Contributor: James Robert Rudolph

- -
Setting suns
turning mountains
the colors of apples,
watermelon, and
the blood of Christ.

Shadow and light
heart breakingly limned,
a painter’s aching heart.

Light so clear
you can see before, back
to the ancient ones,
the Anasazi.

The sun so warm
it can raise the dead.
The wind here is
soft with ghosts.

Jemez mountains,
made of pink clay
an aerie of hawks and thunder gods,
and the air
the tang of piñon
and yellowing aspen.

The cold, snow-melt rivers
flow through me unslowed;
dust devils twirl me
like a square dance;
my skin browning, I become
as unseen as a lizard.

For I am
the high desert of
my father, my grandmother,
the blue sky,
dry, white bones, and
rosy mud
of this place.


- - -