Upon the morning, a good day to die (Shabbos the holiest of days according to our sages boding well for the disembodied, the living and the thinking and the unknowing, too — all holding expiration within the Sabbath’s bounds to be a wonderful omen, despite the suffer and sorrow of inexistence resultant) — having quit the line, forsaken the truck, his people, the world, and an inheritance of future worlds for himself if not for his own, pelted now in the pocked skin of a buzzard’s coyote tied around his neck, Kokuiena in chalk-bitten whiteface walks feet bared bleeding the day’s way up to the flat of Third Mesa: hours it takes him, moons and their illuminative suns before he ever arrives at this plat above his reserve; he paces himself, he must, it’s required, a mandate to take it slow and go easy, and so making those four stops along tradition’s hard pass, interrupting his ascent each pause to a quadrant, each a gesture to its own direction, its own wind — an acknowledgement or farewell, that’s the ritual; arrives atop the sky only at the time appointed, the hour he’d dreamt had been appointed, after having received visions, overdue bills, and a visit from a collection agency, you don’t want to know them. The higher you get, the greater the heaven, and the more you can find it within you, and within you to believe, too, in even your own shadow — how it gives him this riverrush of power, lording it over his past, as if a lower sky…dreamcatching shades of waving arms and hands, his fingers those dusky dun flocks of them splayed in benediction, a duchen, granting the blessing of death over pueblo and purchase: irrelevance, nothingness, dust to dust, smokestacks of cacti, cinders of scrub, driven snow ashes. Alone, he’s here to receive the arrival: Ben, Bahana…you know Him, me neither — and, too, to welcome the emergence of world the next, at last. Must ready yourself, must make pure, must not must at all. Still, it’s thoughts of her, stealing, his sister: mourn his Kuskuska (parents dead, everything they had, since then his heart as scarce as the earth); he’s lost her to them, his land and his people: she’s far away now in Tucson, newlywed to a notable and working parttime at a mikveh, a kindergarten mornings, at least that’s the word, prophecy without postmark. Blanched by air this cast and rare, shadowed and shadowing he waits, and waits mightily; stands to face down the land: to gaze in all directions, which are none altogether, searching like a bird for its prey, the quarry of redemption, a Savior…a lamed weak Messiah just mincing in from afar, dragging Itself easy diseased, wounded as stationed and bloodily crowned — but for hours, hours then days and then a week of this moon it’s just desert, lack of faith. Must have just missed Him, must. How He’d been in the line, it’s been said, but oriented to the wrong wind, allied with an evil gust, turned around, lived against: they went west He went east, or the other way, too; a revelation denied him. After the death of his people through life they die once again; after faith’s lost, when memory itself goes forgotten, what’s left alone, him. Kokuiena. That and a sharp speck spied in the distance. A mote of the sun, just now rending a rip through a cloud…a push, a peck, then a beak — and suddenly, an eagle tears through the sky, shreds the gray with its wings flapping weather from one’s speed the other’s steer, snow and crests of cloud that swoop to him like snow, too, if not for the sun and its rising glare. Rattily rangy yet grand, despite the distress of its birth, it soars to eclipse even shadow, then hovers those ample and amply ancient wings any angel would kill for a span over and around the jut of the mesa and his standing stone. It holds in its beak a small black nothing, a moon defunct, a lunar rock only the size of an eye — a star lately fallen to dull…to blink, then to calm: it’s a yarmulke, nothing else, that the eagle’s glinting, gutripping talons tear from its beak, a yarmulke the vicious bald bird descends with, in a quickening, meteor’s motion, unforgivingly furious as if the animal’s ultimate plunge: a yarmulke as wide as the sky diving down, and at him, to drop lightly, with a plop, on his head.
