July 12 Stories at Chimney Rock

July 12

Stories at Chimney Rock

For Leo and Marie Durnal who took us to their back yard

to see Chimney Rock and to tell us their stories

The stone thrusts up

from the pasture,

bare, brown,

sharp against the sky.

And Leo says,

She's the Greatest Landmark

on the Oregon Trail,

but she's crumbling---

least a hundred feet gone

since I was a boy,

Indians used to send

smoke signals

up from that hill behind,

the Cavalry blasted at

it

for cannon practice for a few

years.

Now,

there's a pair

of golden eagles nested

up on its tip,

And I see two specks

as they

spiral up and down its height

sighting for rattlesnakes in the

cracks.

There's a lot of rattlers 'round

here.

One killed my dog Willy

a few years back

but Marie keeps chickens,

Leo smiles,

Betcha didn't know

rattlers was scared of chickens---

From a snake's point of view

a chicken looks a whole lot

like one of them eagles.

And maybe if I'd had my chickens

with me at the dance in Baird,

Marie adds,

I coulda steered clear of you, you old

snake.

Marie is in blue,

tiny white flowers scattered

over a cotton dress,

blue shoes,

steel-blue hair,

her pale hands mapped,

fine sky-blue veins, deep

water eyes.

Leo shows his gums,

hands on his brown jeans,

plaid shirt torn

over his left rib cage,

a fence he didn't quite clear,

his yellow seed hat reads,

Simplot

across his forehead.

Behind them,

horses are running,

scattering in the grass

around the rubble

of the upper hundred feet of the

rock.

My great uncle Rufus

punctuated his stories,

spitting tobacco, across the

room

a good twelve feet,

to the fireplace every time,

asking through his brown teeth,

Ya know what I mean?

and there was Uncle Mahzon

who showed me his steel helmet

from the war,

let me feel the bullet-hole

on one side,

trace the scar across the back

where the slug traveled

before it tore

through the other,

Knocked me clean out,

Uncle Mahzon says,

and he'd wink,

I thought I was dead,

and also Uncle Pascal

who was oldest and told of

them

carrying his mama's

amputated leg out to the

field

to be buried, to wait

there

until she could join it, It says

"the dead'll rise

to meet Him in the air---'

and Mama needed both them legs to git up.

At the home place

once---

tall pines,

magnolia scent,

the toads sounding

in the marsh---

a pile of lumber rotted beneath

the crumbling chimney.

Beneath Chimney Rock,

Leo's fields are strewn with

fragments.

And always

there is a central Rock

compelling us to speak.