With the Witnesses by Dale Tracy

Author:Dale Tracy [Tracy, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773550278
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

It is merely the broadness of the uncertain shape that indicates the buffalo here. That the shape of this “someone” or “something” is “uncertain” and dragging into a “jagged” and “always foreign horizon” suggests the tenuousness of the buffalo as a symbol for the speaker’s religious faith. It is suffering and its disregard that contribute to the speaker’s doubt; the unwitnessed blood contrasts the observed smell of the fresh kill, suggesting an interest in the successful hunt rather than in its implications. The ambiguousness of the buffalo as an image of faith makes it an image of doubt as well: the image of faith wanes in the face of ongoing violence. If the buffalo is the faith, its blood that, unnoticed, stains the land with death (both literally and also metaphorically as a moral stain) is the doubt, and if it is the buffalo’s blood spilling here, faith itself is the fresh kill (or dies with the new deaths). When the speaker dreams of doubt, she dreams of the “ropes” holding the buffalo as the image that “will not hold.” Thus, as the speaker constructs the image, she simultaneously depicts its unravelling. Her doubt, “always misnamed,” is in this tenuous naming as buffalo, a naming that dramatizes its own inability to hold, another misnaming.

The sequence later returns to the question of faith with a simile:

It is the soul

Suddenly

wandering off

like a butterfly

or a buffalo (5.1–5)

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