The Cave Never Taught Me

The Choctaw never taught me what the Choctaw would’ve taught me. The Australopithecine never taught me what the Australopithecine would’ve taught me of. The Memories, these Memories, our Memories are fading songs in an echoeless cave. The listeners have tired, moved on. The choir sang, regardless... ...for a time. And, in time, the silence overcame the joys of recalling and the calling out was no longer met with the Response. The ochre greened-over, the iron dust fell from frost and puddled dryly on the floor. Summer winds, hot and desiccating, soon scoured the walls and ushered out the swirling cinnamon sand. The drums beat to mineral-rich cave-dew, on occasion. A sometime rain that formed cones. They stretched with weatherings; sometimes taut, sometimes loose. Their stories lost, nothing taught. In time, their skins followed their long-lost bones into the buried burned and carved, now-broken empty bones Home. The silent tumulting earth. The cold overlay of the Singeing Beneath. The singing stalled. The echoes bounced for a time from voice to ear to wall to child to child to wall to stone to dust. The stars never taught me what the stars might then have taught me. The dreams and dancings, the tremulous and then-credulous tremolos, the inspirations of ululations, the song-stories of peoples, of healings, of wilds, of ways...now silent. This silence, in this echoless cave, is the most wanting, most missing, Sound. Sound I’ve ever heard. The cave never taught me. The music never taught me. The drum never taught me. The dance never taught me. The cave never taught me. The fire is out, the embers lost. The handprint remains on a wet wall in a dim corner in an out-of-the-way scree-field crevasse just past the Cree field impasse. The teachers are gone. The ancestors quiet. The cave never taught me. The silence may yet.