Paul Muldoon - Saussure lyrics

§ August 7th. Lewis has sent a hunting-party in search of the deserters, Moses Reed and La Liberté. § August 11th. The Captains mull over the tumulus or mole where the Omaha chief, Blackbird, was buried on his white war-horse. § August 18th. Reed brought back and forced to run a gauntlet of ramrods and switches. Boils and buboes. Haemorrhoids. § August 20th. Floyd dies of colic and melancholia. § August 25th. His spirit clambers up the holy Mound of the Little People, to the moans of its thousands of eighteen-inch-high demons. § October 14th. John Newman is sentenced to seventy-five lashes for having uttered a mutinous oath. § October 25th. Though the sandstone bluffs and spurs give way, for the most part, to sparsely- wooden, deeply-fissured mesas redolent of wormwood, of the artemisia's turpentine and camphor, there's still the occasional, delicately-chamfered column of honey-or salmon-coloured querns surmounted, as here, by an obsidian cornice. Camphor and turpentine. Elk-slots. Bear-scats. Drouillard and Shields, the scouts, can see directly across the stately saraband of the Missouri to the corresponding scumble of mosques and minarets and the three-hundred-odd Mandans and Minnetarees.