959 
 
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ALVMNVS BOOK FYHD 
 
By John Curtis Underwood 
 
 War Flames. 
 
 Processionals. 
 
 The Iron Muse. 
 
 Americans. 
 
 Literature and Insurgency. 
 
Trail s End 
 
 By 
 
 John Curtis Underwood 
 
 Santa Fe, N. M. 
 1921 
 
 New Mexican Publishing Corporation 
 
Cofiyrieht by 
 
 John Curtis Undtrwood 
 
 1921 
 
 X 
 
To 
 Two Women 
 
 O i ~ 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Foreword -..- - 7 
 
 Burros - _ 9 
 
 Flivvers _ _ 10 
 
 The Plaza _...._ _ 12 
 
 The Old Palace _ 14 
 
 The Frijoles Room _ _ 16 
 
 The Alcove , 18 
 
 Palace Undertaking Parlors _ 20 
 
 The Corner Drug Store 21 
 
 Rosario s _ 22 
 
 San Miguel _ _ 24 
 
 The Oldest Church _25 
 
 The Hat Shop - ,. 26 
 
 The Tea Room 27 
 
 The Bank 28 
 
 The Garage 29 
 
 The Swimming Pool 30 
 
 The Studio 31 
 
 Casa Pintada 32 
 
 The Old Bells - - 33 
 
 The Blind Wood Chopper _ 34 
 
 Arturo _ 35 
 
 The Yellow Kiva - 36 
 
 The Paris ~ 37 
 
 Hotel de Olid 39 
 
 The Old Adobe 40 
 
 Penitentes , - 41 
 
 Santa Fe Forenoon 42 
 
 The Tower 43 
 
 Still Life 44 
 
 Star Spray T 45 
 
 Winter Midnight _ 46 
 
 Winter Morning r 47 
 
 Winter Noon - 48 
 
 The Ride Home 50 
 
 Rito Del Frijoles 51 
 
 Corn Dance, San Domingo , 53 
 
 The Heritage - 55 
 
 The Trail Mender 57 
 
 Goats .-. -.58 
 
 Coyote 59 
 
 Processional r 60 
 
 The Dimple 61 
 
 The Spring 62 
 
 Lost Lake 63 
 
 Tesuque Church , - 64 
 
 Ten Candles 65 
 
 The Cabin 66 
 
 The Santa Fe Trail 67 
 
 The Old Dim Trail 69 
 
 The Revenant 70 
 
 Treasure Seekers - 72 
 
 Puppets and People 73 
 
 Pussy Cats and Cherubim 74 
 
 Sunset New Mexico 76 
 
 High School Tennis Court 78 
 
 Envoy 79 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 My fathers tracked across the plains, 
 Forebears in heart, mayhap in blood, 
 To find this region that remains 
 Raised from the sea s salt flood. 
 
 They loarned its highlands and its trails, 
 Its snow peaks and arroyos brown, 
 Its forests green, its misty veils 
 Rolling gray mountains down. 
 
 They knew blue skies of Paradise, 
 Its dry, clear air whose breath is life, 
 Its high rock bastioned ruins that rise 
 Hewed by a giant s knife; 
 
 Its gardens and its orchard trees, 
 Along the trenched acequia s flow, 
 Unfailing as its sun that sees 
 All things that smile and grow; 
 
 Where long, low, brown adobe walls 
 Leaning along the foot hills, climb; 
 Home of a brown skinned race that calls 
 With the slow smile of time. 
 
 This old, star-trailed Franciscan town 
 Where life is always afternoon, 
 Wrapped in its ragged robe of brown, 
 My fathers found one June. 
 
BURROS 
 
 We met four burros in the streets of Santa Fe one steel blue morning, 
 When snow on the mountains crept lower down trails they were 
 
 treading. 
 Two were gray, and two were brown to match the merchandise they 
 
 marched with, 
 Naked cedar split and frost rimed piled on gnarled brown pinyon 
 
 wood, 
 Bound round furry backs and flanks in huge wooden horseshoes. 
 
 And the gray and brown small brothers of St. Francis plodded soberly, 
 Turning corners of the long and crooked trail their fathers tracked 
 
 from Burgos and Assisi, 
 Trampling planks of tossing ships and foam swept beaches brown as 
 
 Mexico, 
 Treading where the padres tramped, on trails as brown as tattered 
 
 robes that fluttered round them. 
 
