Four Poems Christopher Bernard Bernard Page 1   [Listen to readings of these poems.] A Dream of the Xavante I dreamed within the cavern of the world. My old father smeared my head with wet so that his power would enter me. There were guards pounding the ground on their thick legs, a heavy dancing that made the heavy world over and over again, like a mortar in a pestle, crushing meal into bread, their eyes watchful as spies or wardens, their heads cocked and lunging.                                                  I was a child, strange to adulthood's mysteries, ignorant, wishful, naked but for cheap shorts, my hair a helmet of chopped black. A log was locked to my shoulders, the taste of sweat was in my mouth and its sting in my eyes as I hustled across the mudpack until the tiredness ate my belly, and the souls of my equals separated in two before me and my head divided between my treacherous eyes. My foolish mother came running, her hand stretched out with a bottle of water, in pity, thinking to save me from pain and perishing - as if pain, as if perishing into spirits might not be the point of all of it - this scattered world that circles us like the horizon where we squat in the dust under a naked sky and stare at a cross stuck in the dirt, the center plunged like a cane blade in our heart.