STINKING WATER

This is the place,
the hard place of prairie heat,
the mother of drought buffalo place,
the center called Spirit River
over the high table curled
with stinking gourd and buffalo grass.

This place,
muddy beaverskin water
where nettles sting and mud
soothes water washed welts,
where fishing lines
reel in cats on one end,
drunks and giggles on the other.

A quiet frost-softened place
beneath fat-softened boots,
then the flush and boom and reel
wing over wing over wing,
"meat, mother"
for your depression table.

This is the place
of the summers that burned
while Watts and Detroit smoldered in rage.
Sun was pure.
Heat was scented.
Time melted
into mulberry stains and macaroons.

This is the place
of the Holy Closet,
wireboned coats buttoned with eagles,
rainbows over pockets heavy with naphtha,
among the empty shoulders of boys
who escaped the hard place
of chicken sundays and pinto bean mondays.

This is the place
where bones break the skin of hills
and sluff into washes,
where rattlesnakes raid the fractured joints
and pant in the foramens of skulls,
the bones of Saint and Sinner side by side
beneath the bones of hill
and moonbones of grama grass.

This is the place above all places
where the deepest root draws on time,
where flesh and earth,
beetle and bison,
blood and dung,
spring the arc of a life away and back
to dream of water rotting in heat,
decaying to life,
singing the living dying song
of this place called
Stinking Water.


© 1995 by Richard W. Todd

Next Poem