Poem for A Friend

Susan Deer Cloud at the AWP 2013 conference.

I wrote this for the 365/365 a couple of days after a conversation Susan Deercloud and I had over the phone, detailing how frustrated we both have become with spiritualism. Edit: now with a new picture because I should have included one in the first place.


On Reincarnation
For Susan Deer Cloud

Someday, the last white man
will go to the last charlatan psychic,
who will by sheer accident
hook the man’s astral history
like a child hooking a fish
with stick and rope and licorice.

She will tell the man
that in his previous life,
he was another white man
who pretended to have been
a warrior brave in another,
all to impress a girl in college.

And before that life,
he sat out the Civil War
and knocked up slaves,
proclaiming while drunk
that he was a reincarnated colonialist
who fought in both the French Indian
and Revolutionary Wars.

And before that life,
he was a tribal fool
in a country he was too stupid
to remember the name of,
claiming to be their
last great chieftain reborn,
even though he was born five years
before their leader died.

And with his reading completed
the man will ask the
no-longer phony psychic:If this is all I wasn’t, then
what was I ever?
And the fake Gypsy, inexperienced
with genuine revelations,
will pause for too long
before saying, I think you should leave.

And he will walk out,
stand outside, and witness
the faceted crystal prism
he envisioned as his life
turn into a cheap single paned window,
thin enough to shoot through with an arrow.