 They went stacked with stuff for fire that flamed far northward in 
 strong sunlight. 
 
 The padres skin burned brown through torrid summers; their burros 
 hair grew long and thicker through bleak winters. 
 
 And the flame that fired its human torches in Toledo, and leapt across 
 the sea, harrassed them still and swept them with it. 
 
 The brown padres sweated in the desert, and the burros walked be 
 side them bearing food and wine and water. 
 
 The gray padres shivered on white mesas where their burros carried 
 firewood, charcoal, and live coals in battered braziers. 
 
 The burros carried crosses like their threadbare masters of slow 
 martyrdoms, 
 
 Uprights rough and cross bars crude, men rudely joined and set to 
 gether and raised. 
 
 By bright springs and turbid rivers, on brown rocks and mountains 
 meeting sunrise. 
 
 They bore rude wooden symbols of a life that parched in deserts 
 burned and thirsted with a yearning infinite; 
 
 Warmed the dead to life, and dying lifted high a torch of red tradition 
 that each padre s burning body raised from dying once more. 
 
 And the burros beside the padres such as bore a Babe in Egypt, 
 brought the crosses home to Santa Fe; 
 
 Saw their shadows when they grew from earth; and lost them when 
 men raised them higher; 
 
 Heard the bells beside them chiming through three centuries of rhym 
 ing gray traditions. 
 
 And they bore the little children of those dying years that laughing 
 beat them with brown billets saved from crimson fires. 
 
 Still they bear their timber horseshoes of good luck to all who conquer 
 
 cold and hunger, with slight tools of light; 
 Bearing split wood for sacrifice to faith that forms its crosses where 
 
 two faggots set together light their fire on earth s bare altar. 
 They bear brown laughing children where the brown cathedral s bells 
 
 are chiming, rhyming still old rituals; 
 Stepping soberly and slowly, small brown brothers of St. Francis, 
 
 small gray guardians 
 Of the splintered keys of sight, and love like his, like light, for 
 
 sun and mountain, star and shadow; 
 Burden bearers, high and holiest, like the lowliest and the least, bird 
 
 or beast. Santa F6 11 7 18 
 
10 
 
 FLIVVERS 
 
 They come and stand in the Plaza and drink deep there, 
 
 While their riders drink deep at our bubble fountains and aoda 
 
 fountains; 
 
 Little tin tramps of the world with bulging side pockets and canteens, 
 And bedding rolled and shouldered on roofs as deep in dust, 
 As the bleached straw suit cases strapped behind and never opened 
 Prom Lowell, Moline and Mobile to Santa Monica and San Diego. 
 
 Their women wear clothes like their men as often as not, 
 Sweaters, riding breeches, miners boots and faded khaki overalls, 
 Hiding all from head to foot but sun-browned faces and sun-tanned 
 
 fingers, 
 Girls that have soaked in the sun and bathed in it in brown and 
 
 hidden arroyos. 
 Some of them sit in the Plaza with little hand mirrors and vanity 
 
 cases and powder their faces. 
 
 Some pencil letters and diaries, and some take time to stare 
 At gray burros and brown adobes while their mothers are marketing, 
 Big brown women and little wiry ones with bulging, faded, flowered 
 
 knitting bags. 
 
 The flivvers stand fast or sulk to garages to be blacksmithed. 
 
 Men with the trail s slow traces in browning faces, 
 
 Of freedom from shop and farm and office desk and folio, 
 
 Curb them, swing them away, feed them, groom them and bring 
 
 them back 
 Where the women and children are waiting. 
 
 Children whose eyes grow bright from miracles overnight. 
 
 Crowding an epic into three months or four, 
 
 Since they beat through spring rain and sleet and mud that was 
 
 bottomless, 
 On an endless old Santa F6 trail, and the rest like the streams of a 
 
 water shed; 
 Till the high plains passed one night, and the sun pulled out of the 
 
 sky line 
 
 A far, faint saw-toothed coast line of mountains that marched together, 
 Marched and mounted in monstrous ranks till they looked like a wall 
 
 at the end of the world. 
 
11 
 
 There where the West begins they filed through the passes. 
 And the women walked with the children up shortcuts to zigzags, 
 To the wheel tracks on the summits; and they stared and wondered 
 
 and went on, 
 Slowly breathing the beauty of God s vast world at last revealed 
 
 to them. 
 
