The Sundance Wives: Moving the Kettle to the High Country Stove

whistle of
soul,

tea steams
the bark off the
aspen,

change adopts
solitude,

color alights
on a backdrop
of gold so rich it
mines the spirit in
likeness to the 1897
assayer's occupation,
just sweeping the floor
is wealth, gold dust so fine,

they came in need one year, a summer
to take census of a dark chaos that a burro
would have had a hard time packing it,

thing was, remnants of those younger years
when skeletons did not die, hell, they were bones
without flesh alright, and no marrow, but they lived,
and they lived in closets, trunks, attics, and seashells,
and even downtown suburbia, and in wagon wheel ruts
in rural Amish country, and in crooked fenceposts on the
farm where one of them passed by everyday hypnotized by
the barbed wire her mother raced her horse alongside, hell
those skeletons had not died,

moving the kettle
to the high country
stove, leaving with a
better understanding
of arriving.

Copyright Ms. Sage Sweetwater, firebrand lesbian novelist