288 PART THREE
is broken” (shades of Black Elk after Wounded Knee: “the nation’s hoop is
broken”). This poem’s simple question shivers on a line break. “Will we ever
again be at home / on earth?”
Perhaps not, in the age-old way. Haines touches that question’s core in a
nine-hundred-year-old rock painting above a Montana lake.
The late morning was calm, the sun bright and warm. As we approached from
offshore, the rockface came into view, and what appeared from a distance
to be rusty splashes of lichen, or patches of a reddish mineral color in the
rock, resolved into a scattered arrangement of small painted figures. Roughly
vertical, rising thirty to forty feet above the lake, and with numerous faults
and planes, the rockface with its red-painted figures dispersed among the
gradations of rock color, was like a weathered mural, faded from its original
brilliance but, in full sun, still glowing and subtly dappled with light from
the water below.This encounter brought about “The Eye in the Rock.”
A high rock face above Flathead Lake,
turned east where the light
breaks at morning over the mountain.
An eye was painted here by men
before we came, part of an Indian face,
part of an earth
scratched and stained by our hands.
It is only rock, blue or green,
cloudy with lichen,
changing in the waterlight.
Yet blood moves in the rock,
seeping from the fissures;
the eye turned inward, gazing back
into the shadowy grain,
as if the rock gave life.
And out of the fired mineral
come these burned survivors,
sticks of the wasting dream:
thin red elk and rusty deer,
a few humped bison,
ciphers and circles without name.
Not ice that fractures rock,
nor sunlight, nor the wind
gritty with sand has erased them.
They feed in their tall meadow,
cropping the lichen a thousand years.