Home > Poetry Magazine > The Buffalo Coat

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

The Buffalo Coat

By Thomas McGrath 1916–1990 Thomas McGrath

I see him moving, in his legendary fleece,

Between the superhighway and an Algonquin stone axe;

Between the wild tribes, in their lost heat,

And the dark blizzard of my Grandfather’s coat;

Cold with the outdoor cold caught in the curls,

Smelling of the world before the poll tax.

And between the new macadam and the Scalp Act

They got him by the short hair; had him clipped

Who once was wild—and all five senses wild—

Printing the wild with his hoof’s inflated script

Before the times was money in the bank,

Before it was a crime to be so mild.

But history is a fact, and moves on feet

Sharper than his, toward wallows deeper than.

And the myth that covered all his moving parts,

Grandfather’s time had turned into a coat;

And what kept warm then, in the true world’s cold

Is old and cold in a world his death began.

Thomas McGrath, “The Buffalo Coat” from Movie At The End of the World. Copyright � 1972 by Thomas McGrath. Used by permission of Swallow Press/Ohio University Press.

Source: Poetry (September 1964).

Biography

For some fifty years, the late Thomas McGrath produced a prolific array of titles, encompassing poetry, novels, books for children, and several documentary film scripts, including uncredited work on the eloquent and exhilarating Smithsonian film about the history of flight, To Fly. But McGrath is primarily a poet, and although "important contemporary poets . . . proclaim him as a major voice in American poetry in the last three . . .

Continue reading this biography