ANTELOPE CREEK FOCUS PEOPLE

Dolomite petroglyphs rim the ridge 
over ancient maize fields,
bison and turtles, spaceman,
a stickman with two big feet.

Everywhere are chips
flaked from Alibates cores,
the point of strike, the platform,
the bulge and ripple rings outward.

Flint is liquid and flows
from point of force
down through time to my hand
where it still cuts skin and flesh.

I pick up and heft a hide scraper
with a thumb hole formed to fit
the left hand. Like me,
she was left-handed.

Blocks of limestone
fall in the lines of house walls
and trace the places where she
laughed, slept, loved, cooked.

Where her family told stories, knapped tools,
ground corn, dreamed and wondered 
about time and breath and death and sex,
how the owl shapes the night in its song,

how the stars wheel and fall,
how the moon bleeds from a woman's womb,
how the animals love to hear the people sing,
how corn pollen catches in the hair on the back of the hand.

How little different
we are from each other,
flint and steel, stone, flesh,
dream, song, animal and human.

We both speak the language of vision
and echo the purple thunder
over Plum Creek and the wind song
filling the ochre pots.

We both seek the running stones
that guided from village to village
along the Canadian Breaks, shining
in the moonlight seven paces apart.

We are both the hand 
that filled the vermillion cups
and scratched turtles 
in the stone of old oceans,

and the hand that scrawls words
in the flesh of trees
and strikes them like stone
against the flint of the wind.


© 2001 by Richard W. Todd

Next Poem