Ask.

... There is a door that opens to a room and in that room is a table, a round table, and at that table sits power. The head of the table belongs to the fist or paw or talon that grabs power. I want to go through that door and get in that room and sit at that table with that power and the wolf should be there, the elk also, the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea, the serpents and monsters of the deep, and this time when the waters come there will be no Noah and no rainbow, God help us, no rainbow.

… wolves I say, more wolves, elk in the dusk, wolves in the night, and in the morning meadowlarks singing the grass into the light and suddenly one green teal drake attacks another and rams it with its bill and I don’t know why and that is the reason I must get through the door and into the room and sit at that table with the slime and slobber and tooth and fang and fin and feather and ask ...

 ... why does life mean death

and who said my people were better than wolves

and why can’t I howl at the moon

and who do you love ...

… I stare up, and stars are everywhere, there is no city on the horizon, the cold seeks my bones and no moon rises ... the voices in my head are my father and his brothers and down the sweep of hill, past the two barns, the hog house, the limestone shed with a spring to cool the cans of milk, past the meadows and the creek and the woodlot the valley flows studded with quarries, refineries and coking mills and in the day the sky goes dark with plumes of smoke and in the night the gas venting off the refineries and the blazes off the coking mills fill the sky with flames and always there is the stench of fuels spent and lives incinerated and no one can tell me why and no one asks why because the money is good and life is hard and the women scrub and the game has fled and hardly a bone or hair remains to haunt us, and they say nothing, they play poker, drink, sit under the apple trees. There is no mention of another way.

Charles Bowden

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