 They moved on with it day by day, and grew used to it, 
 Rolling closer to the westering sun, and camping nearer the stars 
 
 night after night, 
 They met bleak mesas and buttes, they forded wide rivers of sand 
 
 that sucked at the wheels. 
 They turned and twisted, rose and dipped, slewed and slipped past 
 
 range after range in a maze of mountain wonderlands, 
 Where a man might lose himself utterly, and a woman go mad at 
 
 the thought of it. 
 
 Slowly they lost the old selves of little tame tastes and futile hastes, 
 As they dared the deserts and the snows through blue days like beads 
 
 on the trail s brown rosary, 
 Till a thousand trails that converge from Old Mexico to Montana 
 
 and Canada, 
 Met on tht last brown slopes where bronchos at sun-up shy at girls in 
 
 blankets like logs by the road. 
 They wanted water, oil and gas, ice cream and ice drinks and tense 
 
 minutes at the movies again. 
 And some of them wandered into the past in our Palace and knew 
 
 new mysteries. 
 
 They halt in our streets and refit, and some of us envy them, 
 Who live on the roof of the world, and still hug chain gangs of habit, 
 As they stutter away to the sunset with their faded and fluttering 
 
 pennants, 
 
 And their dusty moving tents of Romance on various adventures. 
 And their eyes hold wider horizons, and their lips are wiser and 
 
 warmer, 
 With their little human hopes and plans, and their hearts on the 
 
 sun s high pilgrimage. 
 
 Santa F6 2 22 19 
 
12 
 
 THE PLAZA 
 
 Motors weave their mazes around it. 
 Motors stand empty and waiting for shopping women, 
 Where dusty, high tilted, spliced and weather stained, 
 Swaying and creaking, the lumbering ox wagons 
 Rolled to the end of the Trail. 
 
 Cowboys bronchos clatter over red brick pavements, 
 
 Girls in sweaters, trim puttees, trig riding breeches, 
 
 Tenderfoot girls in high-heeled shoes, khaki leggins and peek-a-boo 
 
 waists, 
 Red capped school girls two together, are riding bare back and 
 
 circling, 
 
 Where the gaunt chargers of the dust gray Conquistadores 
 Limped and flinched from bits and spurs that propped them from 
 
 falling. 
 
 Boys on bicycles glide and loop, 
 
 Where the long pack trains of mules and pack horses plodded and 
 
 slithered. 
 
 Fledgling priests from St. Michael s with purple pennants and ribbons, 
 Bound for a ball game go eating ice cream cones, 
 Where the learned Padres tramped the long trail from Old Mexico. 
 And the Padres burros still stand here sleekly obsequient. 
 
 Indians sunburned red for a thousand years from Te^uque and San 
 
 Ildefonso, 
 
 With their red head bands and blankets of life glowing red in them, 
 Flame past benches where bank clerks, cigar drummers, tourists, T-B s, 
 Cough and chatter like apes, and chew black tobacco and big black 
 
 war head lines, 
 
 Passing proudly and imperially erect and -self sufficient, 
 As their free fore-runners were in the days when this place was the 
 
 fore-court of a Pueblo capital. 
 
 The ghosts of those proud Pueblo days and the stark stone age be 
 fore it, 
 
 Ghosts of the old dear idle days when men gossiped here of Marat 
 and Napoleon, 
 
 Ghosts of trappers of Taos and Jesuits of Rome whose eyes struck 
 sparks like swords, 
 
13 
 
 Ghosts of Forty-Niners who tarried to refit on their gold rush west 
 ward, 
 
 Ghosts of Sibley s Confederates who gambled as wildly here for a 
 continent, 
 
 Ghosts of the gladdest girls who ever smiled at mountain sunrise or 
 mandolin music; 
 
 Ghosts of the saddest widows and prostitutes who ever implored Our 
 
 Lady of Pity, 
 Ghosts of yesterday, before the railroad came, ghosts of desperados 
 
 and their slayers, of Billy the Kid, and Pat Garrett, 
 Ghosts of the day before yesterday, when the first trails that tied 
 
 together here were faint as a dream s forgetfulness, 
 Ghosts of Onate and Benevides, of Castenada, of Coronado and De 
 
 Vargas, 
 
 Ghosts of Doniphan and Armijo, of Fremont and Kit Carson and Lew 
 
 Wallace, 
 Ghosts of fighters and writers and builders of low adobes and red 
 
 brick abortions, 
 Ghosts of the past and today and tomorrow, still fuse in this focus 
 
 of living. 
 
