by John Brandi

Below the double-peaked caldera, the painted alcoves, the sacred shrines, the canyon closes in. Coral cliffs, buff-colored layers of compressed ash, blue water running through. Park the pickup, walk a cottonwood gulch, come to the adobe church, then into the tangled village lanes, drawn by the chest-whumping sound of thunder. Feast day! The old pueblo alive with drums, song, ceremonial colors. “Come eat!” Someone signals from a door. A Pueblo home opens. Family, relatives, visitors sit at the big table by the kitchen. Women in bright cotton dresses set out bowls of red-chili stew, boiled squash, chicos, baskets of bread, plates of enchiladas,potato salad, wafer-thin piki, sweet empanadas, purple Jell-O topped with Kool Whip. Across from me a dancer enjoys a break, red-ochre on his cheeks, parrot feathers in hair. Outside, deer, elk, antelope, bighorn sheep prance out of the hills into the plaza, pendants and shells jangling. The dancers don’t imitate animals, they have become animals. The Buffalo Maiden— flanked by two high-stepping shaggy beasts, her feathered crown gleaming, her lithe steps floating her aloft between the pounding hooves — is Shakti, primordial life force, a tremor of music and form. Raising eagle feathers to sky, she presses blue corn to breast, dips, turns, bows to the red earth, bows to drummers and chorus. Driving home after a Pueblo feast, the land never looks the same. Mountains iridesce, hills roll with chromatic pitch. Settling in, I kindle a fire and step out for more wood.

                                    Winter stars!
Traveling out, I’ve traveled
deeper in. 

                                                                                      Jemez, NM

by Bobby Byrd

Genitals — A Note to my wife

Lee,
50 and more years together
and last night
I used the word “genitals,” like
I think for the first time
in a conversation between
you and me.
It startled me, the word “genitals,”
perfect, it was
at the end of a sentence
about our bodies growing old.

“Genitals.” 

Your genitals.
My genitals.
Our genitals.

Like a little poem, huh?
A love poem.
This morning, in the stillness before sunrise,
I went out in the back to pee.
There in the bluing sky
Venus
the Goddess of Love
rose up above a little bit of leftover moon.
The tiny planet Mercury
— winged-foot Messenger of Gods —
was supposed to be off to the left
but I couldn’t find him.
He had just disappeared
into the vast emptiness of sky.
Yeah, yeah, I know
planets and stars, they really have no
left and right, no above and below,
no sex, no name, and the sun —
“the sun is but a morning star.”
That’s what Thoreau said.
Gary Snyder said the same thing.
And the cats were talking to me too.
They were hungry.
It was their time to eat.
I had to go feed the cats.
Love, Bobby

by Bobby Byrd

Early Morning, Front Porch
— El Paso, Texas

I boiled water to clean up
the pigeon shit on the front porch.
That’s why I’m outside
broom in hand
on such a beautiful morning —
from here I can see
the whole wide horizon,
the sun rising, desert mountains
to the east to the west,
flowering from emptiness,
the Rio Grande running through
two cities, two countries, two
languages, so much sorrow,
so much love and hatred,
good news, bad news, the old lady
who said it’s all the same,
even in the midst of her suffering,
the death of children,
a husband wandered away,
and still the pigeons coo,
the cats sleep, the earth
swings round on its cosmic string.

by Bobby Byrd

I have a friend, a poet
     in memory of Robert (Bob) Burlingame

I have a friend, a poet —
he’s dead now —
in the mornings he sat at his desk,
waiting
the morning light coming through the window,
a fresh sheet of white paper in his Olivetti portable,
waiting for a poem to come.
He never wondered from where these poems
came, from inside, from outside,
but there was a quiet place, he was not sure
where, it had no name,
and little shards of sights and sounds,
of touch and smell,
of memory too,
bubbled up, like those bunches
of little yellow flowers
in the front yard by the sidewalk,
nameless, what are they,
a smile of his daughter eating her breakfast,
the sudden squeal
of mourning doves taking flight,
a mountain lion perched on a boulder above a game trail,
a blue heron in the still water of sky,
like him, waiting.

He loved the Guadalupe Mountains,
and that’s where he went,
him and his wife, when he retired
and years they spent there
walking the trails, him writing poems,
she making art, until her old age weakness
brought her down out of the mountains,
but he stayed on,
that’s where he wanted to die,
he told her when he came to visit,
and he told his children too,
he wanted to be found alongside
a trail somewhere, a gift
to the mountains,
to the birds and animals, the insects,
the worms and the tiny beasts.
That was his wish.
That was not quite how it all ended,
but who really cares now.
It was his wish.
He didn’t know where the wish came from.
from inside, from outside,
but he knew there was a quiet place,
but he was not sure
where, it had no name —
and so he lived in his hermitage,
a poet monk, waiting
for the great cleansing,
waiting like his friends,
the blue heron
and the mountain lion.