Little Bighorn
You could be listening to jazz
in a truck named for a tribe,
bound for Big Sky, skis on the rack.
Then you cross
the storied river.
It’s night and you’re hours late,
hours left to drive.
Anyway, if you stopped,
stood in the January
wind, who knows what you’d see,
and are you ready for visions,
for this particular horror?
The Little Bighorn Casino
flares and reduces to your rearview.
Pause in your thoughts, what was
extinguished here,
who stood to the last? Look back:
the bright casino lot is full
of Cherokees and Dakotas.
Turn forward: three times
the river cuts under this highway.
(Originally published, in slightly different form, in The Externalist)
