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Busted Out
All the cowboy's got's his life
and broken hat,
strides the shoulder,
down from Weed,
- or some such place
Looking for a break
a smoke, a drink,
he's unaware that 'Cruces
- is a poor choice now
one of then best
snowbird roosts
Getting wind of this,
the mayor's council's
cleaned-up the streets,
outlalwing the homeless
- seeling papers to eat
consequently shielded from
the face of destitution
- just before they look on death's
So, barring a night
or two in jail
(where, luckily, he'll get fed)
he'll mosey on
to Lordsburg, points west,
where the rances are--
- maybe he'll catch on
If not, he's not bad off,
particularly if things
go south with
Bush's snake oil war,
or, at least, the one
he plans
First, the cowban can
walk for miles
on the water in his kit
(refilled from seeps)
a horsechair blanket he
sleeps in on the coldest nights,
living off desert critters
- he snares with string
And he'll not make much of it
if everything breaks down in town
or people jammed along the roads
He'll simply drift
- farther 'round the mess,
- scratchin' at the goin's on
The Pueblo of Santo Domingo
We have come for the white, knee-length
moccasins the woman has made
at the simple table in the adobe
apartment, a three-room compartment
in the honeycombed pueblo, a hive whose
umbilical to creation is just outside,
the kiva beneath its rounded, one-story parapet
beyond the bent, screen door. I rub
my hands over the stylized, black flowers
of a thin, orange pot her husband, gone today,
has thrown, and my friend, for whose wife
the moccasins are meant, examines a piece
of silver these craftspeople are working,
as he, too, is a jewelry artisan.
We have come in a year now lost,
time immaterial to the locus
of the pueblo appearing here
by the river for whatever reasons
from high-up the canyon walls
where the red dirt on the mesa above
was poor, but with the snowmelt, adequate,
and there were fish and frogs
in the now cedar-bowered stream below,
and yucca for sandals, and
abundant hares for feasting and clothing.
Suffice it to say, they had to move,
along with many others, south along
the river, in Spanish, the Rio Grande
and its tributaries, where the new kiva
was duly consecrated, and the endless
work begun on the mud apiary.
There is little to be seen
of the pueblo at a distance,
and, on a dusty day, perhaps nothing,
and they are not given to outward display,
things left to privacy or ritual
masks with phallic noses
revealing much of the fire
behind the quiet pottery,
and their penchant for the comic
as they dance out their lives
under the scrutiny of the tourists
beside the cathedral of Santo Domingo.
Santo Domingo--II
Thirty years later, at first glance,
little has changed.
It's the same ladder
into the heart of the re-plastered kiva,
and the potter is gone,
replaced by the son; the old mother's
fingers are still able
if she wanted, which she doesn't,
so I buy at the convenience store
that was not here then,
replacing the Indian trader,
their solitary pot, molded, not thrown.
used, the girl tells me, on which
to practice her painting.
I notice racy new cars
outside the apartments.
At San Felipe, down river,
They're finishing a new casino
and there are prefab homes
each with a beehive oven,
as we passed, earlier, on the highway.
The church is still playing
back-up to natural theology
as long as it has its way
with Christmas, christenings, etcetera,
none of which is a higher
priority than their dances.
There's nothing much else
displayed for sale
in the way of their handiwork,
now marketed in Santa Fe.
My son asks me why we've taken
the trouble to come out of our way,
and I mumble something about wanting
to see if the river had altered
since I was last here.
There's no easy way of explaining
my attachment to these people
has everything to do with my father
whose spirit I am seeking,
not the man between two worlds
fated to never enter either,
a Christian pagan set against himself,
but one whose cosmic laughter
saved him from unmitigated disaster,
the same sense of humor
I find in these black-eyed women
watching the interlopoers appeal
to a spirit distinct from the body,
that ill-starred Cartesian tenet,
my father's laugh like an arrow
through the heart of such folly
from his deepest intuitive being
and wholly unlike what he pointed
towards his religious self-parody,
preaching his own alienation,
laughter, his sole legacy,
indispensable in surviving him
and the tyranny of the majority.
I almost tell the boy
these marginalized outposts
may well represent the last
of non-segmented human beings,
and their kivas,
without threatening the divine province
of Virgin Birth or the Holy Trinity,
even inadvertantly incubate the final
earthly vestige of our organic unity
beside the cathedreal of Santo Domingo.
Sight-Seeing
Drawn inexorably behind the scene,
a landscaped flat of the Sandias,
northeast that proscenium arch perception,
bundled in wool against the weather,
we linger on the patio's gleaming saltillo
tile of the general's abandoned shelter,
his strategem to defeat atomic blasts
aimed at nuclear Albuquerque,
black flecks materializing out of
spray as snowflakes on our lapels
fall from monolithic steeples,
sheared-off granitic cathedrals,
the icy meringue quickly modifying
to droplets we shake like dogs,
or a strange cold ash from Cabezon,
the volcanic core, severed, in native lore,
bleeding the nearby Jamez Mountains,
a hoarfrost on the painter's face,
the interior logic of his esthetic
reduced from acrylics to meager viewing
by Alzheimer's irreversible damage.
The old man, nonetheless, demanding
he daily have the chance to witness
what previously went to artistry
from these sky-cliffs to soft pueblos.
Only sight remains for the enterprise,
everyday rising from the dead,
driving through sculpted cottonwoods
by Coronado's humbled monument
up Highway 550 until the light
becomes linear bands in which,
at our nearest parallel approach,
a schematic mirage of Zia emerges,
which he would turn into a composition,
not excluding the sterile auto windows,
a curious tangible veil of Maya
through which he knows he sees
as much as possible of ultimates.
Accepting this as a limit of art,
he views himself as merely its vessel,
his gift, in a long life, has emptied
of, nonetheless, such bright treasures.
If he speaks at all, "I see," is heard,
the great phenomenon in his system of values;
so, he rides on contendedly,
trusting, to the end, the synthetic
existence he rendered on canvas.
Bill Dodd, a Southwest native, was schooled at the University of New Mexico, studying writing with Robert Creeley and Charles Tomlinson in the sixties when he began publising poems with Henry Rago at Poetry. In the intervening years he has tuaght writing literature at Eastern Oregon University, the University of Houston, Victoria, and New Mexico State University. Among his poetry titles is "Staked Plains" by Vellum and Velours Press, Seattle. He currently lives in Las Cruces, NM, and these poems represent his first internet efforts.
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