August at Oceti, One Year Later

Standing Rock, 2017

Crawl beyond barbed wire. Stand in the place you stood,
    where you burned your fingers on the barely-live

embers of the Sacred Fire’s final night, looked
    at the half-abandoned world you’d loved; torn

snow pants, ice-crisped tipis, brittle hay;
    wondered if anything would feel as alive

again. All year you’ve failed to unremember the dwindling
    firewood, helicopters scrawling contusions into sky.

But, the drifts of snow that swelled shut the door
    of the yurt are now groundwater, keeping alive

the roots of the wood lily and blazing star. The state
    can take but not erase the hooves that spoke small o’s

along the dirt, or the log the kids climbed, hemmed now
    in clover. And I’m here again, touching my own life

lines to the Cannonball, open-palmed, ready to sift the silt, see
    this river snail beside my skin, the small home-making

of the caddis flies. Teresa, you are water too. And though
    the river is not untouched, still, it squalls with life.