Home From Mesa Verde
Luminous ideas of clouds,
soft billowing pillows adrift,
moist Pacific exhalations
float across Colorado
from west to east.
Ancestral Puebloan songs
fill the forest outside our house
when we are still.
Drum beats and voices harmonize
with the distant song
of the Burlington, Northern & Santa Fe
two-thousand feet below.
Smoke from our cook fires
still clings to our hair and clothes.
Thunder’s alarm sounds
from Cortez to Redstone
Six Mile Creek to Sterling,
from Pagosa to the Never Summer Range,
over the passes and across the ridges,
down valleys and out onto the plains
to the big river.
In the ancient canyons and the high mountain gorges
lightning exposes the night as a fraud.
The rain begins to fall, everywhere.
State legislators cringe, knowing their insignificance.
Colorado is red, but also green and blue and unknowable.
The intersecting lines of the Four Corners fade:
a surveyor’s fantasy.
Mesa Verde fans across the lines and the land
a bush in the wind.
The Southwest is a pulsing place in my heart.
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