Song For the Shell Shaker

Painting by Anita Endrezze

Song for the Shell Shaker



For LeAnne Howe


The stones in the hills outside Durant
are silent this evening,
But so are those
in the river near Nanih Waiya.
Tonight, even the wind is weary.

It's worn shoes press against the limbs of the cedars,
A wounded body
on a secret mattress.

Abandoned, invisible
the wind stopped
Believing in God long ago, or maybe
It was just yesterday, or
The moment before this poem.

Maybe it was the day when something passed
between the woman
And the words she spoke,
A private understanding,
like the silent nods of the blind,
Or an absence that blows
through the winds themselves.

Or maybe, it was when the wind rose from its black bed,
Pushing the river rocks
toward their memory of ocean
And the stones in the hills
toward their premonitions of river--
Turning within as the spheres might turn,
a music of sediment drums
and sticks of water--
To a place on the other side of the mounds
Where you stand,
waiting.


Dean Rader