The Buffalo and the Dentist

                        Frontier Village, restored and furnished 
                        with relics of ancestral time 
                        includes live anachronisms. 
                        So we saunter to see the buffalo, laughing, 
                         swinging up between corral boards 
                        and nearly boot it in the rump as we demand, 
                        “Where’s the buffalo?—oh!” 

                                    It revolves its huge head and looks 
                                    (we are wordless) then slowly swivels back 
                                    Its tail quivers 
                                    but it will not heave up its woolly, dung-clotted bulk
                                    and trot about. 
                                    It stares with bitter eyes 
                                    at the diagonal corner of its little brown yard.

                        In outrage the buffalo is penned 
                        adjacent to obtuse oxen and pioneer ponies; 
                        for it is autumn and Indian summer scorches 
                        the prairies; he gallops in rhythm 
                        with the intent, rumbling herd, writing a thunder
                        over a landscape; then butts a close, humid cow
                        toward violence beneath shadowing trees, 
                        bellows an alarum to the young bulls. 
                        And the smells of heated grass and cow, 
                        the river below and sweating sun ripen his blood;
                        the noise of his fellows is warm in his ears. 

            Thinking these things you are transported in time
            past the buffalo’s eyes to a tidy office 
            rank with sweet antiseptics, close as your foolish
            mortification. You pose tilted, hands gripped, 
            hating the trifling pain and the roar and vibrating charge
            of the drill to your bone. 
            The pert nurse frisks her short skirt away 
            from you, pats crisp hair. Mouth agape, 
            you drool ridiculous blood trying to recall something
            profound you once said, and stare humiliated 
            at a dentist’s ski-sunburned head. 

Though the buffalo could preside in the center and roar
at the sides, it slakes in the corner and slobbers,
ignoring its viewers with weary hostility; 
mud melts beneath its indifferent loins, 
and a domestic sparrow feeds between the tips of its horns.