Bird PointBird Point
It was there when we felled the old cottonwood,
there, waist-high in a cross section
of the heavy, banded trunk: arrowhead
of black obsidian, buried deep in the heartwood,
embraced by the rings and sheaths
the years had wrapped around it.
Edges fine and flaked with care,
tangs whole and sharp,
it rested as in a lined red palm,
fragile, alien black stone signing its slow passage eastward,
traded from hand to hand, nation to nation,
from Glass Buttes toward the Otoe morning,
until a stray shot left it lodged in a young trunk.
A chance cut disclosed what had been hid:
the tree-man's saw an inch this way or that,
my splitting maul struck to either side,
this pure black point might have lain unseen.
The earth keeps her secrets,
holding near her heart the points and fractures,
stray shots and true, death and silence.
We find what we find, wondering.
The earth reclaims her own, folding
pliant limbs about the fallen fence-rows,
the homesteads left and lifeless that subside
into bindweed and fieldgrass;
wrapping her wounds as the oyster does its hurt
by smoothing the sharp and cutting edges
with round and secret luminescence,
as the frosts and sun consume the boards
that framed a home abandoned,
as the cottonwood took in this small, dark point,
embracing and encircling with soft concentric rings
its sharp obsidian angles.
Minneapolis: Mid-List Press, 1992