Along the River Red I Found an Arrowhead

Seth Wieck

April 23, 2023

As a boy, maybe ten, I found an arrowhead

along the River Red, set on the sand like a gift,

so it seemed. Alone I came upon the striped flint.

No tracks but mine. The arrow’s shaft: gone to time.

Only me and the stone and the river

and ripples in the sand like the crease between fingers.

The stone’s still-sharp edge could slice my fingers,

despite time and weather. The arrowhead’s

maker formed a thing that will outlast the river.

A striker of stones showered sparks from this gift,

passing hand-to-hand-then-piercing-hearts. Time- 

and-time again man has given man this flint.

But like wind without origin, from whence comes this flint?

As a boy, maybe ten, with my childish fingers

grasping the sharp flint, I couldn’t conceive the time

contained in the pink, white, and purple-striped arrowhead.

The mere hundred years since an unknown warrior laid this gift

on the wide, sandy banks of the Red River

might register as one grain of sand in the river’s

long history. This particular flint

comes from another river whose waters are a gift— 

west to east—across the Panhandle desert. Fingers

of the Canadian knapped the earth like an arrowhead,

flaking each layer of geologic time 

‘til a valley lay in the Panhandle’s palm. How much time

did it take the Canadian River

to scrape down two hundred feet to Permian mud? Spearhead

makers discovered this layer of flint.

Then with river stones and stone-blistered fingers

they quarried out slabs of this Alibates gift.

But still, in my search, for the giving of gifts,

I’ve found no beginning, simply an unending giving of time.

Before God said, “Let us touch fingers

with Adam,” there was this river; before this river,

an inland sea, silting quartz crystals, forming this flint.

What work has been done, so I could say the word arrowhead?

Now, at forty, with this gift from the river,

each instant this flint has witnessed the persistence of time,

and I can pinch it between fingers, formed as an arrowhead.

This poem was composed for the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon and read at the museum's unveiling of Jon Revett's mural. https://www.wtamu.edu/news/2021/06/jon-mark-beilue-public-art-is-for-everybody.html

Seth Wieck's writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Grand Little Things, and Front Porch Republic. He is a candidate for an MFA at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and lives in Amarillo with his wife and three children.