Here's one with a title that needs explaining.
One of my favorite words is the word, "Preternatural."
I found it in a few books.
Dr. Johnson used it in Rasselas, and Emily Brontë used it a few
times.
It's when you want to--
it's when what you're talking about is of the spirit world,
but it's not of a supernatural nature.
In other words, where it's-- deals often with coincidences
between man and nature.
And, of course, that's-- as you know,
that's what Indians are all about.
The trouble we have understanding them
is that, while they laugh at their superstitions,
when they talk about them, at the same time
they hold them completely.
They say they don't, but that's not the fact.
And every now and then, you're reminded
that there's another world, which consists of plants.
You know, all those experiments that plants
grow better to quiet music than the raucous music, stuff,
anyway.
"The Preternatural".
Hat Mountain smashed under the pickaxe,
quartz veins bleed in the sun.
The grave robbers have found their pyramid.
I take their rusted hammer in hand,
hold it against the shadow of a 50 foot cactus,
blot out the crimson vulva at the top.
Always the newborn eye blinks and cannot see.
One seed in a thousand will germinate.
The pillar of wooden ribs wrenches,
weak of its weight, one slat cracking after another.
My bones flinch at the tendons, my vertebrae
well to the spine of the stationary life.
The plant falling to its own shadow,
with the memory of two centuries of survival.