Is it just that Buffalo Bill is dead, or is it that he is outdated? Certainly, he outlived the golden years of the Wild West – he died in 1917 (he was born in 1846). There is also the slight ambiguity as to whether it is Jesus or Buffalo Bill that is a handsome man. Indirectly we begin to wonder what Mister Death would have to say about the death of Jesus.
‘Jesus he was a handsome man and what I want to know is…’
the ‘and’ puts us off kilter – it has the rhetorical jerkiness of a child.
Why, we must ask ourselves, is Buffalo Bill Death’s bue-eyed boy? Because he was a renowned killer? Buffalos, most famously, but men (and pigeons?), too?
Because he was a fine scalp for Mister Death, packing so much life into his 71 years?
Quite apart from the formal inventiveness and arresting language, the poem’s trio of protagonists are potent symbolically – somehow alluding to freedom, mortality, potency and defeat.
Something from not so different in its allusiveness from Kafka:
The Wish to be a Red Indian
If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.
