ANICCA MEETS SAMSARA ON OGLALA RIDGE

I watch the sun set from Oglala Ridge.
Geese honk overhead and fly for the playas.
Tires whine white noise on the bypass.
I stare at the sun and try to tend to my breath.
An aura shimmers the edges of my eyes.

Aware of this body,
where genes twist and untwist in sacs,
inside sacs of cytoplasm gurgling
inside sacs of organs somehow held fast
inside a sac of skin.

A dog on I-40 had its sacs all mixed up,
a pink streak of sac-stuff stroked 
in an eye blink by a metal brush.
Then the brush was gone,
the artist was gone, the dog was gone.

I wanted to write about the scrawl of the grass,
how to pass through the stiff stalks was enough,
how their pictographs, like Chinese writing,
are beautiful enough without knowing the meaning,
about how there is no meaning to know,
there is only to know the unmeaning.

But all mixed up is this
interstate dog, coyotes unhowling,
the stiff rosettes of thistles,
the crumbling skin of Triassic sandstone,
and an aching absence that tries
to fill the fallacies of meaning.

Something crackles from the sky
drawn to the thorns of mesquite
and blues the air around my breath.
My heart charges and drains at the same time
the current switching at a frequency
faster than I can follow.

A million winters shattered the bones of Oglala Ridge.
A million rains peeled back its skin.
Changes happen faster or slower than I comprehend,
jumbled in the movement from one moment to another.
I sit, it seems unmoving, as the sun sets
and the wheels spin around again.


© 2000 by Richard W. Todd

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