T. Zachary Cotler
The Prayer for Ending
Stories
1.
The night the Fish and Game truck
chased us on the lava mountain road,
he reeked of dark cologne and blood.
Deer, shot and skinned, was púufich.
Eagle was vakâar and holy. I can kill
púufich, he said, but
don’t shoot at eagles.
Fish and Game won’t cross
the reservation line—if I
imposed on him an easy heroism,
forgive me, I required a father.
Eagle wings hung in his truck.
Scared he’d bought them at a powwow,
I didn’t ask. I’m sure he had, but
back then I imagined him up
in some aerie, thin clouds
on his shoulders, cutting a deal, because
it was an old raptor’s last Earth hour.
Your wings for a dance and a cigarette, or
your wings for a sage smoke prayer.
2.
So he explained: The Ikxareeyav were gods.
They made people. One
god, Eel-with-a-Swollen-Belly,
lived at the downstream end of the world and swam
the river earth and stopped to stack lava rocks
here
on the north side. Those were singing places
for the people.
He stacked rocks on
both sides of the river. He had made
the Center-of-the-World. Believe me? It was before dawn.
Here were huge topped
if you fall in. I would. We crossed a field
of halfsunk stones in the canyon
between the boulders and the rapid water.
3.
Ninivdssi vúra,
vitkiniyâac
ta kóova,
tu’
áxxaska,
tu’
áxxaska —
I slept in the hunting shack
with his mother. He’d planned
to sleep in the tent with mine;
she said go, and he stayed
out all night with his gun.
Between the boards,
where the shack’s mossed wall
had warped, I watched him
run a cloth along his gun
and plug his eye into the scope
aimed into the zodiac.
What kind of immortality
was this? He was the opposite
of what at twelve I understood
of death. Eagles don’t have
night vision. He tilted to the moon.
—My back,
it has become like
a mountain ridge,
so thin,
so thin.
4.
He rocked in the needles,
nodding his head,
thumbing the bone
of his knifehandle.
I stood behind him,
chin on his head.
His mother was
Nearly blind.
The dark was
intimate with her.
Her songs were
repetitious and
about extinction.
—Ninivássi vúra,
vitkiniyâac
ta kóova,
tu’
áxxaska,
tu’
áxxaska.