Out of the Wilderness

for Shirley Stevens

Joe Bruchac who taught me about Kokopelli
the hunchbacked god with a flute
tells me signs are there, they're everywhere

And that a fox came and put his head
on Joe's knee when he was sitting
on a rock in his Abenaki wilderness

Joe said "that was my dead friend speaking"
Now I'm calling Joe and asking him about that fox,
I want him to teach me how to make one

come through the desert or wilderness
and talk to me—but Joe says "no—the signs are there,
the signs are everywhere—birds, stones,

everywhere, you just have to watch for them"
He tells me there are certain times of the year
when the tribe can't tell stories—I think about that too

while I wonder about the old phone message
on my machine—a voice saying—"I'm just trying to find you"
and I am trying to remember who that was and when

There is no trace, no echo, no sound, no message again—
I tell Joe about the voice—how grateful I was to hear it once
And I begin to learn about the shape of the wilderness

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Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, a native New Yorker, taught creative writing, Classical Literature, World Mythology, and founded a Myth/Folklore Studies Center at IUP. She co-edited the prize-winning Life on the Line, and is the author of Going to Bed Whole, Tottering Palaces, The Approximate Message, and In the Fall of a Sparrow, a chapbook commissioned by the Pennsylvania Governor's Institute for the Humanities. She has read her poems in Ireland, Greece, Mexico, Israel, Spain, and Bratislava and has collaborated on 20 pieces with composers and other artists. Her work has been published in journals, magazines, and anthologies. She as received grants from the National Endowment and the Witter Bynner Foundations and was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Award in the Arts at IUP. Most recently, the collaborative piece, "Furoshiki" (languages that speak without words at the center) premiered in Philadelphia. Facilitator of Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop, she was brought to England to be a featured writer on the BBC's "Writer from Abroad" series. In 2012 Tebot Bach published her latest book of poems, I Want to Thank My Eyes.