Patrick W. Wallace resides in Vicksburg Mississippi. About his life and work he writes, "For most of my life I was primarily a singer,songwriter & musician. I have written songs since the age of 13 and played in bands throughout my life. I even lived in Nashville for several years and put out a couple of independent albums. At this point in my life, however, I am not stressing my musical side as I have had to let that part of myself go, for now at least, and am working in the public school system and thinking of returning to college to work towards my Ph.D. as a poet and literature major. I received my BA degree some years back with a triple major in Philosophy, English and Anthropology. I received some academic honours such as Outstanding Student of Philosophy Award and was inducted into several honour societies such as Golden Key, Phi Kappa Phi and Gamma Beta Phi. I am currently working on writing my thesis, which I neglected to do when I moved to Nashville to pursue a musical career with my alternative rock-n-roll. If and when I complete my thesis I should receive my MA degree in Philosophy. When I am in my more academic persona I write poetry rather than songs and so I am now trying to start anew my poetic and academic pursuits as I am getting older and the fates have pointed out to me that perhaps it is time to return to the more scholarly and poetic path. I write in an idiosycratic style that is very out of step with the mainstream minimalist American style of poetry... but I have to write what I have to write."
I have no tribe.
I have the world.
I have no tribe
To give me my name.
P. W. W.
What he believed and felt and did in the modern world and,
earlier, in his own world are the bone beads of his story.
A. Kroeber
I.
There were once many people,
But only in stories,
He had not seen them.
Their numbers were dwindling
When he was born.
They gave each other secret names.
They shared hunger through the last snow moon
That blinded itself with whiteness,
Waiting for the Big Wind
To bring overnight green to the bare rocks,
Flowering to the hilltops, clover all around.
They would not starve.
They would share in this birth.
O ye dry bones,
Hear the word of the Lord…
Behold, I will cause breath to enter you,
And ye shall live:
And I will lay sinews upon you,
And will bring flesh upon you,
And will cover you with skin,
And put breath in you
And ye shall live.
II.
In the summer there is no rain.
The hills are an oven
And the Big Wind is gone.
But soon will be the harvest,
The most social season.
The dispersed people gather
And stay up all night talking.
There will be time to sleep later,
To sleep with the snow moon.
The poison people
Would kill them at the gatherings,
Like insects preoccupied with eating.
The poison people made gifts of diseases
Wiping most of them out in ten years.
Ishi was one of the few to survive
To be hunted.
Ishi's father died in a morning attack,
Less than a dozen escaped.
Their camp became a place of broken huts,
Overturned food baskets,
And the dry white bones of his tribe.
All men avoided this place
As the bones grew bare beneath the flies.
… And he sat me down in the midst
Of the valley which was full of bones.
And caused me to pass by them round about:
And behold, there were very many in the
Open valley, and lo, they were very dry,
And he said unto me, son of man,
Can these bones live?
III.
Then was the time of concealment.
The long hiding had begun.
Thought to be exterminated
They lived with great caution.
Eternal routines of remaining hidden.
Only silent weapons used for hunting,
Moving by jumping from stone to stone
To leave no footprints.
Forty years they hid and dwindled and died
Passing at times the massacre caves
Filled with the bones of their people.
…There was a noise, and behold, a shaking,
And the bones came together bone to his bone.
And I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh
Came upon them, and the skin covered them above.
But there was no breath in them.
IV.
Then Ishi was the last man alive
Alone with the ghosts of his home.
Finally he wandered, starving, dying,
Stumbling down from the mountains.
He would find a new world;
He would find a new century.
He came to the slaughterhouse
And the butchers woke up.
The dogs were barking;
They had cornered a wild man in the corral.
Crowds and crowds at the Oroville jail
Stare in the cell and whisper.
Hiding behind a tree at the station
He watched the great demon come to a stop;
He had heard its call before
And seen it snake between the mountains.
Now he rode in its belly to his new home,
The museum.
He lived there, a relic, the last Stone Age man.
No nightmare had prepared him
For the herds of the city that flowed as one.
The crowd at the beach blocked out the ocean.
Could so many people live at one time?
He finished his life in the museum
With artifacts, mummies and Indian bones.
…Come from the four winds, O breath,
And breathe upon these slain,
That they may live.
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway 1999. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for
copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to their
original work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © Patrick W. Wallace 1999.
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