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Red rock, rhyolite,

from what volcano did you flow eleven thousand years ago?

by Karen Gookin


I can hold it, cup its six pounds in my hands, feel

its rough, hard mass and trace the hewn path

a strip of leather once took, ‘round and ‘round, to strap

a bone handle tight. I can call it by its given name

and read how it was formed by volcano or caldera.


Yet I’d rather hear its story, know its history

with the land, learn how it was that my father found it,

sixty years ago, picking rock on his new-bought fallow

field. Cree, Ojibwe, Black Feet, Assiniboine? Which

new mother, which warrior’s boy, which old woman


raised up this rock and brought it down hard enough

to kill and clean a bison run off the cliffs of Wahkpa Chu’gn

8 miles south, to break the creature’s bones, pounding

and scraping for the mush of precious, life-giving

marrow, then pulling the carcass by travois—over


what’s now farmland—where somehow, lost or forgotten,

the maul dropped and stayed. Each spring the frozen plains

heave up another generation of remnants lost before, walked

on, plowed under, layer upon layer of antlers and bones,

arrowheads and bowls, celebrations and wailing, and then


this rhyolite maul for my father to find as he walked his field

that day, tractor pulling through new furrows, the smell

of freshly turned earth with all its stories, just picking rock

and tossing them in the bucket with ruddy, worn hands nearly

as scarred and pocked as the maul found on the land


he’d called his own. Mine now, the records say, and flowing

with golden wheat, but he was the last to walk this ground.

The land has its own story—unpurchased—thousands of years,

a thousand peoples walking. I hold the maul today, able only

to look with wonder, to store it on the work room shelf.


 

Karen Gookin grew up in the wheat-farming country of North Central Montana. Her poems recall family times in that Big Sky land, along with life and loss in the shrub steppes of Washington State, where she and her husband Larry, both retired professors, raised their two daughters. They have lived in the "Evergreen State" now for over 40 years. In her “working” life Karen taught English at public school and university levels, wrote and edited for two newspapers, and played flute/piccolo in one of Washington’s regional symphony orchestras. Her poems have appeared in Cirque Literary Journal, Shrub-Steppe Poetry Journal, YARN, Washington Geospatial Poetry Journal, and Yakima's Coffeehouse Poetry Chapbook (winning the Tom Pier Poetry Prize). A first chapbook of 25 poems, The Hills Around Are Dust and Light, is scheduled for November 2023 publication by Portland's small press, The Poetry Box.

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