New Mexico Musings

I have just come back from spending a week in New Mexico.   I have been there four times and each time has been an adventure.  I have covered some of the Albuquerque area, a good part of the Turquoise Trail east of the Sandia Mountains, Santa Fe, the Los Alamos area and Bandolier National Monument, and the Taos area including Taos Mountain and Arroyo Seco.  The New Mexican landscape is expansive and truly breathtaking.  While I was there I wrote some prose poems.  Not only do they reflect the mood and landscape of the Land of Enchantment, the poems also carry an undercurrent of emotion that still runs through me.  There has been a rash of deaths by homicide in New Hampshire over the past month that have profoundly affected many of the people I know.  Being away was only that, being geographically removed. 

Saturday Morning Santa Fe One

It’s not easy to change one’s pace

from here to there to the moment.

Time spent looking at sky and trees

seems like living in slow motion

away from all that causes me to question,

to take stock of what I do.

Expectations of great revelations

become time just be-ing,

reduced to simple self,

no need to question.

The answer is as still as the stones,

as fleeting as the breeze.

Saturday Morning Santa Fe Two

Is there hope when a small child is

witness to death in its harshest from,

a bullet that stops the heart of the woman

Who held him, the vessel where he began?

There will never be anything that can touch that pain.

A path of retreat will be sought

at the sight of other children with their own,

nothing to fill the hole greater than measure allows.

Sunday A.M. Santa Fe

Winds cross desert to mountains,

sweeping dust from the cracks of my mind,

leaving behind wanton lust for the landscape,

Ever changing, colors move from brown to orange,

Green and blue.

Whatever darkness or hideous deeds

perpetrated in nature are swallowed by the

sun’s gaze.  Wide open spaces grant  

room to breathe, to expand, to forgive

human belief in his own dominance.

Nature smiles at our foolishness and

Sends the rain.

Sunday a.m. Two

Painted red start crosses my view,

red on white and black startles me,

delights me.  A gift, a greeting from bird

I will never see north of these mountains,

my personal greeter into the land of enchantment.

The Gem Store in Taos

“Welcome.  Where are you from?”

Gentle soul with arthritic hands and weathered face

tells of his time in Boston, how the fast pace of the East

almost ruined his interview in slow talkin’, slow movin’ Texas.

He smiles, wraps my purchases carefully,

two obsidian, a sand cast from the Four Corners region,

bracelets and carvings for grandchildren.

Then he asks, “Have you had any green chile yet?”

“Why, no.  What do you recommend?”

He gives directions to the best green chile on

Shrimp enchilada I have had the pleasure to know. 

Rio Grande Gorge

I walk across the bridge spanning the Rio Grande,

imagining my mother’s ashes in a flurry.

Grasping the rail, looking down, I know she would

have rather napped in the trunk than view such a height. 

I turn a full circle, knowing this is the most land I will ever see

In one gaze, and the most blue sky.