My Father Spoke to Me of Indians


      by Bill Meissner

      "The Blackfeet knew every grain of sand
      where this farm is," he told me. "I used to hunt
      arrowheads where wind
      scalped the earth of grass.
      I never could find one,
      but you might."

      I began to smell an old story on his breath,
      and my ears had already run
      a mile away.

      "And that burial mound back in our woods--
      the one shaped like a man with buck horns on his head--
      they say at midnight ghosts drifted like smoke
      from that mound, set fire to
      the whites' houses. Settlers
      hung Indian relics
      above their doors for good luck."

      Next day I lay on the spine of a hill
      and told the clouds what my dad had said.
      I smiled, a tree nodded.

      The night he disappeared no one
      knew where. Near morning when I found him
      he was kneeling in the sand--
      a smell of wood burning the air,
      his fingertips digging like moles
      trying to touch
      just one notched stone.

      Reprinted with author's permission; originally published in Learning to Breathe Underwater, Ohio Univ. Press.

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