Skull, and: Exile
Rent from DeepDyve- Skull, and: Exile
Skull
Long after the flesh had vanisheda sheepherder found it at Deep Creek.
It belonged to one of the Chinese minersmassacred for gold in Hells Canyon.
A bullet had blown a whole sectionaway, but this did not discourage
the sheepherder from turning itinto a sugar bowl. The sort
of relic one might findin a collectibles store or the dusty,
web-framed attic of an eccentricwho died of cumulative failure.
Was it you, Chea Po, who containedthis sweetness? Held its promise?
I like to think you weren't oneof the bodies washed up downstream
after weeks in the river.That you remained on a gravel bar
where you'd panned for flakes,watched by bighorn sheep. It is important
for me—a stranger writing 123 yearsafter the murders—to imagine you there. [End Page 40]
More than artifact the morning light reveals.For whom water speaks a lost language.
Exile
No tool in your miner's arsenal, Chea Po,no toss of the I Ching's yarrow stalks,could divine the depths of separation.Stretch out your arm, flick the coal
from a twist of burning tobacco,and neither movement describes it.Only feeling gives a clue, and even thatis crude, inexact—a mockery of measure.
When you quit China for the rawAmerican West, did you have a timeline,a plan? Or did you flee famine, the rebellionsand banditry that ravaged the Pearl River Delta?
In either case, the sum of the equationremains the same. A secret weight,heavier on the scales than any goldyou may have found in Hells Canyon.
You must have envied the eagle glidingon currents above the rim, the sure-footedbighorn sheep who climbed those walls.Able to do what you could not. So at home,
so integrated into their surroundings it tooka trained eye to spot them. Not like you [End Page 41] and the other Chinese who left Lewistonlast fall to cast your fates upriver.
Always deer in the gunsights, you nowroam the gravel bar of Deep Creekwith your placer pan, more isolated,it would seem, than even those animals
whose freedom you would emulate.Unaware, as the sounds of the waterintertwine themselves in your dark ache,of the rifles riding down to destroy it. [End Page 42]
Peter Ludwin is the recipient of a literary fellowship from Artist Trust. His first book, A Guest in All Your Houses, was published by Word Walker Press. His work has been published in many journals, including Bitter Oleander, Comstock Review, Prague Revue, and Wisconsin Review. For the past ten years he has been a participant in the San Miguel Poetry Week in central Mexico.
