Platte 1950

Here: a take-apart moment—
I slow down, relish each drift of memory, still alive, this
Past. I sit in my cowgirl shirt, pearly snaps catching a glint of sun.
I am almost four years old,
My hair is curly, and although the picture,
With its ruffled edges, is
Black and white, anyone looking back in time can see
That the sky is blue in an early prairie spring.

I sit on a thick tree trunk, cast at some point
After a storm, probably, uprooted from its
Mooring in the bank of the river,
And turned by wind or the push and tear of water,
Laid on a horizontal line to earth, an end just over the river,
The Platte, and so I sit, my small body straddling
The thick-laid slabs of bark,

Tossing back a glance at my handsome dad, his blonde hair
Lifting slightly in the breeze, and wearing his own cowboy shirt,
A yoke of tan over red plaid,
He smiles back at me.

The picture opens long-closed doors,
And the rest of that day begins to appear, settling around me
As the memory blooms:
A cloth imprinted with fading yellow and blue flowers,
Spread on grassy tufts a step or two away from the
River; my mother in peddle-pushers, smoking
And gazing fondly, detached,
At my brother, my Johnny, just walking;
He picks up miniscule buds and tiny cones,
Tastes skeptically and looks up at our mother
With his round brown eyes, and
She laughs, indulgent, brushes the bits
From his mouth. The picnic hamper has
Fruit; she butters home-made bread
And sprinkles it with sugar.

And that’s all.
It’s just as real, more than
Half a century gone. There were smiles,
A splash in the river, pretend games, parents
Vibrant in the moment, laughing,
Smoke lazing up through Russian olive trees,
Cottonwoods rustling, Johnny, my dad, and Mama,
And I am always and still there,
Still alive in this past.

· ·

Breathing Home

So there I was, sitting under the great black dome of heaven, far stars as close as an outstretched arm, ancient wise old Taos Mountain barely visible in the night, but powerfully present. And in the way of the unfettered mind, I started remembering some years back, when we tore the tangled vegetation off the privy, thinking to make a garden around it and turn the old structure into a gardening shed. A few hours later, as the sun was rolling west and closing the day, a bird flew back; sitting on the now bare metal roof peak, it squawked a single cry unmistakable in its poignancy, for home had disappeared.

Looking out across the low pinon earlier that New Mexico evening, a coyote, barely visible in the hip high scrub, paused and looked at me. I looked at him, close enough to gaze into his yellow eyes, the flash of such connection momentarily disorienting. And then he trotted off; it was his place, after all, not mine, and this time I had not disrupted home.

The living life is fragile and tensile everywhere, but none so clearly limbed and starkly seen as there, in absence of tree, suburb, chaos of what is made, not what organically is. There, all that remained, in the homeostasis of the moment, in the confluence of mountain, desert floor, and sky, was for me the archetype that feeds a soul – mine, at least. That pure form, brilliant in mountain contour, and mystic, ancient sky, miracle of changing light, was testimony to when and then, inhabited by beings wiser than the human observer.

Since I tore away some long dead bird’s thicket-home those many years ago, the ways bird, toad, fox or coyote appear have been a gift to apprehend. We share home, and we dare not forget that; our outer landscape cradles it and our inner landscape creates it. And this is how I began to think of the inner landscape of poetry; the internal architecture of my creative self, and I began to realize how the literal landscape often informs the internal one. For me, then, poetry is my internal home; the space I feel my most expressive me, and when I go to water my western roots – the Great Plains, the mountains of Colorado and New Mexico, as I have since I moved away and to the east – I turn to words and the poetic form to nurture the symbiotic me, the one breathing in the same space as those other beings, hopping, flying, trotting, scampering, and making home.

At Last Barbados

I took the small white oblong pill and by the time

I awoke, flying blue-green over an ocean prairie,

Caribbean sirens sang from island to island;

Lower and lower we dropped until ground speck loomed,

Settled in metal rooftops’ hot colors, and my world had changed from

Dread to calm.

High above Atlantic sounding, on a cliff atop the surge,

Wind patters palm trees’ fronds, a sound like night-time rain; the hemisphere sleeps;

Monkeys scramble and a night bird calls faintly, once, across an answering sky,

In the morning as the eye searches for nothing but what is rolling below,

I swear I see the curvature folding horizon’s coverlet,

And Africa there, a thousand thousand miles across the deep marine and

Along the eastern coast gods march,

Mythic, pitted rocks cleaved from ancient coral reefs;

Nimble boys and old men with grey hair tied in ponytails game the surf,

And ride waves home in crests of long forgetting.

