La Resolana

by John Roche

(Inspired by the Cloudburst Council poets’ retreats at the Gell Center, Naples, NY, 2012-2019)

The sun shining on everything and everybody is seeing as it is at the
same time. —O’odham elder quoted by Tomás Atencio in Resolana: Emerging Chicano Dialogues on Community and Globalization (2009)

Resolute
or reconciled to our folly
we seek
year after year
La Resolana
the place where the sun shines
the south-facing wall
where, in north em New Mexico
(El N orteiio)
villagers gather to talk out issues

Or, at the Gell Center, before west-facing hill
usually bathed by spring rains
or walking streams full of frogspawn
hoping something will jell besides tadpoles and mosquitoes
our poems so much flotsam and jetsam
but what else is there to speak
send forth on the pollen-laden breeze

The only way we pay our rent (resolutus)o n this planet, dissolve
the impediments blocking acequias’ lifewater, keeping
each man or woman hidden from the other, the secrets
poisoning the polis
must be voiced, somehow antidote found
uranium tailings and sacred objects reburied
the fracking stopped
No poem stopped at the Border