Toward the Navajo reservation

CROWNPOINT TO THOREAU




Imagine a postcard landscape:

Yellow buttes, red mesas

Dotted with piñon pines

And the sky swallowing the earth

In a shifting kaleidoscope

Of light and clouds and shadows

Under a bullet-bright sun.



Next imagine highways:

Dark ribbons weaving through green valleys,

Coursing around the stoic faces of cliffs,

Cresting pine-clutched heights,

Falling exuberantly into sere troughs,

Or flushed under torrential sheets of rain.



Then imagine dots along the roads,

Transforming into dark-haired, red-skinned people

Moving in a slow walk,

Their backs to the traffic,

Sometimes a thumb lifted,

Sometimes a dollar flag flapping from loose fingers –

But without expectation.



These are the Indians

Pacing the pace of centuries gone

Before horses, before the caging

Of horses in monstrous machines,

Before humans flew

Into the devouring sky.



2006

 
"Crownpoint to Thoreau" was first published in the Ann Arbor Review, 2007.  I wrote it after I visited my sister on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico.  I am publishing it on the blog today because of an email from a reader.  The missive follows.
 
"Jerry, Bryce and I are friends of Deb in Crownpoint. Met you when you were helping her move. Now in Kitwe, Zambia. Just before I left for Africa, read all your novels that Deb had, plus the two I bought on line. Love [']em as well as the poem you wrote about the road between Crownpoint and Thoreau. It's hanging on the wall above my desk in Zambia to remind me of the real NM. Write some more. Even better, come visit us in Africa and write some poetry about it."



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