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Ken Smith

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The Blinding

He has returned from the country of defeat, carrying a fish spear and a bone axe, an antler, a white stone with a hole through it: his trophies.

     The grave-goods lie on the ground before him. One by one he touches them with a finger, speaking for each the names they are known by, the names of the people who shaped them from stone and stone-melt, who were at the last buried with their tools and ornaments. The wind carries off the names, folding them all into itself.

     The dead are here he says, in the old tongue. With his hands he describes the coming of light to the plains, the first trees of birch and arctic willow springing between the fingers of retreating glaciers. He speaks of the first deer caught by the hunters, weighted with stones and thrown into the river. Here, on the ridge of brown shale, the migrants stood, the man with his chisels, the woman with the firebox pressed to her breasts.

     He knows the month the first creatures noticed the stars and began to count and name them, shaping them in groups to make the animals of their stories painted in the deep caves of the ancestors. Long after, he says, men built towers by piling stones to get closer to the sky of stars. His feet leave prints in the mud. Later, coming back there, he is surprised, discovering his footsteps again, printed in the stone.

 

Page(s) 176

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