Ghost Dance

by Gary Short

This fall the pine nuts are sparse in the piñons.
Some say the bad year
is the residual of drought. Others blame
a plague of tiny spiders
that invaded the woody cones.

When the wind moves there are voices
through the trees that border the Paiute cemetery
in Schurz, Nevada. Once I watched
a large crow lift

from a headstone. The bird was shadow
unfolding over hills of red dust.
Its wings were black prisms.

Rae Rae Antelope told me another reason
for this fall's bad harvest—the Pine Nut Ceremony
failed. Two elders died
last summer. Now

no one knows the full dance or song.
The words are lost. When they tried
to call up the song, an enormous wind
spiraled ghosts of dust and sand.

The people ran, leaving one young man
in a reddish cloud
dancing haltingly around the piñon tree.

At the Paiute ceremony at dusk, I stand
near Wovoka's grave—Wavoka,
who realized the Ghost Dance, a ritual
to restore the world. The vision

swept over the plains from here to Dakota.
A belief that if the Indians danced
long and hard enough the dead would live

and the old ways return. Looking west
into the lowering light I see a young man
wearing the local high school football jersey.

He kneels at a grave site. I can't see
his bowed head but clearly read the "42"
on his back in blue script. I step toward him

then realize it's a shirt pulled tight
over the inverted U of the tombstone,
a teenager buried there
just two weeks before.

I lose my place, have to begin
to understand all over again.

In an Episcopal church performance
of Arthur Kopit's Indians
at the Pyramid Lake Reservation,
I play the part of a reporter interviewing a General
on the killing field
that was the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek,

where the rounded-up Lakota Sioux had danced on
and on into trance, chanting,
"We will live again, we will."
The cavalry soldiers panicked
and killed. Hundreds dead in the snow.

Before the scene the lights dim,
and dozens of Indian children in the audience
rush to the front of the sanctuary
and lay their bodies down
in a frozen depiction of slaughter.

So many bodies
piled near the altar;
I can't keep my balance
stepping among the tangled arms.

One girls looks up
and winks to reassure, but I feel
a chill—late December, South Dakota,

1890, or just yesterday,
alone in a cemetery in Nevada.
It's hard times when a young man appears
in the shape of a tombstone.

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