NEWS OF THE NORTH FROM JOHN HAINES 289Over the lake water comes this light
that has not changed,
the air we have always known...What matters with this and all poems, says Haines, is how “craftturns into
vision,” his own and the tribal artists’ craft.
Thanks to the day’s mission starting early, morning sun on the rock and a
break where “the light / breaks” create a mythic scene “before we came”—
“we” including all white latecomers scarring the earth. Now the poet ’s craft
and vision enter the painters’: this rock could be “blue or green,” seems “cloudy
with lichen,” “changing” before our divining eyes in “waterlight,” an apt coin-
age. “Yet blood moves in this rock,” bright rust or brick pigment, maybe sim-
ply the available coloring. Then why blood? Just as the rock’s fissures and
grain “gave life” to the pictographs, so “the rockface took on life from those
painted figures,” he notes, and we recall how “Every accidental crack or dent”
in Yeats’s carved lapis lazuli stone “Seems a water-course or an avalanche.”
Fed by changing sunlight and lakewater, an uncanny eye sees into the rock,
bringing it alive.
By shifting angles of view and later examining his photos, Haines saw that the
Indians had used irregular rockface to set a “many times life-size” eye within
facial contours, an eye gazing back into the rock. Given a sign of such conscious
art, his language sharpens: “fired” mineral, “burned” survivors, “wasting”
dream evoke centuries of sunlight and human doings as well. Only “thin red
elk and rusty deer, / a few humped bison” remain of a rockbound myth.
Haines won’t leave it at that. “Not ice... / nor sunlight, nor the wind / gritty
with sand has erased them.” On Keats’s urn the lovers and heifers are still in
motion, and for Haines, the game on this naturally carved surface still feed “in
their tall meadow”—tall on the rock face, and abundant. Spirit-creatures “crop-
ping the lichen a thousand years” remain fused with geologic time. Despite our
scratch and stain, Haines leaves this vision open for us with his three dots: “the
air we have always known.. .”
Then turning from “we” to “They,” “The Eye in the Rock” brings human
spirit then and now in face of elemental nature.
They who believed that stone,
water and wind might be quickened
with a spirit like their own,
painted this eye that the rock might see.Haines once asked, “Will we ever again be at home / on earth?” Will our words be
“tied in one,” quickening “the great rocks,” as a Yokuts shaman once prayed?