Chaco Canyon
I am up early for my drive to Chaco Canyon. The graceful beauty of the mesa before me, dignified, eloquent—truly like that of a goddess. A goddess who spilled her indigo soul across the horizon. This sky before dawn widens, slowly becoming a splatter of biomorphic art. I drive into that emerging splatter. Drive into the stretching plateaus of solitude. I drive through the desert as the sun breaks through the unfathomable indigo— an orange iris circled in blue. I drive and feel I am bleeding into the landscape, feeling I am one with the entire scene. A bridge says 17’ 2” but I think horizontal only, compelled by horizontal, and the view, vast in scope, is beyond all calculations. In the distance, the watermelon mountains call to me with their black seeds and their pink bodies. I drive. I drive as if hypnotized, I drive under the seventeen feet two-inch bridge, which means nothing to me as I go speeding to the land of the Ancients, dreaming about how they built vast temples reaching the stars to gaze upon the body of the Eternal and receive messages. At last, I pass adobe huts, cracked mud, stone walls, gravel roads. My feet on land. I raise my arms to the crow-winged sky that blazes across the watermelon mountains. I feel I am following in the footsteps of the Ancients. With dust on my boots, I hike to the windows of Chaco Canyon. All day, I sat and gazed from the circles filled with sky till evening fell and the portals filled with stars.
Depoe Bay, Oregon
My body is sending information to your body
In winter
When intelligence is stored
underground
The decayed
leaves of fall now rotten
But the earth
smells potent with life
and the trees
are communicating
wisdom through their roots
to the saplings and the sea
I love my jewel-colored winter scarf
and the way it floats
in the gray air— a reflection
in the store window along
the promenade—all closed up now
my breath on the glass
warm and fertile
like a greenhouse grower
soft like ruffles
and sea algae
the color of my eyes
Communicating
to you