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Defending the Creek
Asphalt frames the secret place
where Cochise slept a hundred years
in solitary peace.
Soon these mountains,
cherished by Geronimo
by red-sleeved Mangas
and the rest who love
the rock-bound loneliness,
will be given to the world.
An amphitheater here,
a ski lodge in the lion's
last retreat,
a campground for those
in metal shells who peek
at wilderness.
I've witnessed other murders.
Seen factories where herons
nested in the tops of trees,
a freeway where a flock
of mallards fed and chicory
reflected summer sky.
I've seen the small worlds
handed to the large
in the name of progress
and the public good.
I've watched the darkening
of wild-eyed light,
walked the devastated earth
and wept.
But tears are useless now.
Bring on an army armed with words,
in love with history;
forceful as the wind,
entrenched as deeply
as the native grass
and passionate.
Above all, passion,
that fuel to the spark of love,
that wise seed,
that flaming ocotillo flower.
Chiricahua Autumn
You write that the aspens have turned to gold,
that the acorn gatherers have come
moving among oaks and filling baskets
with brown fruit.
Like the mallards that took wing
before you thought to watch their flight,
the pickers came and vanished,
leaving earth the way it was...
mountains
- valleys stretching blue
- aspens shaking golden tambourines.
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
These are the dangerous hours.
The prairie twilight stretches out
like a blackbird's whistle
or the flight of moths
and a blue mist that binds me,
hands and heart,
to earth.
I touch its green flanks,
its dark muscle
and think of women
big as mares or buffalo
who marked these grasses
with broad shoulders,
steady feet.
In their image I lie down
in the tasseled grass
in the music of larks
in the dangerous hours
and give my body over.
Facades
I treat them gently,
these little men
from Zacatecas, Juarez,
Chihuahua,
these laborers who
chop tumbleweeds,
dig ditches,
build the finest
of stone walls
and for nothing--
a bed, water, food,
what payment
I can summon.
Dear God! I have become
the patroness of souls,
hands, stomachs,
the repository of dreams.
They came and they come.
Jesus, Abel, Alfredo,
with hands that know horses,
that cradle the large heads
as if they are women,
with tongues that speak
softly, quickly
in a language I do not--
may never--
understand.
Buzzards
I have asked where the buzzards go
in winter, but no one knows.
One day they are simply gone
leaving the sky wiped clean.
What I believe is that they follow plenty,
winging south to the jungles
where war and famine, pestilence
and greed make death commonplace;
where they can eat their fill,
warm their reptilian hearts
at equatorial fires,
follow the scent of the dying
for thousands and thousands of miles.
Jane Candia Coleman is a Pulitzer prize nominee and Western Heritage Award-winning author of No Roof But Sky and The Red Drum, (both by High Plains Press) and the author of numerous novels, short story and essay collections. She lives on a ranch near Rodeo, New Mexico, at the Arizona-New Mexico border. Her newest books are Borderlands: Western Stories, and Mountain Time, an autobiographical memoir that explores a life lived close to what Coleman calls "the inherent justice of the natural world." Both are published by Thorndike Press.
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