abiquiu

 herman pipkin, palo duro canyon, c. 1935



cool light slanting through dust

early morning Abiquiu

 silent but for

faraway thunder

piñon, red earth, and stones laid out along the sill like prayers

and bones--possum skull, blackbird wing, the twisted horns

of a mountain sheep

I have heard the whispered "bruja!"

exile does not translate otherwise

and you alone know why I have sought refuge

here in the desert--

 that my heart is aflame with love for things both fragile and wild

and that
each day requires a ritual of quenching the heat with the cool hues of canyon and water

You write, Come back to the City

and I wrap my shawl more tightly around my shoulders

strike a match and watch the parchment burn, your words shriveling like a spell

only here can I be what I am

a woman on fire

elegy

for k.c.c.k (9.19.68-1.7.13)

It will always be winter as we walk down the dirt road with our chapped hands shoved in the pockets of our little checkered blue jeans

The wind is so cold it bites the delicate membranes inside our noses,

and our eyes sting in the bitter air

Geese clap into flight

We dare each other to touch the teeth in the grim smiles

of dead coyotes hung along the barbed wire

For some reason these are the things I vividly recall from our life in the old hotel on the plains

I remember your birth-

the fear I held within me that you would come

and break my heart

It will always be your call that wakes me up in the middle of the night,

Baby brother

child of straw hair and blue eyes

 

What does it mean to you now?

Can you hear the songs I sing when I am lonely or

the prayers I whisper in early morning dark?

Do you think of the cold, the rasp of dry bluestem, the sweet early morning call of the Sandhill Cranes passing overhead while we sleep, warm in our beds, just children, 

safe

a wild love for the world

In September I drove home alone from the Texas Panhandle. Driving in a desolate landscape has always brought me a strange peace. On this drive I listened to fifteen years of music I had collected, and as I moved through these mesas and dry creeks I have memorized after years of making this trek, it was as if the music synced up with the landscape and the shapes of both melody and terrain became the same fabric of some great weaving that extended beyond me into infinity. I was just this one fiber, one beautiful, anonymous strain of violin or cello.

Running just after dawn this morning I felt it again, only rather than landscape it was light, and all the variations the sky takes on as the sun moves through the movements of its symphony. I thought of Rilke and his evoking light and air, of the "infinite space we dissolve into," and of Philip Larkin and "rather than words came the thought of high windows--the sun-comprehending glass..." And of my dear friend y.o. and his exquisite video of the subway-window-light.

As I am running I feel the edges of my being dissolving into the infinite space that "tastes of us, then".

fragment

fragment 9.12

almost weightless
in the cold deep
light pierces stillness
only a heart
beating.
calm
suspended here it is almost as if
you. never. existed.

almost as if
my name had never been spoken
by the viper's tongue--

you could never have known
the weight of stones I carried
(and cherished), each one
sinking,
silent
to the depth of this spring
that will never cease
 to love

Song

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning.

Adrienne Rich

…alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space
we dissolve into, taste of us then?
                            --Rainer Maria Rilke, The Second Elegy