Olive Night
The Jemez
Indians mention the Los Ojos bar.
I think of the Swiss
Army practicing maneuvers in the Alps.
The world is a hit-and-run, an armed robbery, and a fight.
I think of the evening star.
And ripen, as an olive ripens, in a cool
summer night.
*
The Cloud Chamber
A neighbor
rejects chemotherapy and the hospital;
and, instead, writes
a farewell letter to all her friends
before she dies.
I look at a wasp nest;
and, in the maze of hexagons,
find a few
white eggs, translucent, revealing formed wasps,
but wasps never to be born.
A pi-meson in a cloud chamber
exists for a thousandth of a second,
but the circular track
it leaves on a film
is immortal.
Empty Words
He describes eagle feathers with his hands.
He signs the rustle of pine needles on a mountain
path in sunlight, the taste of green water,
herding sheep in a canyon, the bones of a horse bleached
in sunlight, purple thistles growing in red dirt,
locoweed in bloom.
My mind is like a tumbleweed rolling
in the wind, smashing against the windshields of cars,
but rolling, rolling until nothing is left.
I sit in the sunlight, eyes closed:
empty mind, empty hands. I am a
great horned owl hunting in a night with no moon.
And this Indian, deaf-mute, is like a Serbian
in a twenty-four-hour truck stop,
is a yellow sandhill crane lost in Albuquerque.
I see the red blooms of a nasturtium battered
in a hailstorm. I see the bleached white bones of a horse
at the bottom of a canyon. And I see his hands,
empty hands, and words, empty words.
Tsankawi
The men hiked on a loop trail
past the humpbacked flute player and
a creation spiral petroglyph,
then up a ladder to the top of the mesa
and met the women there.
A flock of wild geese wheeled
in shifting formation over the mesa,
then flew south climbing higher and higher
and disappearing in clear sunlight.
The ceremony was simple: a blessing
of rings by “water which knows no
boundaries,” and then a sprinkling of baskets
with blue cornmeal.
I write of this a week later
and think of Marie, who, at San Ildefonso,
opened the door to her house to us.
And we were deeply moved.
I hear these lines from the wedding:
“In our country, wind blows, willows live,
you live, I live, we live.”
Antares
You point to
Antares.
The wind rustles the cottonwood leaves.
And the intermittent
rain sounds like a fifty-
string zither. A red lotus blossoms
in the air. And, touching you,
I am like light from
Antares. It has taken me light-
years to arrive.
The Owl
The path was purple in the dusk.
I saw an owl, perched,
on a branch.
And when the owl stirred, a fine dust
fell from its wings. I was
silent then. And felt
the owl quaver. And at dawn, waking,
the path was green in the
May light.
The Cornucopia
Grapes