 They live in the laughter of children that their fathers fathers begot. 
 
 They live in the smiles of women whose bodies and souls they wor 
 shiped and lusted for. 
 
 They live in the looks of men that they loved and killed, and traded 
 with and betrayed. 
 
 They live in the houses they builded, the trees they planted, the turf 
 they sodded, the pavements they laid here, 
 
 In this gray meeting place of the winds of God and the wills of men 
 for the feet of those that should follow them; 
 
 Here where the trails meet and cross, as the paths in the Plaza meet 
 and cross, 
 
 In this fore-court of adventure by old camp fires of longing and for 
 getfulness; 
 
 Where the ghosts gather with the living in the sunlight and moonlight. 
 
 And the motors whirl like smoke, and the mountains stand sentry 
 eternally. 
 
 Santa Fe 11 15 18 
 
14 
 
 THE OLD PALACE 
 
 It lies, a long, low procession of life epitomized, rough cast in adobe, 
 Like a slow and plodding line of old Spanish Conquistadores, 
 Straggling through dust and heat, dead beat footmen following sweat 
 ing horsemen, 
 Trailing rusty lances idly, and leaving dusty furrows in the sand 
 
 behind them, 
 On the endless trail from Old Mexico to New Mexico. 
 
 They crept past brown and dry arroyos and bare and wind-swept 
 
 ridges, 
 
 Gray, dust gray, with the steel in them dulled and dented 
 By the bowlders the Indians hurled at them from the tops of the tall 
 
 terraced houses. 
 They crawled past beetling crags, and black mesas, and sombre 
 
 shadows of mountains that menaced them, 
 They stabbed the cactus with their spears and drank its life-blood to 
 
 sustain them, and pressed on past passes eternally unattainable; 
 Till they slaked their horses dusty throats at last in the smooth gray 
 
 ripples of the Rio Grande del Norte. 
 
 They sweated past the sand hills on old trading trails of the Queres 
 
 and Tehuas, 
 They topped the last lean ridge, and watched a little river flowing 
 
 westward through a valley time had left for them, 
 Those that were left from the trail and the trial the desert had made 
 
 of them. 
 And they found peach orchards, and maize fields, and a Pueblo, and 
 
 a place for them; 
 For a hand of life had led them to build here a city and a home 
 
 for them, 
 
 They were the first forefingers of hands that wandered groping, 
 The first blunt forefingers of a tide that swept westward through the 
 
 ocean from bleak acres by Corunna and Santandar, 
 Down from the orange and pomgranate groves to the wilder gold of 
 
 the sunset, 
 Seeking room to spread and grow and glut its hunger insatiate for 
 
 gold and great adventuring, 
 Eddying north from narrower limits near the Gulf, to the uplands 
 
 of a widening continent. 
 And the desert took toll of them, but they pressed on and multiplied 
 
 until they taxed the desert. 
 
15 
 
 They tithed it and ditched it and built homes for the spirit of the 
 
 race that led them, 
 Such as the Moors made and the Goths made when they met and 
 
 mated in Spain. 
 
 And this old palace was the type and the chief of them. 
 They made homes for flocks and herds such as followed with the 
 
 Indians and women when Coronado marched from Mexico, 
 As they made homes for earlier folk migrations of all herdsmen. 
 
 through the centuries, 
 First made a corral, then a -square and a frontage of tenting for the 
 
 face of it. 
 
 And the corral and the tenting grew to a courtyard and a patio with 
 shaded arcades, 
 
 Such as the Moors made in Cordoba with rows of tent poles for their 
 first slim pillars, 
 
 The Spanish captains and governors came to herd nnd pasture their 
 people here, 
 
 And they made a greater sheep-fold and a Great House for the herd 
 ing, and the people called it El Palacio . 
 
 It stands as gray as the sheep with tree trunk pillars brown as 
 
 stripped posts of corrals. 
 Made of the same sun-dried mud that the older herders and builders 
 
 wrought with, 
 Long and broadly based, primitive and significant as a pueblo or a 
 
 pyramid, 
 Where time made it a gray and lasting monument of a race that 
 
 passed and yet lives here. 
 It stands a tomb of the past, and a treasure house of gray traditions 
 
 and hidden histories. 
 
