Sleeping It Off in Rapid City

On a 700-foot-thick shelf of Cretaceous pink sandstone
Nel mezzo …
Sixth floor, turn right at the elevator
‘The hotel of the century’
Elegant dining, dancing, solarium
Around the block from the Black Hills School of Beauty
And campaign headquarters of one Jack Billion
(‘Together we can move forward’)
The exact centre of the Oglala known universe
Cante wamakoguake
Or only 30 miles or so away, south-west, off Highway 87
I waken to the sound of the DM&E
Rattling through this sleeping town
Sounding its horn as it snakes its way through
Hauling coal from nowhere, through nowhere, and then some
Old rocks and distance, a few hawks overhead
4 a.m. – per una selva oscura
– Kwok, kwok, kwok, shrieks the Velociraptor
In the closed dinosaur shop
– Vroooom
Roars the Triceratops, like Texas thunder
They keep the tape-loop going through the night
Always have done, no one knows why
The Bible Store respires in its sanctum
As if in an outsize black glass humidor
This is a sacred ground, a holy place
4 a.m. in a sacred place
I can tell this is a sacred place, I needn’t be told
It’s in the air
I feel it
This old heritage hotel, this is a sacred place
The tour buses are lined up outside it
Awaiting the countless pilgrims
On the floor, my shoe, under the bed
Even my shoe is blessed
The Lord’s blessing is everywhere to be found
The Lambs of Christ are among us
You can tell by the billboards
The billboards with foetuses out there on the highway
Through the buzzing, sodium-lit night
Semis grind it out on the Interstate
Hauling toothpaste, wheels of Muenster, rapeseed oil
Blessed is the abundance, blessed the commerce
Across the Cretaceous hogback
Hundred-million-year-old Lakota sandstone, clays, shale, gypsum
And down through the basins of ancient seabeds
Past the souvenir shops and empty missile silos
The ghosts of 98-foot-long Titans and Minutemen
150,000 pounds of thrust
Stainless steel, nickel-alloy coated warheads
Quartz ceramic warheads, webbed in metal honeycomb
Eight-megaton payloads
Range 6300 miles
Noli me tangere
God bless America
We’re right on top of it, baby
This is why you’re here
Close enough, anyhow, just 11 miles west of Castle Rock
In a pasture, right off 79
The middle of the middle of the heart of this great land
There’s a sign
This is a sacred place
Up there in the hills, the vast, ponderosa-feathered batholith
You can see it from space
Two-billion-year-old exposed rock, rising from the prairie
A faint blue shape on the horizon
When approaching from a distance
But seen close at hand ‘grim and black’
Paha sapa
‘Savage cliffs and precipices … fantastic forms
Sometimes resembling towns, some castellated fortresses …’
A sacred place
Custer once came through, in the summer of ’74
With that moustache and golden hair
And espied here the multitude of flowers
17 varieties in a space of 20 feet
One could pick seven different kinds at dinner
Without ever leaving one’s seat
– It was a strange sight, he wrote
To glance back at the advancing columns of cavalry
And behold the men with beautiful bouquets in their hands
A sacred place
The Great White Fathers dwell in these hills
Noses and foreheads blasted out of granite
Crazy Horse, too, 30 stories high
An enormous pod of migmatite glowering east
Big chiefs everywhere
On every street corner in town
Life-size bronze likenesses
See the chicana brushing President Van Buren, bless her
Bless the chicana in pink rayon, the dutiful city worker
Brushing the statue with a toothbrush in the night
There’s Nixon at St Joseph and 5th
Seated, hands folded on his lap, the way he did
In the midst of ‘delicate negotiations with Mao’
This is what it says at the base
Bless them, Nixon and Mao both
Men of peace, soldiers of God
The bronze is cold in the High Plains night
The eyes they gaze out of are holes
Here, at the exact dead centre of America
Or close enough, just north of here, off Highway 79
The buffalo roam in these hills
Paha sapa
The bison graze in the shadow of these hills
One angry bull tosses a Harley 30 feet in the air
A big fat biker, attached to it, 30 feet as well
The sacred bison
He would have ridden among the sacred bison, the biker
Ridden as if he were one of their own
– Tatanka, Tatanka, cries Kevin Costner
– Tatanka, concurs Kicking Bird
– Tatanka, agrees Wind In His Hair
Bless Kevin Costner
I saw that one on the wide screen, in Dolby Surround Sound
Kevin Costner stayed in this hotel
Babe Ruth and Calvin Coolidge, too
This is a sacred place
I have come here from far away
After many years of wandering
Disillusion
And found surcease here from all my cares
Surcease here from doubt
Here, at the centre of it all
On a great slab of Mesozoic rock
This sanctified ground
Here, yes, here
The dead solid centre of the universe
At the heart of the heart of America