HIGH PLAINS

I traced lines over her body and wandered 
in the folds and creases. Sipped the sweet 
water from her hidden places, scrambled 
the mesas, slipped into the canyons, touched 
with a lover's touch where I knew she would move, 
rubbed the places that would make her shudder 
and heave up her hips, her hills, bubble 
water from her springs, wet the meadows 
and bear uncountable children.

The wind buried me and the water carried 
and spread me like a new skin over 
her body. I pressed new heat to her lips, 
her breasts, her belly, her sweet mound, 
her thighs, the flats of her feet. I pumped 
and pulsed new water into the sand of her rivers,  
rain for the dry places, braided water 
and sand thick as semen and menstrual 
blood into the flowing strands of her hair.

Naked beside her my skin flaked 
sand into her eyes. Naked beside her 
my flesh melted into the dust of her flesh.
Naked beside her my bones dissolved 
into her bones of sandstone. Naked beside her 
I rusted to loamy ash, glazed 
onto pots thrown from her wordless clay.

I loved her like no other. I loved her 
in the wild dance of infinite time.
I loved her with innumerable waters. I loved her 
with the tramp of my feet on the thumping round 
of her swollen belly. I loved her with my wind 
fluttering her eyelashes on the dark circled 
edge of earth and sky. I loved her 
with my breath drawn dripping and steaming  
from the dark folded depths of lungs.

I loved her in the cackle of cranes 
and the bellow of bison, in the wind blowing 
waves of antelope hooves across 
the small of her back. I loved every root,
every seed, every egg, every season from the  time 
of bleeding to the last dry scattering.
I loved her silence at my loud insistence.

I loved the murmur of her lips on the edges 
of the long night's morning. I loved 
the places where I fit male into 
her female and the places where I fit 
female onto her male. I loved her 
for being always there without doubt 
or question, for taking me whole, for taking 
me with my imperfection. 

I loved her with the gnarled grasp of a cedar 
root hanging onto a crumbling loess ridge.
I loved her letting go, falling over the edge,
unrooted, unbound for a moment.
I loved her close enough to smell 
her hair, her heat, and far enough 
to forget her face, the feel of my feet 
pressed into her feet, to forget 
what real touching can be.

I will float the Platte from source to mouth,
another layer of dust on the Peorian loess,
a dancing bubble on the beautiful Dismal,
a fleck of light on a Niobrara ripple,
ash for the roots of blue grama on a Kansas 
prairie grave, a shadow lifting from the flanks 
of Wind River, swaying in the Pine Ridge lodge pole 
ponderosas. And she will have me, scattered and whole,
when I lay with her for the last time.


© 1999 by Richard W. Todd

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