It’s the sixth-grade history book’s fault

or the teacher’s, or the Freedom Train

you toured in ‘76, or that you grew up

in a Plains State but never saw anything

except cows grazing off gravel roads.

Or that buffalo are also called bison

and bison buffalo and who knew

they were, in fact, the same?  Had you,

you would’ve had a linguistic handle

to hold onto.  Instead, for years, you had

it all wrong: you thought of them as, 

     Many Dead By Another’s Hand. 

Many to you meaning all.  What Red Man

hadn’t driven over cliffs, consumed

with painstaking resourcefulness, White Man

shot in extracurricular zeal, bent

on clearing the wilderness—meaning, the tall

prairie grass and any who wandered it—

for your kind to settle on.  Years later,

you move north a ways to Sioux Falls.

You tour the city; life turns on a nickel.

Next day, The Argus headline reads:

     Dumb White Girl Discovers Buffalo

     Extant at Great Plains Zoo.

In the picture, you stand agog, a picture

before yesterday you thought

could’ve only been taken a hundred

years or more ago, when women, wearing

bonnets, never nicked themselves shaving

with a Daisy.  What you thought were dead

mystical creatures, same as pterosaurs,

dodos, or unicorns, and kin to semiotic

creatures of ancient imagination—

running wild on cave walls, were

in truth, The Argus confirms in black

and gray proof, roaming more or less free,

down the block, in the city’s backyard—

with deer and antelope.

The fog lifts and a sun you hadn’t missed

sets, foreshadowing all the other shit

you’re more or less sure of even now,

as you read this.  Sure this word means

that, and that, this.  Sure tomorrow

as you hurry toward your own un-

distinguished extinction, you’ll rove Sioux

Falls’ streets at will in your new Ford

Explorer, stopping off at Taco Bell

to dine on chicken softshells,

breast, bone, beak, yolk, crown,

and full, and content, sure, somehow,

you’ll be the exception, sure your kind—

meaning you, not your herd—

could never be extinguished,

sure the obituary that one day reads:

     Woman Who Talked Much Said Little Dies

couldn’t possibly be drawing your picture,

couldn’t possibly be speaking of you as past

a future stretching as far as your eye

can see, even now.  So far away,

in fact, you name it, forever.