Two men, 38 and 40 years old, died,
a third person, a 49 year old woman,
passed away this past week…
All three died after participating
in a sweat lodge …
which is meant to be deep prayer
over all gathered in nakedness there;
no clothing to mark status,
everyone as they were when they
came hot and steaming
from their mothers
long ago.
The three died,
and two dozen are ill,
after, it seems, inhaling toxic fumes
and/or becoming overheated
in a sweat lodge put together and led,
not apparently, by Native Americans
for whom sweat lodge is precise memory;
a gathering of the
wounded and the strong…
but rather this sweat lodge was made
by someone who allegedly charged
Ten Grand for five days of what turned out to be
The Days of Sickness and Death.
I asked my brethren what they thought occurred.
One brother, a wisened White Mountain Apache/Nez Percé
said, ‘Good. Serves that a-hole right. Sick of this second wave
of white men copying us; They took everything
we had the first time, land, baskets, bows, and just
have come back in the last 20 years to steal
from us again; the only thing we have left
… our way of seeing and being.’
Another of my brothers, Luis, a young-old Choctaw, gentle,
a healer and a pray-er, had tears in his eyes.
He said, ‘I’m sorry that they were hurt, that
they died. That somehow we didn’t know, for
we could have come and helped them.’
Tarp he said, or tyvek or plastic
are the wrong things to cover
the sapling bones. Only cloth,
and hides, blessed by the old people,
only the things that can breathe,
so the people within can breathe…
for all that hot air can,
if fire not tended just right,
burn the lungs.
I told him I saw my own lungs once,
they are like angel wings, so fine and
paper-thin little hollows and refuges,
filling and emptying of warm but not hot air.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘like that,
the poor little wings inside the body
can burn, become hard and not be able
to rise and fall on the air… injured wings.’
We just sort of fell into prayer then, sitting in the
little glass kiosk that protects people
from the weather while they wait for the bus.
Luis prayed so softly and I joined in,
just looking at each others’ hands.
In that part of town of tire-iron coffee for a quarter,
and no one owning a car, and men laying on the sidewalks…
and dark tanned women pushing grocery carts filled with tin cans,
no one would notice two old people praying.
But, in the kiosk with us was a mother with her two
little ones and ten thin grocery bags full of cheap food.
And she looked over at us, and nodded
in maybe agreement or approval,
but most of all, her children crept over and stood
before us in perfect reverence, trying
to say the words we were saying, right after we said them.
It’s something like that, the difference
between praying in a lodge constructed of
sudden mercy and strength delivered soft…
vs producing prayer like its an
event, somehow…
rather than just some glass kiosk
all scratched up with glass cutters
from graffiti guys,
and behind you the sun dropping below the Rockies
shining sunset gold
onto two little raggedy boys just now learning
how to pray from an old man —
who really knows how– and by heart.