BORROWED TIME IN CHACO CANYON

For no particular reason,

Borrowed time has given us

another day

upright on the earth,

in all of its exhausted duskiness

& anxious old New Mexican

first lights

of morning;

             the serene immutability of

eternity, the sunlight piled

up in the doorway, here

in these greathouse ruins

                           of the canyon.

This must be where real peace abides,

in the deep kiva shadow roots,

the burning

yellow chamisa

roadsides of September,

where all forty-nine years of me trudged seven

miles to Penasco Blanco & back,

where an eight hundred year old shamen

tried to pray away a killer drought

at the nexus of river & desert

with a 

fresh macaw feather in his hair.

I thought of fire-breathing

Charles Bowden

Author of Blood Orchid &

Blues for Cannibals

deconstructing & reassembling

border consciousness

who marched in the

summer heat across the Sand Tank

mountains to Gila Bend carrying a fist-

full of water, serene

in the cold sweat of his ritual-

because it was there.

This is where real peace resides:

with these bellowing clouds that

melt like whispers on the dry horizon over

Charca Mesa,

its pottery shards,

fossil sea shells,

parrot feathers, 

copper bells & bird points,

the furnace hell of the far ruin in the hiking heat

eating peanut butter on wheat bread

upright against an

                    Anasazi wall

every brick

whispers all time is simultaneous.

I listened carefully & could hear a

scorpion cast its shadow on the bare

slickrock & a flute voiced woman

singing in the river:

"This is what we do.  This is living, 

taking its walk."

John Macker

(from Desert Shovel)