I.

       Prior to writing as a form of possession what lights and shadows swept the walls.

      SARAH GRIDLEY

OUTSIDE THE LITTLE CAVE SPOT

      The opening to the world is lopsided, irregular, dipping down like a lock of hair over someone’s eye. Outside the cave: liquid gold, silver. Inside: as if flesh had been scraped off. Of the many ancient virtues, hope is the one you almost forgot. Limestone so dry and jagged, so pockmarked, it could cut your skin. It stops you. Like a clock stops: you are here. From inside, you see that you are often unkind to others. You shake hands without taking off your gloves. There is a motor of living water outside your ear. Little socket, the earth is frozen, cold and skinny and breaking down. You could lean out and lend your warmth to it. You sit here and the cries are muffled. You worry how, in the matter of a single letter reversed, a bit of food during a fast, a shade too dark for the sky-paint, sacred can turn scared and cause harm. This is how large you are. A thumbprint in a cliff. How much you are asked to keep in mind.

PICTOGRAPH: AVALANCHE MOUTH

      We didn’t know what we were seeing, and so, saw less. Red lightly painted over the surface. They showed themselves like the animals do, only in certain light. It was an empty place we visited, and then they filled it. The coaxing of figures, as if out of a dream, from the corners of dream into the open: handprints, finger-lines, a turtle. Meander outside the area of recent spalls. Dark and cold this time of year, in the canyon, and we were sullen, increasing the severity of where we are. A crazy mean lost culture, blue going in the wrong direction. Always interfering with something sacred still going on. Deer-sex in the interior: one must move by touch. The walk-through pictograph in the making. Ever since we were born, we could imagine these still and silent fields. Deer positioned on top of hay mounds in the safe zones.

PICTOGRAPH: THE RED DEER PLACE

      Close to the river, rain-clear near its shore: seven doe, rose-orange. A mother with a fawn. One starburst. A hundred tally marks. A kind of feather. Clear water, red lacquer of the bare dogwood branches, the shale muted, mixed, spirit tempered with blood. Rock-blood, which is a flower shade, more silent, safer. Your mother is entering a timelessness on the edge of death. A light source so distant we feel auxiliary. Yet a loud thrumming of our ears against the gates. Why do whitetail deer have a white tail that could so easily betray them? Does it bind them like knots in a rope at night or in the confusion of flight from harm? The white is not so bright in the broken tines of hoarfrost, the penciled-in trunks of aspen that fall in lines like faults or fences, yet these look like deer bodies, too. It is perhaps the heathering, the empty space between the colors. A fading language that might be bridge to our existence here.

THE SHAMAN’S CAVE

      Up in long steps through heat to heat, each tree a station where we recover. O, un-diseased trees, who hold a place for us. That the earth was such a place. Place your hand there. Or rather, there were pools here, but they are dry now, smeared with guano. From this nest, Thou directs. The cold winds leap. Our valley, murderous, far below. Unnatural green of our truck and of our pasturage. Is this the state of our interior—barren? Is this where the waxwing song—plummets? All people still dream. The thresholds appear, arcs stained with hematite, red ochre. Which give way to zigzags and stars. Until the line that divides the world in two snaps. Until we lose all courage before this cause. From deep within, something tosses the tops of the highest trees. We are without shields. Intrinsic lack of the right weapon: possible bear, possible star figure, possible god.

CHICKADEES AND THEIR ALLIES

      The flower chart expresses in concise and graphic form the general lines of evolution from the ancestral buttercups, silverberry, sow thistle, goosefoot. The larger rocks crowd together in the downward stream. Water buffalo, bottom-feeding with their snouts. Patterned with lichen, the shadow of a chartreuse beard. They say, you, wading there, are like an ant, a speck of dust. You, who are busy and then gone. And the cloud cover? Eccentric. Who rose at six to paint a second coat of ocher on the walls. A staging ground, where we eat our lunch, scatter tobacco. I am trying to find out what bird accompanied us from the cave, a black-and-white one, but was it wagtail or eastern kingbird? Enigmatic birds, like people, like rocks—who knows what are their shields or what protects them? Four grosbeaks land out of nowhere, like dried leaves, with citrine veils. I mistake the raindrops on aspen limbs for buds.

THE SENTIENCE OF ROCKS

      Take the origin of this stillness. Divide it into bits. What is form but the reining in of desire? As we age, we drape less. Charcoal peppered across our caps. Suddenly, we have microscopes for eyes. We complain of our “loose habits,” by which 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,