 It stands like an old gray college or cloister in Toledo or Salamanca.. 
 
 More than tomb or college or cloister it embodies the past and inter 
 prets it, 
 
 With the leaves of its libraries, the ticking of its typewriters, the 
 calling of its telephones talking to today and tomorrow. 
 
 And the brown, ranked pillars of its long arcade are the pillars of 
 proud triumphal arches. 
 
 The great ghosts of the past stride through them, and then stand 
 back again and mingle 
 
 With the natives and the tourists, and the painters and poets and 
 lovers in the Plaza in the moonlight who linger and love it. 
 
 Santa Fe 10 5 18 
 
16 
 
 THE FRUOLES ROOM 
 
 They made an echo of antiquity 
 
 Of the room where Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur in the early Eighties, 
 
 With his leather covered Morris chair and leather covered lap board 
 
 on its arms by one window. 
 
 And the shadows work on it, and shadows of a time as oli as Jerusalem 
 Move in the place or rest like the words of a finished manuscript. 
 
 They fill the low show cases in the corners, 
 
 And two huge wall cases hewed from a three-foot adobe partition. 
 
 They flow through low doors in walls as thick at each end of the room, 
 
 In a low and narrow vista of door on door receding 
 
 Through the whole past of the Palace to shadowy doors before them. 
 
 They lie on white wooden shelves and wide surfaces, 
 Shadows of the past solidified in hand-worked bone and stone, 
 Shadows in hanging trays of glass like X-ray prints of the bones of the 
 
 past, 
 Skeleton fragments of the days when the caves of Tyuonyi were hand 
 
 carved and crowded, 
 
 Bone awls for ghostly garments, bone flutes for ghostly music, 
 Stone arrow heads, spear heads and cherts for shadowy huntings 
 
 and killings. 
 
 There are deep shadows on rank on rank of stone axe heads and 
 
 hammers, 
 Line on line of the story of the felling of trees and the wedging of 
 
 vigas for balconies, 
 Where shadowy women gossip and scold and walk on the face of 
 
 the cliff, 
 And children whose bodies have crumpled are playing on ladders 
 
 whose substance is dust. 
 There are hard shadows of stone hand mills where girls ground blue 
 
 corn. 
 And the crude stone quern still holds dull shadows of the rhythm of 
 
 the rubbing that caressed it, 
 Where they bent brown breasts to it, that swelled as they sang to it, 
 
 There are round shadows of smooth black stones one could hide in 
 her palm as she polished pottery. 
 
17 
 
 There are shadows in the big flat bowls of gray and white and brown 
 
 and rus-set, 
 
 Where the life of a tribe that was, has slowly burned through the clay. 
 There are bowls whose circle is broken like the circle of feasters 
 
 that dipped from them. 
 There are patterned shards like fragments of lives men pattern out 
 
 piece by piece. 
 
 There are shadowy shafts of arrows and hand-carved stones for their 
 
 smoothing, 
 Shadows of the craft of old men who fashioned and fitted and flew 
 
 with them. 
 There are throwing sticks and praying sticks and prayer plume 
 
 holders of clay. 
 There are brown and white turkey feathers intact, and strange 
 
 ornaments 
 
 For the great high cave of the kiva deep-niched in the cliff, 
 Like a lost high altar of living in a ghostly cathedral whose transepts 
 
 are builded in air. 
 
 There are shadows of shadowy symbols of dead rituals, 
 
 Shadows of the dancers plumes that felt brown feet that felt high 
 
 ladders, 
 And the hard, brown rocks of the valley when life was vivid and 
 
 good to them; 
 Till the last lone fire at the foot of the cliff died out on a dead 
 
 black winter s night, 
 
 And the last lost wailing echo of living sang to it, 
 And to life that writes in shadowy symbols, broken pictures, dying 
 
 men and gospels misspelled, 
 In Tyuonyi even as Jerusalem. 
 
 Santa Fe 12 30 18 
 
18 
 
 THE ALCOVE 
 
 The light streams down from above through a gray wire glass sky light, 
 Like cloudy light that falls in a shadowy sea cave, 
 Where pearls and corals glow, and abalones slowly open living opals, 
 Near flame-tipped sea shells, obscured by sea-green sea weed and 
 
 great red sea fans, 
 Under the feathery shimmering shifting of frondage, water, color and 
 
 light, 
 The hard, brown rock stands out like tie ribs of being. 
 
