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Reaching Yellow River

By Roberta Hill Whiteman b. 1947

“It isn’t a game for girls,”

he said, grabbing a fifth

with his right hand,

the wind with his left.

“For six days

I raced Jack Daniels.

He cheated, told jokes.

Some weren’t even funny.

That’s how come he won.

It took a long time

to reach this Yellow River.

I’m not yet thirty,

or is it thirty-one?

Figured all my years

carried the same hard thaw.

Out here, houselights hid

deep inside the trees.

For awhile I believed this road

cut across to Spring Creek

and I was trucking home.

I could kid you now,

say I ran it clean,

gasping on one lung,

loaded by a knapsack

of distrust and hesitation.

I never got the tone

in all the talk of cure.

I sang Honor Songs, crawled

the railroad bridge to Canada.

Dizzy from the ties,

I hung between both worlds.

Clans of blackbirds circled

the nearby maple trees.

The dark heart of me said

no days more than these.

As sundown kindled the sumacs,

stunned by the river’s smile,

I had no need for heat,

no need to feel ashamed.

Inside me then the sound

of burning leaves. Tell them

I tumbled through a gap on the horizon.

No, say I stumbled through a hummock

and fell in a pit of stars.

When rain weakened my stride,

I heard them singing

in a burl of white ash,

took a few more days to rave

at them in this wood.

Then their appaloosas nickered

in the dawn and they came

riding down a close ravine.

Though the bottle was empty,

I still hung on. Foxtails beat

the grimace from my brow

until I took off my pain

like a pair of old boots.

I became a hollow horn filled

with rain, reflecting everything.

The wind in my hand

burned cold as hoarfrost

when my grandfather nudged me

and called out

my Lakota name.”

In memory of Mato Heholgeca’s grandson

Source: Star Quilt (Holy Cow! Press, 1984)

Biography

Roberta Hill Whiteman, a poet of Wisconsin Oneida heritage, is the author of Star Quilt, a poetry collection which integrates her ancestral culture with European-based approaches to verse. Whiteman grew up in Wisconsin among the Oneida community and also in Green Bay; the family moved between the two locales several times. In previous centuries the Oneida were forced to make a series of moves that displaced them from their . . .

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