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.