The Wind Was Ringing My Doorbell

... the other day -- that's how hard it was sweeping down the Flatirons and onto my porch. I swear I could hear the nails creaking in the roof as it blew. Hurricane strength gusts, enough to blow a bread truck over. Kinda fun. Good to have nowhere to go. Yesterday I watched yet another blizzard move slowly in. The storm crept in on jaguar's claws, not little cat's feet. I watched it in mass move over the mountains and down like a giant white eraser turning everything into a cartoon, a drawing, an icy etching. Not much snow yet but bitter cold. The world asserting herself. So much for going to San Francisco. I think of the fog rolling down the mountains near Pulgas from the Pacific -- Pacific fog, only frozen. Now I can't see the next street over and all is the same color as the frost on the branches: the world reduced to it's undersides. I remember how I dreamed myself into this landscape, first coming here in order to rewrite my dreams by changing their 'scape. Now I'm like a book I read myself into -- I think I'll light the fireplace, look out.

I've been under the weather in this weather, spending a lot of time in bed and sleeping away my dreaming; some kind of stomach flu -- could be my ulcer back; I've been doing a lot of thinking.

There was a life I once crafted for myself, one of self-sustenance and ground -- grounding. By accident I find the place I always wanted as a girl dreaming of the woman I would become, a simple place, but a life I wasn't rich enough to live without a partner for the work and the road and the knowing. Odd to find such a huge chunk of me, not discarded, but like something that stays in the drawer because there's never a good time to use it or it's useless without the match. This, getting snowed in, this lifesap asserting itself through the creaking layers -- the trickle through the acequia still sustaining the heart of the river puts it in my mind's hand, something I'd forgotten I wanted: a beautiful place beside a painted mesa, to find myself in the fossils and colored stones in a river, the red earth, the rock and the rolling river within its moods. I kept thinking of Kunitz's poem, the one of living in the layers and the one that ends: "I must change my life."


Acequia



I always wanted
that New Mexican sky,
that strap of land between the rio
and acequia, the sun-sanded
land and the man behind the hand,
the strands of my hair going nowhere,
fixed in the sight of that painted
beauty, hum-struck, a quiver
in a hive of bees. Days alive, they dance,
heartfull, dichoso, the plucked pollen,
the illumination from the river rising
in all of their eyes. They. The field and bosques
alive and intertwined. The wings, still.


1/7/07