The Indians are coming
from the towns and reservations,
in cars and buses,
for real.

All night the drums speak
what they've waited so long to say.
The white man scratches his head
at the news teams and seems pleased
it was born on his ranch,
as geneticists jot down his address
and the New Age gets goosebumps.

An old Indian man says an old Indian man
told him long ago he might live to see
the White Bison, sign from the Great Spirit
of the coming of Peace.
The old man smiles for the cameras,
happy to have lived so long.

All night the songs
enter the billion-to-one ears.
All day the white hide
dazzles the eyes of the singers.
Peace has a shape
that gathers the tribes.

The rancher has a spiritual Woodstock on his hands.
He was a lonely man and a mediocre farmer.
Now people bring gifts, hippies from the cities
arrive and want to join the Indians
at their fires, but sit at their own
because at last they understand
they're not Indian.

Police feel strange in their uniforms.
The CIA is nervous, the government
couldn't predict this invisible explosion,
a big leak of Peace into the world,
pouring out of the unreadable gaze
of the White Bison.

All night the chanting, drums and dancing
weave patterns in light and air and time
and the bison grows, its image borne
by electronic pulse over the seas
into the eyes of watchers of TVs,
its story by word-of-mouth
carried even deeper.

A White Bison? Indians?
They rise in imagination
like mist from the ground.
You can see them now,
standing in a field, leaning on fences,
sitting, smoking, talking, looking
at a young bison, dirty white,
dusty, shit-smeared, fly-swatting,
skin-jiggling miraculous white.