Pictograph. Melissa Kwasny

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СКАЧАТЬ we mean we drink and smoke. Our bodies won’t stay long, although our bones can. Surely, we will be given time to explore the diverticula of the heart. The long, most beautiful summers coming to an end. We sense the shadow-bearing figures, day and night, mixed as they are. We might be stage. We might be inconsequential. We begin to sleep close to the sound of the creek. We stockpile our warmth for the others. Do our dreams prepare us for our eventual deaths? There is no time there. Therefore, there is no breath. Small area of dots and hand-smears outside the rose-orange wash of blood. They are watching us from there, Pilgrim. Whoever they are.

BEING QUARTZ

      Parchment upon parchment. Hoofprints across the snow. A thousand cracks in a glassy ceiling. There is light there, the windows double-paned, the doors shuttered tight. Dirt can’t get in, can only scuff the surface. Even the most strenuous hiddenness must unfold and die. Is death then an extreme condition of exteriority? What is inside grown exceedingly out? The animals have come down. I can hear them roaming, though I can’t place them. A slow process, marked by indirection and great lull. I read that the path to the underworld passes through a region of ice. I read, “the alert and autistic ends of the mind’s spectrum.” The shaman’s cache is not in the cave but inside the rock walls, where she keeps her toolbox, her maps and set of instructions. Where she calls out the vowels, open and endless. Where she watches as her teeth and lips close.

PICTOGRAPH: POSSIBLE SHIELD-BEARING FIGURE

      To the phrase “We mean you no harm,” I have added, “We wish you well.” How the day trims the night with blue trade cloth. How the night offers long-distance bells. And the wine-makers appear to mix the waters. Lately, the rivers have begun to talk, in their loudspeaker voices, as if projected. As if they were speaking from a crack that opened deep inside the cliff, as if they were placed there like a feather in a book. Yesterday, I had one of the Old Days. As they say, my solitude was extended. An implied but un-depicted ground line. An abstract foothills tradition. The sound of rivers can lead me back there, to what I am being carried along to find. Their lives, this one, a kind of drowning. Imagine it summer. The rock shelter is dry. Scrape of chert. Chirr of insects in the fescue. The earth alive in ways I am not. Dead in ways beyond my reckoning.

PICTOGRAPH: HELLGATE CANYON

      Not a place to “house” the dead but a place for them to appear. Red ocher, made of rock, bound with the living: egg, fat, urine. In other words: wave the paint stick near the surface. Feather the incense in. What would spirit be inside the earth if we could see it? Foothold, finger-hold, grasping onto the bare shelves, its steps trailing down to the ancient rivers. Foxglove, how the spirit hides. Its carapace, the cliff. Does it resemble the human body, loosely woven, like cheesecloth? Or is it dense, dark grit on a ledge? I wonder if they were scared, if they were children, men or women. Chained in lines that seem knotted even as they stretch out. Note the extensive scratches on what could only be a torso. The wind, the trees cry after them with open mouths. The saddest piece of music ever written.

PICTOGRAPH: STAR BEING CAVE

      Womb of earth and we, its organs. It is bone-dry, now dead. To run our hands over its sides would be to scrape them. Lice-filled nests, broken shells with inner seams of blood, guano pooling like oil on the ledges. Flicker and pigeon feather, dirt and scat in tiny chains of pellets, rat or squirrel, some fur-bearing creature hunting eggs. But if there were a fire, if we crouched by it in the night, walls drawn with stars and humans who resemble stars or birds, the cave would come alive, by which I mean the lower kind rush out, the eagle walk with its wings lifted so they don’t drag. Its eye, a predator’s eye. Graffiti and beer cans, the deep ruts cut from a truck in spring, the curators who chiseled out the central pictograph and then left—couldn’t they see it? How it ties us to the past? The cave has elbows. The cave breathes and counts its breaths, its cavities filling up with light and dust and allergens.

CAVE SYSTEM

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