Salt Lick

by Sandee Gertz

In Norse mythology, Audhumla creates the god Buri by
licking cosmic salt ice

Hunger created this place.
It must have been where I was headed all along:
lifted by December winds of Western Pennsylvania,
and placed into the silence of Southern spring moss.

Drunk on honeysuckle and ancient tree trunks,
state park maps and painted posters tell me
I’m touching the deep, salient edges of rock
where prehistoric animals once licked.

Gunmetal instincts in their thirst for salt,
the unknown craving of minerals,
when all they knew were their ragged coats
of winter, primal wounds of drought.

In bitter wilderness, they wore down the paths
until they were a trace, until natives
found their embedded steps,
bow and arrow ready.

Once Bledsoe, a Tennessee pioneer turned
a corner and saw the promised land of antlers,
the paths forming spokes of a forest wheel,
all leading to this common center.

Where they licked, I too crave salt,
in this sudden Cumberland Plateau,
exile arriving as reverently as I came to the iron numerals
etched on the Bavarian door of my childhood home.

In the brush, a dead tree trunk resembles a heron.
Prehistoric shapes in every dying limb, and I know
I have waited for this as long as the divine cow,
one day his hair, the next, his head.

Northern violence in my chest, forgotten cities
where I once laid bare on Dale grass, reaching
toward the Jerusalem’s Trumpets,
white petals waving from the corner of my yard.

Here, an oak stands firm to my right —
the dendritic arms of time breathe in ancient air,
the earthen grooves of this North /South divide.
and all I know of my hands is they are folded