ALL MY RELATIONS

This pen is writing in you the poems of the earth.
This paper no more than the skin that's all that is between us.
These syllables the sibilant tongues of wind in your ear.
The scrawl brushing your eyelashes is the feather of a wing
fanning smoke into your face.
The songs I hear singing were sung to you by the same Grandmother.
This form that takes shape as we bend around each other
becomes the common spring from which we drink.
The dance of my fingers is with the dance of your eyes.
We are together and apart in time, in time.
My boot step words leave a path for you to follow
and a path for me to find my way back to you.

Dust sifts from my pencil and marks the transit of glaciers.
Ink is blood dried where the skin of grass was torn.
A phrase stains the white flutter of leaves your fingers still and hold
for a moment of wonder, and then let go.
Words are no more than passing flocks of geese,
little different from hailstones mounded in a ditch
that melt in the breath of a downslope chinook.
They scratch in the wind crater sand the tenuous poems of blowout grass.
They will return, as long as the bent bow of the sky is drawn on the dancing hoops.
But if the prairie is gone, they are gone
and become the undecipherable scribble of tombs.

What I say no longer matters. The saying is now to you.
These poems live in your eyes, taste the world with your tongue,
hear their heartbeat blood thumping in your ears.
They harden against hip and yield to the damp of your lips
and sing in the hair you wrap around the gift of morning.
Heft them to your back on the trail your boots lead you down.
Let them spin with the molecules you split and bind
from their water and breathing.
See if they grow corn. Mark if their red calves drop fat and alive.
I give them, gladly, for the compost and rot.
Hands together, head bowed, I honor and give them to you.



© 2002 by Richard W. Todd

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