Mesa Memo

1.
Re structures --
the horizon and its lack
of cluttery maples,
turquoise too.
Structure and turquoise.
A color with vivid gloss
like that door in an adobe gate
beat up trucks,
the blue car in a driveway's shadow.
An abandoned house.
And everywhere turquoise.

2.
Yesterday's weather moved
in strokes of rain over the high desert.
Blue-gray clouds flung the mesa
across the sky. The Chama
glowed muddy red and brown.
I'd forgotten about these colors.

3.
I see it: sight line
of the same old same old
you know -- it's always trees, bird
breakfast or collage:
to make a blue door
from an old sock is the conundrum.

4.
Off to find a river rock
maybe a mesa to take home
though they'll charge extra
in baggage, there won't be room
in the overhead bins
-- pack it in with other trinkets
adobe red, Chaco Canyon
petroglyph,
swimming in Abiqui

--
note: click image to enlarge.
& for more, take A Walk Around the Lake.

kiva

Reading Stephen Maurer's poem Mimi's Solution, at first I thought instead of 'yurt' he meant a different circle structure, 'kiva,' like the one pictured here. Only this is ruins of a kiva, a ceremonial room, a sacred place for those who built these walls. But of course, his poem itself reveals that he meant 'yurt.' And the link below his poem leads to a kiva experience.

Still, it reminded me of Chaco Canyon, where the photo was taken. It is a national park, whose website includes this under 'directions' - "Warning: Some of the local roads recommended by map publishers and services using GPS devices to access Chaco are unsafe for passenger cars." They might have warned, too, that even the road they recommend is a 35 km journey after you turn off the highway to Cuba, NM, and much of this road seems designed to shake you until you wonder what parts might have come loose and fallen off your car.

This tends to discourage casual tourists, apparently, because we had the place almost entirely to ourselves. And Chaco Canyon is a beautiful place to go, to camp. To walk amid the ruins and feel the presence of their absence, of those people who built and lived there and chiseled their symbols in the rocks. Who grew from children and themselves raised families in this community, in this culture. And added stones to its walls. Someone told us that the word Anasazi is Navajo, and has come to mean 'cliff dwellers,' but originally meant something like 'ancient ones.' Or, said another way, it meant 'we don't know who they were.'

Mimi's Solution

Anasazi relics placed in morning stillness
under a shaded New Mexican sun,
Mimi gazes over pinion pines and slickrock hoodoos.
Above Rio Puerco's entrenched meander,
hawks float lazily along a layered cliff,
breezes pushing them over fenced lands.
The skeletal remains of her yurt
frame sagebrushed sandswells.

Whistling softly, she alerts a field mouse
wondering if it's her old friend,
whose nightly incursions on lightning feet
transgressed yurt walls.
Politely taking crumbs, too wily for traps,
his circling wariness became grudging respect.

She sees regular trespassers on Anglo land,
renegade spanish cowboys who travel
the old roads across Anglo property,
validating themselves rightful owners of the Piedra Lumbre.
Their cattle, soft-eyed and single file,
seem entitled anywhere.

The yellowed yurt frames an old reflection:
the homeowners of "Las Animas de Abiquiu"
proclaimed property values paramount;
the yurt could no longer stand,
must be replaced by a thickwalled hacienda,
Santa Fe style, required by the covenants.

Now from a nearby cottage,
she moves nomadically,
coming and going politely,
transgressing borders
like the hawks and mouse,
and the Spanish.

---
for Mimi H.

words: Stephen Maurer, Washington.
& more, here: Anasazi (poem#7)

dis play/ce

triangle sky
museum trails
museum trails leading
through centuries
through relicts

of civilization
of civilization captured
of civation labeled
of civshipped

put up
onon exhibition
onon this stone ground

overwhelmed we sit
overwhelmed we sip
overwhelmed we sip sorganic coffee
next to a totem

that someone
dis
dis(played)
dis(placed

here

----
words+image: Dorothee Lang, Germany (virtual notes)
& more about the display/ced place: here.