Ishi

• Written after reading Ishi by Theodora Kroeber
• (8 December 1990 - 6 January 1991)
• after Edwin Markham

• He looks toward the camera without smiling
• before a world that has murdered his people.
• He stands barefoot in a shirt and frayed tunic
• open at the neck, his collarbones shining,
• his dark skin drawn taut across his cheekbones.
• He has hung leather thongs through his ear lobes.
• He has burnt his hair short. His eyes are clear,
• but we can’t see in them his Yana name—
• no one who knows it is left alive.
• No one can see in his eyes the world
• where he might have lived before the white men,
• learning in his place with his people
• the skills with which a man may gain respect
• among the canyons below Mount Lassen,
• among creeks and scrub brush, salmon and deer,
• utterly destroyed, utterly alone.
• His arms hang loosely at his sides, his fine hands
• curve in, away from us. His eyebrows are raised
• as if to see us as carefully as we see him,
• surrounded by whiteness that represents the light.