Chaco Canyon
I am up early for my drive to Chaco Canyon. The silence of the mesa before me, dignified, eloquent—truly a goddess spilled her soul across the horizon. The mountain black, void of color. This sky before dawn widened—a floating splatter of biomorphic art. I drive into the sky emerging. Drive into the stretching plateaus of solitude. I drive through the desert as the sun breaks through the unfathomable indigo, like an iris I cannot imagine. Like the iris in a dream indescribable. Like an iris circled in orange. I drive, and I feel like I am receding into the landscape—and now I am distance. And a bridge says seventeen feet two inches. And I think horizontal only, compelled by horizontal and the view is beyond all such calculations. The mountains now watermelon from the orange sky, and they call to me with their black seeds and their watermelon bodies. And I drive, I drive, I drive under the 17′ 2″ bridge which means nothing to me as I speed to the land of the ancients, where the ancients built their temples to the stars and gazed upon the body of the eternal. I pass the adobe huts, the cracked mud, the stone, the ground, the gravel. I raise my arms to the sky, a pink sky that blazed across the crow-winged mountains. I follow in the ancient footsteps with clay on my boots. And the windows of Chaco Canyon once filled with sky now filled with stars.
Depot 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