THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR DEATH SONG

Is it
in cold hard cash? the kind
that dusts the insides of men's pockets
laying silver-polished surface along the cloth?     Or in bills?
papering wallets of they who go about
threading the night with dark words.
Or checks? paper promises 
that weigh the same as words spoken once
between the grown grass of our history and
the hidden water in the clouds.
However it goes, it goes:

through my body it goes. Assessing each nerve,
running its edges along my arteries, planning ahead
for whose hands will rip me into pieces
of dusty red paper, whose hands will
smooth and smatter me into traces of rubble.
It's invoiced now:

how our bones are valued.
Our bones that stretch out pointing
to sunrise or are flexed into one last
foetal bend; our bones - removed 
piece by piece and knocked about, catalogued,
numbered with black ink on
their newly-white foreheads. We come apart
as we were formed
having gone together to laughter of white soldiers, white students,
all the same in our fleshless prison.
From this distant point
we watch our bones     auctioned
with our careful beadwork, our
quilled medicine bundles, even the bridles
of our shot-down horses.

How
have you priced us? At what cost
removed us?
What price the pits 
where our bones share a single word:
     remembering . . . still
we don't see how one century
has turned our dead
into something else, what you call
'specimens'. Our blindness
might be catching, you know . . . picture the mortars,
the arrowheads, the labrets
standing up and shaking off their labels
like animals suddenly awake to find
the world went on while they slept;
watch them touch each other, become as one,
march together out the door, walk
into the wind searching for us.
Watch our bones rise to meet them.

At what cost then
our sweet-grass-smelling having-been?
Is it to be paid
in clam shell beads or steatite,
dentalia shells or turquoise,
or blood?