Borrowed time in Chaco Canyon

John Macker

(with a line by Ted Berrigan)

 

 

For no particular reason,

borrowed time has given us

another day

upright on the earth,

in all of its exhausted duskiness

and anxious ancient first lights

of morning:

the serene immutability of

eternity, the sunlight piled

up in the doorway, here

in these greathouse ruins

of the canyon.

 

This must be where real peace abides,

where they keep the blood mysteries

in the deep kivas and the burning

yellow bulging chamisa

roadsides of September.

All forty-nine years of me trudged seven

miles to Peñasco Blanco and back,

where an eight hundred year old shaman

tried to pray away the killer drought

at the nexus of river and desert

with a fresh macaw feather in his hair.

 

I thought of fire-breathing

Charles Bowden

Author of Blood Orchid and

Blues For Cannibals

deconstructing

/reassembling

border consciousness,

who marched in the

summer heat across the Sand Tank

mountains to Gila Bend carrying a fist-

full of water, serene in the cold sweat of his ritual−

because it was there.

 

This is where real peace resides:

with these bellowing clouds that

melt like whispers on the dry horizon over

Chacra Mesa,

its pottery shards,

fossil sea shells,

parrot feathers,

copper bells and bird points,

the furnace hell of the far ruin in the hiking heat

eating peanut butter on wheat bread

upright against an Anasazi wall

every brick whispers:

all time is simultaneous.

 

I listened carefully, I could hear a

scorpion cast its shadow on the bare

slickrock and a flute-voiced woman

singing in the river:

 

“This is what we do. This is living,

taking its walk.”

 

 

 

first appeared in the book,

Disassembled Badlands.