It doesn't end with the last word

 Here’s a glimpse of N. Scott Momaday’s poetics, his sense of what’s good and beautiful in poetry: 

Story is the marrow of literature. The story does not end with the last word. It goes on in the silence of the mind, in that region in which exists the unknown, the mysterious, and that origin of the word in which all words are contained. 

 

Here’s an example of the story going on in my mind after the last word of a Momaday poem. Momaday’s last collection includes 100 haiku under the title “A Century of Impressions.” Here’s No. 2:

 

summer on the hills

poppies bursting in the sun

five colors rampant

 

You don’t need to be a resident of the Southwest to imagine those red poppies in the sun, which might be yellow in one poem or blood orange in another. But what of the remaining colors, out of just five? Do any of the many colors of the earth count? The blues of the sky? The lazy whites and frenzied grays of the clouds over the desert? And how you see greens and blacks, as in vegetation and in shadows, in that landscape tells the world more about your character than any psychologist could pry out.

• Sources and notes: N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear; New York: Harper, 2020, pp. xiv and 100. Several notes have mentioned this collection, beginning with ‘Momaday: ‘The Death of Sitting Bear,’ May 17, 2024.