Ode to the Red River Cart

“an interminable shriek of grinding wood” [10]

— Joseph Howard, Strange Empire: Louis Riel and the Métis People

1.

Just a cart made of wood and shaganappi

pulled by a draft animal

triggered a sound that was “hellish, horrifying and nerve-wracking,” [11]

A wooden squealing wheel hub

twisting in a dry wooden axle

shattered the prairie stillness

in its continual drone

driving anything within fifteen miles out of sight

Deer and coyotes fled in opposite directions

Groundhogs dug deeper

birds lifted and scattered

to its “tooth-stabbing screech” [12]

its relentless twisting waves of squealing

bore a hole from ear to brain

a sound worm twisting, coiling

altering anyone’s sense of

moving or still

big or small

near or far

straight or crooked

the Métis on their seasonal hunt walked

dazed in this ethereal wailing netherworld

of “ a thousand fingernails being drawn across a thousand panes of glass.” [13]

2.

This is the gratitude?

This is what’s remembered after busting your knots over every boulder, rut, ditch, gopher hole from Winnipeg to St. Paul? Draggin your heavy ass through mud hole after muskeg, ooze past your spokes and weighed down by nine hundred pounds of raw buffalo-hide stuffed pemmican sausages?

This the thanks for converting to a fortress when drawn in a circle against an enemy, wheels facing outward, carts wedged together protecting everything inside it.

This is gratitude for being an all-terrain vehicle transforming into a raft to ford rivers and creeks

This, a mind-altering earworm?

Well, after all, you are just two six-foot wooden spoke wheels

dished, broad-rimmed, and shaganappi bound,

fixed to parallel, twelve-foot shafts

with a mortised wooden box

all drawn by a draft animal.