Papa waded into the prairie grass when I was nine
and never came back. Mama keeps his medicine bag on the wall
and a powder horn he brought down from blue-eyed Quebec
waits at the fire. His crucifix dangles under her buffalo robe
and she can still recite Il me fait reposer dans des verts pâturages,
Il me dirige près des eaux paisibles, though the words are water
on her tongue. I imagine him lying in the stickgrass, his shoulder
blades forever shrugging the crows away. The last of our good
doeskin went to make leggings like a proper girl should wear
and the quill embroidery has not faded. Mama has a beaver hat
taken from a corpse beside the trail. Her cough won't go.

Where the Conestogas ford, I stand and offer pommes blanche
two for a penny to drovers who whip their oxen straight into the mud.
The cattle low and balk and protest the icy tug of water
at their hocks: 10,000 will cross in a summer's day. Mama turns away.
She rode a spotted pony as a girl and left no track. Whiskey swirls
in the Fort Kearny barracks after dusk; she dances, whirls and shuffles,
comes home with a bloody nose and two bits in her pocket. Ripped
knuckles fester from the washboard; steam has leached her blackbird hair.
At Dirty Woman Ranch, men fall upon her — Like this?
Like this? she asks. The kine look back but do not answer.

The Platte cinches my chest as I wade into the fickle water;
my feet dig into the mud searching for white bulbs of arrowroot.
Rising light capes my shoulders, wraps my throat higher,
higher until each breath drags through constricted dark.
The river, ten wagons wide, flat, shallow — once the winter melt
has boiled through — throws sandbars up one day
and, the next, carries them off with a twist of nut-brown water.

Carol Yocom