Pictograph. Melissa Kwasny

this one, a kind of drowning. Imagine it summer. The rock shelter is dry. Scrape of chert. Chirr of insects in the fescue. The earth alive in ways I am not. Dead in ways beyond my reckoning.

PICTOGRAPH: HELLGATE CANYON

      Not a place to “house” the dead but a place for them to appear. Red ocher, made of rock, bound with the living: egg, fat, urine. In other words: wave the paint stick near the surface. Feather the incense in. What would spirit be inside the earth if we could see it? Foothold, finger-hold, grasping onto the bare shelves, its steps trailing down to the ancient rivers. Foxglove, how the spirit hides. Its carapace, the cliff. Does it resemble the human body, loosely woven, like cheesecloth? Or is it dense, dark grit on a ledge? I wonder if they were scared, if they were children, men or women. Chained in lines that seem knotted even as they stretch out. Note the extensive scratches on what could only be a torso. The wind, the trees cry after them with open mouths. The saddest piece of music ever written.

PICTOGRAPH: STAR BEING CAVE

      Womb of earth and we, its organs. It is bone-dry, now dead. To run our hands over its sides would be to scrape them. Lice-filled nests, broken shells with inner seams of blood, guano pooling like oil on the ledges. Flicker and pigeon feather, dirt and scat in tiny chains of pellets, rat or squirrel, some fur-bearing creature hunting eggs. But if there were a fire, if we crouched by it in the night, walls drawn with stars and humans who resemble stars or birds, the cave would come alive, by which I mean the lower kind rush out, the eagle walk with its wings lifted so they don’t drag. Its eye, a predator’s eye. Graffiti and beer cans, the deep ruts cut from a truck in spring, the curators who chiseled out the central pictograph and then left—couldn’t they see it? How it ties us to the past? The cave has elbows. The cave breathes and counts its breaths, its cavities filling up with light and dust and allergens.

CAVE SYSTEM