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How something is made flesh

no one can say. The buffalo soup

becomes a woman

who sings every day to her horses

or summons another to her private body

saying, come, touch, this is how

it begins, the path of a newly born

who, salvaged from other lives and worlds,

will grow to become a woman, a man,

with a heart that never rests,

and the gathered berries,

the wild grapes

enter the body,

human wine

which can love,

where nothing created is wasted;

the swallowed grain takes you through the dreams

of another night,

the deer meat becomes hands

strong enough to work.

But I love most

the white-haired creature

eating green leaves;

the sun shines there

swallowed, showing in her face

taking in all the light,

and in the end

when the shadow from the ground

enters the body and remains,

in the end, you might say,

This is myself,

still unknown, still a mystery.


—Linda Hogan

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