Two Poems by Bonnie Proudfoot

Stuffy

This was not the buffalo of the roundups,
or the buffalo of great thundering herds
racing through clouds of dust on endless
plains. He was a scruffy, taxidermed buffalo
named Stuffy displayed in the Central Terminal
of Buffalo, solemn and stalwart, wooly blanket
of furry curls, looking, on close inspection,
like a coat at Goodwill, moth-eaten, crumbling.
Still I thrilled to see his fearsome dark eyes,
impossibly wide apart, flared, rubbery nostrils,
a great humped back, maybe 12 feet high
on a mosaic pedestal, terminal almost empty,
relics of a soda fountain, news stand, ticket booth
the only light. My adopted city whose steel mills
soon to be as extinct as the buffalo. The name
itself up for debate. Beau fleuve, beautiful river,
some say, the French colonial theory, though
a great Seneca chief was once named Buffalo
as well. Stuffy, I’m back, I’d think, stepping off
the track, a sign that I’d returned to my new life
after riding through the night, my eyes finding his
(stiff, aloof), zipping up a jacket, pulling on
a cap, popping nickels into a coffee machine.
Something about the frost-coated morning,
or how he summoned the past, his sorry fate,
his ornate pedestal crumbling beneath time’s
stampede. His skanky coat. His vast loneliness.

*

Dowser

He arrived in a rusted pickup, muffler dragging the ground,
eased his body, almost liquid, out of the seat. His feet
reached the earth first, then a cane, the head of two snakes
carved into its cracked veins. He held a forked stick
in his gnarled hand; as he paced back and forth, his crooked
spine seemed to gain height. Dowsing runs in families,
some can sing, some can heal, some, water calls them.
Not the rush of a stream, so much as the pulse of it, not
in his brain, but through the brittle pores of a stick,
in veins of his arm, he knew the veins of the earth.

He stopped, held up his cane, said, “here, here,
maybe 75, 100 feet down, there’s your spring.”
We staked the spot, shook his magical hand,
paid him dollars and apples and dug. And I know
how the ground softens my heels after drought breaks,
the smell of wet on leaves, the must in the coal cellar.
Not a gust of sudden wind, no, more like knowing
it will snow without a cloud in sight. Isn’t the sky
full of power? Isn’t the earth full of promise? And
the forked stick dipped, and clear, potable water filled
our well, the only answer to all our foolish questions.

*

Bonnie Proudfoot’s fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in anthologies and journals, including New Verse News, ONE ART, SWWIM, Gyroscope Review, Rattle, and the New Ohio Review, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart. Her novel Goshen Road (OU Press) received the WCONA Book of the Year and was long-listed for the PEN/ Hemingway. Household Gods, a poetry chapbook, can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. A full-length poetry collection, Incomer, is just out from Shadelandhouse Modern Press.