New Mexico Mercury

Weekly Poem: FIRST SHA’LA’KO

The  men come down
in twos and threes South
to  dust-dry Zuni River:
surround and screen
six tall  Sha’la’ko of the
snapping beaks and hooting.

Up the hill the small
Zuni girl chops  at
stacked juniper  with
a sharp, man- sized axe: 
smoke comes East swings
around North then West...

Weekly Poem: I think I understand fishing

when lakes glisten with shallow ripples
and crows cry from distant pines,
echoing late summer
when the cicadas' clamor breaks afternoon calm
as autumn approaches
the fisherman stands along the shoreline waiting
sentinel-like, dressed in khaki pants and shirt
sunglasses and broad-rimmed brown hat
he contemplates the moment, then another in simple succession...

Weekly Poem: In The Heart of Syria (A Hak-ku*)

Humanity is
never the most logical
option, just like love.

Weekly Poem: Fire or Water

A flock of crows
reflect the midnight moon.
A coyote howls
the starless horizon.

Quiet settles
the slow footsteps
of a sleepless man
as he strikes a match

lights a filterless cigarette
and pretends a herd
to keep watch over,
imagines a Winchester in his hands...

Weekly Poem: If Only

Losing control
as one grows old
could be divine.

A hoarder’s ecstatic
Zen trick
into letting go.

Hades ransacked
Zeus stripped of bolts
& tossed from Olympus...

Weekly Poem: Sing no hymns save frog-croaks

Frogs, a sort of mascot for my brother
whose friends called him Hoppy.
One of his tree ornaments,
a frog wearing a Santa hat,
hangs on our tree every Christmas,
near the back.

Flat fields of his youth provided
nowhere to hide, the sky was too close;
so he left muddy rivers, farm ponds
and sloughs to become a frog out of water,
exotic desert amphibian, trying to drown
Vietnam nightly
at the Green Onion Bar...

Weekly Poem: In Hobbs

Monday morning sunrise – Hobbs, New Mexico, October 25, 2010
Already the west winds blow, relentless
Rocking the pickup we huddle inside
The dogs and I
“In Hobbs,” granddaughter Lily shrugs her two-year old
Shoulders and remembers the summer green Ruidoso mountains
I am on the edge of town
Down a gravel road that runs by the ruins of a
World War II Quartermaster’s depot
Abandoned now, only concrete borders and cactus around...

Weekly Poem: Nature is Inevitable

Don’t think about what’s inevitable, give it corn.
Give it a pint of cow dung, give it your underwear.
Not everything that’s inevitable is
You think the world’s coming to an end, give it the finger.
After all you’re not killing anyone, you’re not executing.
You’re just commenting. You have a right to choose what you say.
I’ve come back from the costume of my past & I’m inevitable.
And I’m not causing a little girl with flaming arm crying for help
to face the future you’ve given her: the power-mongers who
stick money up their ass & fart gas, are —
causing this war against the spirit, this war against the Earth
this war against the god of my parents...

Weekly Poem: Going Gone

Yesterday I up and went to Chimayo and Truchas
met an Uruguayan in Chimayo with a
honey voice
all rasp and rough
music a love song
gone to seed from
feeling too much and
living too hard and
painting all the same

In Truchas, a Basco raised in Cuba
with red ringed eyes
knew me for an Indian right away
Any Veda he could
lay his hands on, he said,
he had read...

Weekly Poem: When Will the Next Chance Be?

-written in response to Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Patio Door with Green Leaf”

There are doors
we never see.
Just this morning
I failed to find
the door that would have led me
to a deeper understanding of your heart...