New Mexico As The Heartland Poem by Leah Browning

You go back to New Mexico and find it softened; in your absence,
it has become beautiful. The mountains slope, rust-red and tan,
a knobbled mixture of dirt and rock dotted with scrubby green bushes.
The road winds past a wall of mountain on one side, a steep ravine
on the other. You are taken by the harsh beauty of the land,
by the power and magnificence of it all. The summer sky
is sunny and warm, and when you arrive at the house, you take
your daughter to pick peaches from the tree in the front yard.
Together, you hold hands as you walk inside to sit at the wide
wooden table and eat them. Here at the front of the house, banks
of solar windows tease the sun in through broad panels of glass,
turning everything sunny: the table, the walls, the red brick of the floor.

That night, as you look up at the ceiling, at the planks of wood
fitted neatly together, at the solid wood vigas you spent every night
of your childhood looking up at, as you listen to the coyotes howling
in the cold mountain air, hunting rabbits under the stars, under this
grand and unforgiving sky, as you drive home and go back to the
streetlamps and oak trees, as you return to your everyday life,
shadows of you will remain scattered in your wake, like pages
torn out of a book: another version of you will stay behind,
lying forever sleepless in the layers of silence of a summer night;
another will walk to the store to buy milk, panting at the altitude;
and another will go on eating peaches in the sunlight, sitting
at your mother’s warm wooden table with your child at your side.