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from The Field for Blue Corn

3

Certain colors are the conversation

we held one dusk, that altered

from the violent afterglow of fresh bones

to the gray corolla of old ones, only minerals

As restless matrices in blue sage dissolved

a horntoad ran under a bush. I insisted it was

a baby bird. Then a baby bird and a horntoad ran out. Now, on a hill I never noticed between two close ones we've climbed, I see at an altered angle. Some small shift in refraction has set the whole plain trembling and hostile

4

I wondered if seasons were invented

by our brain, which is maternal, to soothe

chaotic events, since no springs here

have been alike. Moths swarmed the elm tree

one year, and bees the next, so I thought

it was the teeming, but this year is dry

austere, an anatomical drawing of the heart

taken from life, inaccurate and scientific

Branches without leaves over bare ground

pretend to reveal everything. We revolved

around ourselves as if we were central, the way

the earth was, which is not, like this plain

sun lights between the Taos Mountains and Jemez

Now, move a little to the west. Seasons are

an amulet against the heartbreak of things not unique

dulling loss by flowerings, the columbine

that died back. A rite of passage is the first

winter, we need to survive meeting strangers

as pulsating light and not explosions, the way

a flower, as “the culmination of a plant”

expresses its seductive intent

6

Color is an aspect of the light on a face

and on the pale gash of a washout in the hills

like spans of window glass on winter sky

The hue of vapors is revealed through a filter

of clouds with soulful articulation. We see

blue shadows on peaks normally glittering

with snow. I learned the palette

of diffuse days. Positive tones, finely altered

are silence and distance. In curtained rooms

a pulse beats in prisms on the floor

Other days one goes out adorned and sunburnt

All the more precious a veined wing

Undiluted brightness is an aspect with heroic

edges, in spite of common immersion in sun

as from the lover's face, veiled or aggressive

along a large but rhythmic wave. As with

land, one gets a sense of the variations

though infinite, and learns to make references

7

Please stay a little longer, at least

until the garden is turned, our old whimsical

siege on arid land, where I have seen snow peas

and columbine, even though not inert growth

Extra effort to keep a flowering vine as it is

entropy, is locked into our memory, since

we'd naively assumed flowering was natural

A sprout against its seed coat is the first

battle, after the one with air. All the seeds

seem to fall near the enemy. If I have failed

to grow herbs in a knot, as in English gardens

some motley hardy ones may take, and buckle

the topsoil with incompatible roots. Please

stay. Help me pace out the field for blue corn

If a winter has seemed to pass as only our shadows

on a rough wall, weren't they blank and rough

as apple petals blown over and over each other

to drift in heaps on the porches?