I watch their eyes see nothing but the water;

They care so much that nothing matters anymore.

Still, if I were seeking how to make my bit of clay mean something

In this world when I am gone to whatever home awaits

I’d recall and feel the scene I see; the tide comes in, the tide goes out; it pools

Among the monoliths standing on the shore.

Between the breakers water waits for an instant’s universe,

And eddies, each ephemera a different masterwork.

I will be there in the next millennium; my bones and dust at one with

This pulse of life that more than my short breath

Confirms what was and is; confirms an evermore.

November Alchemy

Last night I drove up on the ridge between the lakes,

In the solitude on the seasonal road,

Soon to close in winter’s snow,

The bowl of night encompassed all there was,

A full moon bathed the landscape in

Daylight, it was such a moon as that,

A universe according to its rhythm

In one swift moment then

Spilled upon me a revelation:

That I am of and in

This space of dust and light,

For there, in empty pastures, cloaked

In winter’s coming on

I felt of life, among the spirits from the fading stalks,

Goldenrod unblooming and dewberries gone,

The clumping of the earth

Shielding shoots and seeds within,

Until comes a spring that cold has made

Forgotten now.

Uneasy these few weeks, distracted and uncertain

And too much touched by what I can’t explain,

All gentled down and washed away into the balance

Of what has been, and what will be,

My own connectedness.

The winds come up, soon calm descends,

Full moons arrive, inexorable and pacing surely,

And there I understood, illuminated in

Those now-quiet summer pastures,

That all mystery of completed place was

Perfected in

My beating heart.

Clearing Space

Early on an autumn evening, after all the animals are fed and I’ve made the first small fire of the season, I stop the whirring in my head, and begin to eliminate the static. I turn off the television. I turn off the music. I let the phone ring unanswered. I close down my computer. I push the magazines and books I dally with each day into piles, dog-earing the pages or bending spines, marking my return.

I am wondering. I look outside at the early dark, and try to stop the internal racing. I am clearing space.

In Taos in July the wind devils dissipate in the evening; cloud banks collide over the tops of the mountains, changing the colors of the sky as the sun disappears, leaving residue of color not just in the west but all around, for there is no west at sunset in New Mexico. The magpies chatter all day, but at night, finally, they begin to tire. A calm settles. I am listening to the grandfathers. They message in the wind, the rustling of changing skies, the spritzing of brighter air into slow closing of grey cloud cover signaling rain—sheets of it curving in the distance as the winds push its veils across mountains and mesa. The grandfathers talk and I listen. The grandfathers hover on Taos Mountain; they are all around in that expanse of place; they come if one will listen. They speak if one will hear.

In the house, there are spiders, and of course, whether I want to be fully engaged with them or not, there is cognition; spider cognition. They live where I live; we share a wedge of place. A small lizard sleeps on the adobe wall, hidden as she rests. In the morning, she scurries under the screen door when I surprise her, opening up the house for sun and coffee. We are an unlikely family, searching tenuously for our rapprochement. I know the spiders and the lizard are simply where they are supposed to be, and so am I; the only difference is that I feel quite assured that they are not so discontent and ungrounded.

When I arrived, I carried trials and sorrows; I was full of fretting and unease. None of this was out of any ordinary. It is the way life attaches. I had thought to write, to be disciplined and record all the wonders of the place, but the seduction of space and color and elements entered into the being of me and I felt a certain energy roll away from my very self. As I sat with my sister one evening, first arrived, I looked out toward the oddly subtle pulsing view of the sere and drying desert praying for rain, and I released my static and my clutter. I held up my arms to the cooling night, and I released the humanness of my life to something large and comforting. The grandfathers invited me to let it float away, and so I did; I cast it all to Taos Mountain, where nestled were the woes and hopes and secrets and dreams of countless pilgrims and countless natives in the stoic of geology and place.

No poetry was lurking. No age or care or intention existed. I tossed my me to Taos Mountain, and the grandfathers cleared my spaces, my internal crumblings and my fretful heart. The loveliest dawn arrived; not one of pinks and yellows gleaming into my bedroom window, but, that night, the dawn that I had arrived in this place for a reason. I came for my sister’s healing, and I found my own salvation.

