Piedras Marcadas
2022
In northwest Albuquerque,
Behind an autoshop and gated community,
Is the Piedras Marcadas canyon.
A cold and brutal wind spears over the sand.
Every tiny bone in my right inner ear aches.
I walk with my hands pressed over my ears,
From a distance perhaps it looks
Like the world is too insistent,
And too loud,
For me.
I turn off the path to escape the wind.
I clamber down steep rocks.
At the bottom I look behind me and up.
There are petroglyphs on those rocks.
They are simple, and they are true;
They are true, so they are simple.
After too long of staring with a very blank mind,
I think of
What was it like, to be the first to see them?
And then I realize I am being terribly white again,
And that of course there was no first:
No first explorer
No first wanderer
No first innocent and wide-eyed romantic
The only first was the carver of the petroglyph,
And yet
Before them was the world
And, after that,
the bleeding and the folding
of that world into their mind,
and then to the hand to the tool to the rock,
and full circle therefore
ouroboros of being to mind to world,
the only first is ever the world.
When I thought of that First to see them, I thought of course of the European.
As we both know, there is only
First draft
Sketch
Misunderstanding
Accident
Error
Before the white man,
Before Europe.
This we know at the place before thought begins.
But no, of course—
Even that European knew they were not first,
As they told themselves otherwise.
How could they forget their lateness?
The effort of their undoing,
All of that killing, all of that concrete,
It still illustrates our daydreams,
Blanco y sangre,
Still cauterizes the edges of the night and of the day.
But you cannot speak the sin,
You cannot bare the wound.
It is the white hot blade of tension over the dinner table.
Everybody knows that something unspeakable was once done by one diner to another here.
If it is spoken, we must all start again.
That is always more terrifying than the truth and the knowledge of the unspoken thing.
The debt is endless,
The beginning is too far down.
The cut was so deep,
The wound was so total.
It has been so long since then
And it was a moment ago
And it is happening forever unstoppably now
It will be tomorrow
And it was before god.
No accounting however creative can balance this.
Try to fill the ocean with a single sinner’s tears,
I dare you.
That would be what they deserve,
But we are much too brief.
Anyway the first sinner is long dead.
They passed in the arms of love,
On a bed of gold and fur,
And they believed they had lived right.
Can you fill the reservoir in summer?
Can you polish fools gold into gold?
Can you blow away the sandstorm with a fan?
Can you roll the floodwater back with a broom?
Now the soul of our world holds only debt.
We have replaced the soul of the world with debt and every vault is empty.