings an elegy for handcuffs
	whispers its moment of silence 
at the crunch of rush hour traffic 
and speaks the dialect of a fork lift, 
 	lifting like cedar smoke over the mesas 
		acred to the furthest block. 

Two headlights flare from blue dusk, 
--the eyes of ravens peer at  
Coyote biting his tail in the forklift,
 	Shaped like another reservation—
		Another cancelled check.

One finger pointed at him, 
That one—dishwasher
he dies like this
with emergency lights blinking through the creases of his ribbon shirt.
	
A light buzzed loud and snapped above the kitchen sink 
I didn’t notice the sting of the warning: 
	Coyote scattering headlights instead of stars;
howling dogs silenced by the thought of the moon;
constellations rattling from the atmosphere of the quivering gourd.
	 
How many Indians have stepped onto train tracks 
	Hearing the hoof beats of horses 
	In the bend above the river 
		Rushing at them like a cluster of veins 
scrawled into words on the unmade bed?

In the cave on the backside of a lie 
soldiers eye the birth of a new atlas

one more mile, they say,
 one more mile.