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Descent
I come from people who would not forgive.
They were Spanish Protestants who ran like hell from Cortrai
to Holland and New Amsterdam,
damning the Inquisition,
and they were the Inquisition.
They were Puritans who painted their kitchens in Connecticut and Massachusetts
the bright blue of angels, and led frail old women
to the gallows if their bones creaked against any trespass,
and they were also those cursing old women.
They were Scots and Welsh who dreamed their iron and arrows
like a thousand deaths of San Sebastian into the English army,
and they were the English army.
They were Indians, Potawatomi and Apache who nearly laughed themselves to death
when they were taught to love their enemies,
and their enemies were also my people.
I too would rather laugh myself to death than die
at the hands of an enemy, even if he is my relative.
Or forgive anyone who's truly wronged me
or maybe only just slighted me
or anyone else in my family, or even a friend,
unless they're on their knees near my front porch
for at least one whole winter,
and even then, covered with sparrows.
And I am also those sparrows
and in this year of Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-nine,
I beg the Spirit of forgiveness to forgive me.
Hawk
That hawk was riding a tumbleweed, blown
seventy feet into the air. Looked like for the fun of it.
Whoever thought of that.
Joy in riding a fragile world of brittle skeleton
you know you'll lose at the first rain
to a rusted fence or the bottom of an arroyo.
But there hasn't been so little rain in forty years.
The neighbor says the oaks are going to die,
and don't worry, even if the rainy season comes,
these mountains are a lightning rod.
I turn away. They say she sleeps with her father.
They say they run bulldozers over the ancient burials, hoping to leave
at least one small bowl unbroken.
They say it's easier to be an oak struck by lightning.
That a tall burned snag is another
of God's holy fingers.
Broken Glass
On December 22, 1882, an old newspaper
reports a demented woman was sent from Georgetown
to the Grant County Jail.
Sheriff Whitehill is at a loss,
poor creature, New Mexico law makes
no provision for paupers or the insane.
Her name, where she was born, or if she had a sister
who loved flowering dogwood branches
are secrets lost among the broken colored glass,
the pioneer tears
I've gathered among fallen mining shacks.
I wonder if it was the brothel.
If it was one man, or one-hundred.
If it was a small crack in a treasured Tiffany lamp
that split her like kindling.
Or the disease of a season,
not too far from midnight singing to the mountain
mahogany, maybe taking a small one for a child
to forget the one in the cemetery.
I wonder if she went to California, on
one of those wagonloads of the insane.
Someday I'd like to make a stained glass window
from these sharp tears I've stolen
from the earth.
But it would never go inside a church.
It would hang against the sky,
in memory of everyone who broke.
Bill Evans Lake, 1999
The last cold Sunday of the millenium
we fished among the waterweeds and the chamiso.
My son looked into the gold
jewel eye of the black duck
and the secret eye of the crane
and swore that he'd live, too.
I prayed every dark road in him
would lead to a place like this:
where he must have been before.
Not the two empty beers in an old fire.
Or the shirt sleeve the other boy cut away with a knife
so he could take a pure animal shit
behind the junipers.
Or maybe those, too.
I'm talking about deep water
ringed by mountains, and delighted
creatures staring back and willing to live
under the same sun, the same shadows.
The Histories
When we sleep the deer return
for their bones.
They drink through the oak leaves
floating on the waterhole.
They turn towards the naked hearts
we hide behind storm windows.
They trample us like thunder. Like whisky, and the histories
blowing through the verbena at dawn.
Midnight when I piss in the blue enamel pot,
I know it is useless, they're not deer at all.
They're an army riding towards us,
on the backs of the wrong horses,
in the wrong winds.
And they will never go back beneath the oaks
until we have given them
our deep tears for their souls,
and all we have ever seen of this earth's
butterflies gathering
pollen, for their bones.
Victoria Edwards Tester lives in Santa Rita, New Mexico and in the Chiricahua Mountains with her husband. Her debut volume Miracles of Sainted Earth will appear in January of 2002 as the inaugural book for the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series by the University of New Mexico Press. The poems above are from her debut volume. You may contact the poet at: victoriat@gilanet.com Other work by her may be seen at the drunkenboat and purchaseMiracles of Sainted Earth at Amazon.com
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