Detritus With Legs - A Walk In Pueblo Canyon Territory Poem by Warren Falcon

These
radiant [ruins] obey the abandon our
learning sought. - Nathaniel Mackey*1

I am obviously a part of a story that is not mine
So it was on the edge...The edge is in our very flesh
the vulnerability of the little ones - Michael Ortiz Hill**2

[NOTE:this poem, and others, derive from frozen Christmas hikes through Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico*1]


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Only give me
the narrow canyon

born of
rarer rain

random dew

(does)

spark

long deep
snows melt

creep into
trickle then

drain come
into eventual
creekness then

rush wild and
flood where I

have and will
silently walk

detritus with legs***3

so as not to
disturb native

spirits pervading
following

(who's my shadow?
which,
beneath
indifferent sky?

or is it (disinterested) ?

cuz I project
alla time)

the rest'll get
done though

in the wailing
in utterance

the horizon spouting

unreal glow

congealing

muteness

prevailing ever


Still

- - - - - - - - (be still)

to witness means
something much


Not much else to do


And these words

here


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*A line from Nathaniel Mackey's poem, The Phantom Light of All Our Day, which reads:

These
radiant winds obey the abandon our
learning sought.

I exchanged the word 'winds' for 'ruins' since my poem is a meditation/recall of a frigid winter walk in Bandelier National Monument, a canyon of the Ancestral Puebloans who dwelt in caves, natural and hewn, in the rock canyon walls.

Bandelier National Monument is near Los Alamos, New Mexico in Sandoval and Los Alamos Counties. The monument preserves the homes and territory of the Ancestral Puebloans of a later era in the Southwest. Most of the pueblo structures date to two eras, dating between 1150 and 1600 AD.

While on my silent walk through the ruins it did not escape me that I was only a few miles from Los Alamos where the first atomic bombs were created and eventually transported by US bombers to the sky above Japan WW2, then dropped destroying two cities, millions of lives then and, yes, still, NOW.


**Michael Ortiz Hill, from his marvelous essay, Blues Song On The Edge Of Chaos.


***My riff on Vladimir Mayakovsky's image and title of his poem, A Cloud In Trousers.
Amongst ancestral ruins and dwellings I do indeed feel a sense of trespass though I feel awe andrespect and mystery but my garish modern/postmodern ego/self feels to me as if I am indeed 'detritus with legs.'