NOW I KNOW / just a little bit / about what it's like / to be Native / in N. America...

Recorded in my tent during a middle-of-May mountain rain, this is little improvised journal poem, It's a true story, about how I almost got shot in the dark, in OREGON, by a drunk -- a woman -- at the edge of wilderness... "...They have all the money. They have all the guns. Now I know, just a little bit, about what it is like, to be native, in North America..." MUSIC: from the EPIGRAM CYCLE, second movement, "CONFUSION IS PANDEMIC" IMAGE: CORN LILIES (Veratrum viridis), a powerful mt. spring emergence event, directly after snowmelt. Corn Lilies seemed an appropriate plant and photograph here. They are both what we now call 'native invasives,' gaining ground in the montane zone with the excess nitrogen that comes with 100 years of intense overgrazing, but also, as the Native Americans knew very well, the second most deadly plant in the Pacific Northwest. They used the black root, which is snow white when cut open, as an arrow poison.