Arrowhead

by Michael Brosnan


While tilling the garden, she finds it,
turns it over in her hand, scrapes away the heavy dirt,
runs a thumb along its ragged edge,
 
imagines a man with a different language
chiseling the point years ago on a late May day,
the breeze in the trees sounding exactly
like the breeze in these trees.
 
She hoses it clean, dries it on her pants,
pockets it, gets back to planting — peas
and kale and chard and carrots.
 
Some night later, a glass a wine in hand,
she reads a book on Abenaki history, this tribe of first people
living in the “Dawn Land” in small bands near the sea.
 
When, she wonders, were they forced to shift
their thinking from hunting to killing?
Did they have a word for “flourish”? As he chiseled,
did her arrowhead man feel something slipping away?
 
In the dark, out her window, is the land she calls “my yard.”
Tonight, it feels more untamable. A shaving
of the vast Earth that none can own.
 
The truth is: it has always owned us.
The wine truth is: as it pleases, it will churn us into story.
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