Remains Of An Indian Village

By Al Purdy

Underfoot rotten boards, forest rubble, bones....

Animals were here after the plague,

after smallpox to make another ending;

for the tutelary gods of decay

acknowledge aid from any quarter...

Here the charging cotyledons of spring

press green forefingers

 on femurs, vertebrae, and delicate

 bellied skulls of children;

the moon's waylaid light does not shrink

from bone relics and other beauties of nature...

Death is certainly absent now, 

at least in the overwhelming sense

that it once walked at night in the village

and howled thru the mouths of dogs

But everything fades

and wavers into something else,

the seasonal cycle and the planet's rhythm

vary imperceptibly into the other; 

spirits of the dead have vanished,

only great trees remain,

and the birth certificate of cedars

specifies no memory of a village...

(And I have seen myself fade

from a woman's eyes

while I was standing there,

and the earth was aware of me no longer_)

But I come here as part of the process 

In the pale morning light,

thinking what has been thought by no one

for years of their absence, 

in some way continuing them

And I observe the children's shadows

running in this green light from a 

distant star

into the near forest_

wood violets and trilliums of 

a hundred years ago

blooming and vanishing_

the villages of the brown people

toppling and returning_

What moves and lives 

occupying the same space,

what touches what touched them

owes them...

Standing knee-deep in the joined earth

of their weightless bones,

in the archaeological sunlight,

the trembling voltage of summer,

in the sunken reservoirs of rain,

standing waist-deep in the criss-cross

rivers of shadows,

in the village of nightfall, 

the hunters silent and women

bending over dark fires,

I hear their broken consonants...