Poetry / Reservation Joe

“I once had the soul of an Indian fly into my body
after a car wreck in Arizona.”

I’ve been sitting here for two hours
and this is what I got:
an attempt to relate by an old man
who always peeks out of the windows
at the girls across the street
before getting bored
and staring outright.

I’m tempted to ask if it was the soul
of my grandfather,
who met my grandmother in Arizona
after she got knocked up by Elvis
with her first child and desperately
grabbed onto the first thing
that would take her back to Chicago
without asking questions.

This guy kinda looks at me the same way,
that pervy smile that reminds me of an apple segment
gripped tightly between real teeth.
The old man always said,
“you can’t trust a guy whose teeth look like fruit.”
My grandmother always said,
“your granddad’s a little crazy”
but I kept my distance anyway.

This old man,
who is not my grandfather,
who is from Albania,
says he picked up an Indian’s soul
from among the glass and blood of a car crash
on a road that had been boiled to ink
by the desert heat.
Vultures above his head traced the sun,
their wings cutting and dipping
along a wind he was not relieved by,
and the spirit offered him a chance.

He told the old man that he’d be here now,
a pervert a shooting star’s throw from home
in exchange for not dying, young and alone
on the highway.

It seemed like a fair trade:
An old broad who banged Elvis,
a home where the heat wouldn’t whither him,
a parade of skimpy-skirted schoolgirls
always at his window
and a parasitic Indian in his soul
who tells him when the fishing’s best.

Joe knows nothing
about being an Indian.
I can only think that
if he wanted to be in the ranks of great men
like Elvis and my grandfather,
he would’ve been better off
taking his chances with the vultures.

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