Red Mountain Mind

Red your pine needles, your rusty clay and woodpeckers,
Red the dawn about your head, and squirrels who sleep in hollow beds.
Red the river with your mud, tinged with blue, green, brown and gold.
Red your ants, emboldened by flesh, and red your buds in spring's first blush.
Red the cardinal, mulberries, raspberries, blackberries, holly and red maple, red oak, rhodedendron.

Red too am I, rolling in mud and water, hair like flame, and skin now re-formed with your own.

You call to me through creaking trunk and woodland scent:
"Sink back into the mud
back into pine needles and redbird song.
A new clothing fashion from
dust and feathers, twigs and elderberries."

I will don Red Mountain as it dons me,
but a thread of thought in the mind of its song.

Woven, re-patterned,
my mouth becomes beak and eyes like a fox,
two antlers grow from a sharpened brain
as mud dries into skin bark, textured, all curves,
with tree knobs and boles for knees and elbows,
and this heart, now quartz stone
purified, pressed into form by the weight of 6.5 billion years
and the great river of time that wears away at the universe
like water carves canyons, caves, new creatures,

pooling deep in the cosmic belly,
it carries the seeds of life,
erosion of dreams now scattered to the winds,
impregnating the darkness like embers or stars,
galaxies fed by the compost of planets and long dead suns,
recycled, reborn, as tree, rock, snout and smile.

Human too, more stardust and water than creed or law.
Red mud for blood, these Homo sapien creatures.

Sun carries me back
back to Red Mountain.
Woodpecker overhead, drumming on my mind,
a resonant bowl for the wind

as thought drops to earth, an autumn leaf,
red blood turned purple, deep maroon, black,
feeding the soil of all that lives in the world.