Dove Creek...a Poem by Damon Falke

Dove Creek

I know how my father

Picked through the desert

Looking for ruins.

I know the golf clubs

He carried to ward off snakes,

Swinging them through sage

And dens made uneasy

In their own shadows then.

All for a bird point or pottery piece

Charred with the markings

Of the Anasazi who first fired them.

There was my father,

Hunched over a cache of stones,

Sorting them out like so many bones

And discarding all but the one

Thin flake that he held up

For me to see. Just this one blade,

Chipped and notched along its center.

My father, grinning then,

With his club off to the side

And the one flake held high

In his shaking hand.

DAMON FALKE, a former resident of Moab, Utah, is the author of Broken Cycles, a collaboration between his poetry and the photography of Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton, formerly of Pagosa Springs. Falke is a graduate of the University of Texas and St. John’s College-Santa Fe.
He lives in Marshall, Texas with his wife Cassie and their two sons.