The Hebrew word for salvation is literally translated “great opening spaces.” All my life I have intuitively understood that notion—the Great Plains are vast, and a road always leads to somewhere, and if you stay on it long enough, it always leads up. Arriving in Taos, at an elevation of some 7,000 feet, my journey paused. I cleared out my internal spaces, and gave all that stuff to Taos Mountain. My cobbles and shackles joined the repository, the one in Taos Mountain, the repository of the ages, where the people, those who gazed upon what is immutable and constant, knew, as I did then, that it was safe.

The grandfathers watch me, and in the wind that still kicks up now and then, I detect their nods. Some call it giving up, and I call it surrender. In clearing spaces, I create the room to grow. The grandfathers bid me listen, and Taos Mountain knows.

Blind Eye

In Exeter, the apples lay rotting on the garden path,

As gentle Devon summered in a late last bluest sky,

And man-tall hedgerows that lined

The brown-mapped roads up on the moor

Began to show their russets and their goldens

As the light began to die

Earlier and earlier, the thorny hawthorns bare,

The maple, oak and dogwood leaves floating down

To hedges’ grassy banks,

Leaving holly and primroses to brave the coming wind,

To color through the gray.

The chill was there that long past fall,

A marker of an unseen pulse, a throb of

Strife, not hers, she thought, but from the

Rovers on the quai, the travelers’ dogs all running wild,

Or hearty shouts of revelers closing down

The pub at 2 AM in Wonford Road.

She didn’t want to know.

She closed her eyes, and didn’t see the world was spinning

Way too fast; her garden bloomed through early frost,

She carried on; the blind eye turned to

Balm enough no matter present tense:

On the trellis by the terraced beds, the bramble and the ivy twined,

She should have seen the signs.

Ah, well; all that was long ago, the choirs stilled, the

Gateways closed, the spring of making new again

Choked by betrayal’s rust; corrosive lies,

And long into the future that came awake in that bad

Dream, the beauty of that year turned to dust and formlessness.

In dormancy all things repair; they sleep into another time,

And so she did; the decades cloaked in silence as she moved

Through past and memory, stoked indifference, turned

Away, resolved to find some relic, some retrieval from the ash.

Who knows just where forgiveness lives; who tells one how to do it?

But forgive she did, with wisdom earned, eyes seeing all around,

And now she sees another turn, another of life’s seasons:

Her spring was dashed, and summer too; all that is gone

Forever now, a waste of her, a waste of time, time ungifted witlessly,

And no recoup, no recompense, though

Steeliness and wholeness won,

And she is seeing where she’s been; the hedgerow bare,

The thorns to keep the wild ones out,

But the holly’s red, the primrose blooming,

For she is autumn now.

Spark

A small, precious spark
Of life, breath only his, no other's,
Extinguished tonight
Surrounded by the anguish that is so
Inexplicable:
No father, mother, child, no
Human celebration knitting now
To everlasting,
No, it's
A small
Sweet loyal dog
Sent by loving human
Kin
Into that unknown place
Beyond the stars and tears.
We love them and they die too
Soon; we make that bargain with the
Universe:
You love us,
And when it's time
We will love you into
Your great quiet:
The silent leaping joy
Of chasing stick, bone, clod of earth,
The silent plunge into our laps,
Nestling, the unconditionally joyful
Greeting at each always new reunion
But of course, in the awful yawning,
Suspending hours, the liminal place of
Decision's dawn,
Motion slows
Into this silence;
The gaze of eyes, the trust to always
Say
I know
I know
The silence of the quiet house
With breathing now one short.
We let him go.
We made his choice,
And as with the all of our other
Precious beings
Who await him in that unknown there
The language of the love we have,
When translated, breathing soul to
Soul, was understood; it
Said
Help me leave, it's time.

Meditating Snow

Behind still-blinding white, late day light,
The old sun wins last moments,
Streaks of yellow wheatgrass,
Bruised pink changed to violet
Descend into far back fields
Laced by black bare branches framing barn;
Silhouetting
Evening’s arrival.

Never one to dwell in air not grounded,
I raise my eyes to meet
What keeps me in my necessary world:
Hope, the choir's blend,
The invitation from the growing, dancing ground.

Season answers seeking with its changing light, and now,
Then-gone swift lumens of momentary grace.
I am guided by what I share with every breathing pilgrim:
The spark of choice and effort; the ken to see and knit
The claimed slices of day into the covering, gentle dark.

In the hollows of the night,
Praise hums, spinning gratitude that
Bands the disappearing hills.
Watching now, the bright of snow cast up
Gives deep way to
Sapphire stillness.