The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
The Koi People

	"All beginnings are hard," he said.  Smoke rose from the flames between them, and the sweet pungency of sage hung in the air slowly swirling like tiny eddies of their shared thoughts.  He could read the boy's face, creased with apprehensions of the future.  He stirred the ashes and selected another tether of sagebrush to place upon the fire.  The tender branches were unblemished - a summer's growth, nourished by the rain and born from the earth.  He bent the branches together, but they were too full of sap to break, and they crackled loudly as he added them to the still burning pile.

	"Why must I leave?" the boy exclaimed with sparks in his eyes.  "What will I find?"  His Father didn't answer.  Instead, he inhaled the sacred smoke, his eyes reflecting the fire as memories poured through his mind like a river over the stones of his scars.  He sat unmoved.  "The Great River will guide you," his father told him, but to the boy the words were no help as he turned to the fire and followed the trail of ember-ash into the darkness of the night sky.  The stars seemed like an ocean of elders seated around the fire, ready to tell the stories he had heard every season since he could remember.  They were like a thousand eyes reflecting the fire, sitting unmoved, unwilling to answer or allow the boy to swim and play carefree in the river of his youth.  

	The boy's eyes stirred the smoldering embers in his mind into a fountain of fireworks: he would run the river, past the rapids, until it became a great lake, and he would hunt and kill a great carp and return to his home a hero.  The carp would be the size of his canoe - a hundred years at the bottom - and his mouth, surrounded by long barbels, would tell him the great secrets he knew were behind his father's and grandfather's and the elders' eyes.  Then he too would possess the fire of manhood and take his place in the tribe.  "This I shall find," he told himself as he caught his father's glance reading his mind with a half-smile that said: "don't be too sure."
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