from underneath the footbridge where it passed
over low tide and the muck of low tide
as I passed above with a chatter of tires
of a sudden out clamored a flock of gulls
and their thick feet were tiling the flat sea with ripples
all in a pattern as if they had rehearsed it
and they were identically honking like toys
all in unison as if they had practiced it
as if I were the catastrophe they had been waiting for
My father told that story again
the one that ends
You can’t get there from here,
and he laughed again like always.
I didn’t laugh though.
It’s only a good joke
if it couldn’t be true
that’s what I thought.
I haven’t slept well
ever since then
because I keep wondering
is that really how things are now?
Coyote ate up all the animals
Crow ate up all the birds
Pike ate up all the fish
Grasshopper ate up all the crops
So when Yaitse
That pasty-faced monster
Ate up the rainclouds
And the sun went crazy everywhere?
Nothing to eat but bones, we had
Nothing to drink but tears.
The tree grew up overnight, the first anyone knew
Was sunrise and passengers tumbling from cars gawking
At that tree, its lower branches wreathed in fog,
Its upper branches gathering the fog into
Towering clouds. Crow winged out of the sun, squawking,
And drove the dogs away from the tree,
And we danced, we danced down the sun and the fog,
We danced the concrete into dust, the dust into the sea.
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No rain that summer, my father said, the grasshoppers’ song bringing
No relief among the dry weeds. Then the buffalo came like thunder,
My father said, they came like the flood
That follows rain. The hunters went out singing
In the cool before dawn, dark shapes going along under
A dark sky. My father said by the time they came back again,
The whites were heaps of bones beside their heaped goods,
And the grasshoppers were singing up the rain.
Bag of Anything 