Stopping at a Roadside Rest in Beach, North Dakota by Christine Jacox Kyle

"Thunder and the West indicate a highly sacred or powerful vision and signify revelation, introspection, and deep change" --Black Elk Speaks

This is no land I know from any map.
All day the air has bristled with thunder
and still there is no sign of oncoming
darkness in any quadrant of the sky.
Seven hundred miles ago, the gray cliffs
of St. Paul dropped down to a sheer prairie,
my car slipping through the arroyos and grasses:
Blue Earth, Humboldt, Kadoka, Interior,
beads on a map I've devoted the day
to learning. At the Missouri, a wound
in the heaving hills, a nighthawk tumbled
out of the brimming blue of the noon sky.

Am I always at the edge of something
about to crumble? Once, two thousand miles
from here, I belonged to the sea, the incessant
curling of waves. I crouched in the high dunes,
gathering beach palms, the delicate shells
of animals I could once name. I leapt
the pure line where the wavering grasses
etched each days wind in a new direction,
the wind tipping the dunes leeward each year.

A road sign points to a rest area:
I pull off and hear the trees beginning
to rustle, leaves in a light wind turning
toward the banks of the river. I get out
to read a sign nailed to a tree. It spells
this land's history: first, over bedrock
laid down six million years ago,
a broad swamp widened where the dawn
redwood flourished, the ginkgo, tall palm trees.
The water deepened to a sea. You still
may find, I read by the steady lash
of lightning now, fossils of gastropods,
the sturdy bivalve, squeezed between layers
of coal and shale. After the mountains rose,
the sea withdrew, leaving the rivers that etch
this land. I stumble down through wild plums
and reach the frothing river as thunder splits
the clouds. I shiver, slide out of my skin.

A seam of coal burns red within the sky.
Hail spatters the ground. Far off, a coyote
cries, the last voice from a mountainside.
Two kestrels eye upwind. I take a cup
from the wooden well. It's full of water
where the sky blazes still. I lift the cup
with both hands and drink as deeply as I can.