Back in my hunting days, bobcats caught turtles and

brought them out of the swamp, up onto the raised bed of the 

wood-train railroad, to eat them. They’d leave the shells 

between the rails. Trains passed over, redneck poachers and 

country boys walking the line passed them by. Coyotes deigned 

to pick them up for play. Months later, bleached a sacred white 

by the sun, Mr. Luke would come along and grab them up. 

My yankee friend Mr. Tom and I would compete to 

find the best ones, up on the tracks or down in the woods.

 

This one I scratched up out of my mind, no photo or model,

just marks on the iPad which coulda been a star system, 

coulda been a candle, but which became for me a meaning trail, 

old time symbol for Indians and boys, those millions of years 

surviving, tales of my grandfather’s logging camp where Bob Red, 

half Chickasaw half Black cook made turtle soup for the men. Not just the past. 

This turtle speaks to me from the future, its afterlife as a shell, shimmering 

with power. A voodoo thing, a boy’s treasure, a glory vouched safe in eternity, 

accomplishment out of the primeval gas of intergalactic star formation, and 

shout out to me, hey old man, back there still living, you ain’t touched nothing yet.