 The ocean shimmers through the hues of translucent canvases; 
 
 In a stirles-3 tide of air that floods the Grand Canyon s terraced 
 
 abysses, 
 
 Through frail and rifted veils of mist that drift apart and reveal; 
 Opals and pearls and dead red spoils of fossil centuries, 
 Far-flung treasure of Titans washed by the waves 
 Round points and bays and hazy purple coasts of sunset and sunrise. 
 
 It beats round the high piled massive of the silent mountains of Taos, 
 Like a tall sea island rising between the tide and the sky, 
 Out of a great gray plain toward the cloud drift of spent whirlwinds, 
 Eddying, swirling slowly till the hills lift up their hands, 
 And strain down snow and rain that the spring may blossom again. 
 And the rocks that wrestle with heaven for a parapet for far plains, 
 Stand in strong blues and sage grays as a strong sea island stands > 
 through ages. 
 
 The ocean rises and flowers again in April through new fruit trees, 
 Ghosts of dead seas and seasons that spread and lapped through the 
 
 valleys rise with the swelling of sap. 
 
 Apple trees blossom in spray, and peach trees raise pink swirls of fire. 
 Below them snow still lingers in blue shadows as polar as shades of 
 
 icebergs in sea lanes, 
 In the lee of the low gray adobes with red peppers still hanging by 
 
 the doors. 
 
 The ocean moulded the walls of these churches, 
 
 Of Ranches de Taos that stands like a rock sea-flung by Spain towards 
 
 the north and the mountains, 
 Weathered and rounded, storm beaten by years, 
 Of the shadow netted Sanctuario by Chimayo, 
 
19 
 
 Soaking in light in the hills like a sponge that clings to the cleft of 
 
 a reef; 
 
 And of the brown cathedral corner tower in Santa Fe, 
 Like a crumbling -shore rock bastion of a faith today forgotten more 
 
 and more. 
 
 The ocean moulded the growth of flat acres of grease weed, 
 Like a low sea forest raised from the ooze to the sunlight, 
 Where salt gray waves once rippled and slowly drained away. 
 The ocean shaped the trees that veil and reveal wide mountain vistas, 
 Poplars pointed like rocks and cottonwoods spreading like sea weed, 
 With fingers of tides in the veins of each leaf, and the spreading of 
 eddies in circles concentric of years hid in gray trunks. 
 
 The ocean moulded the hand and the mind of the man who made 
 these pictures, 
 
 Out of its salt spring of being that knows not dying or dry rot, 
 That ripples and wells through the ages of sunlight and starlight and 
 
 moonlight. 
 
 It moulded and made and sent him to silently preach to the people, 
 In this small side chapel of service unceasing in today s gray cathedral, 
 Where men light pictures to God instead of candles and lamps, 
 Silently preaching the rhythm and the flow and the glow of the tides 
 
 of all living 
 Till the hand of the painter is dust, and his mind is a mist in the 
 
 midnight, 
 
 And the gleam of the strength in his soul like a pearl in a sea cave 
 In a gray little alcove of time is a treasure of light that remains. 
 
 Santa Fe 11 24 18 
 
20 
 
 PALACE UNDERTAKING PARLORS 
 
 Late at night, next to the post office, 
 
 A huge square window with one crack in it gapes darkly, 
 
 Like the black mouth of a cave of death where silence whispers 
 
 All lost horrors of the past, and today s last hopelessness. 
 
 Two green shaded lamps like the eyes of a monster that menaces, 
 Look past undrawn shades for people that pass in the street, 
 Passing oblivious, restless, foreboding, horror-seized 
 Hundreds and thousands of times, at noon and at midnight, 
 To come here, sooner or later. 
 
 By those two lamps two men are sittng, keeping watch, 
 Always someone sitting, keeping watch, 
 Smoking, yawning, saying little and listening 
 For the tense ringing of a nerve-racked telephone, 
 Spring and summer, and autumn and winter. 
 
 This is the gate of despair, and of dreams that are nightmares. 
 
 And here the dead go first when they begin 
 
 The long, dark journey into deeper darkness, 
 
 Down a black funnel that narrows faster and faster 
 
 Through the grave s close trap-door to utter forgetfulness. 
 
 The men who sit here learned their craft in Egypt before the Pyramids. 
 They have made mummies before, and their eyes and their lips 
 Look out of the living mummy cases and whisper tonele&sly, 
 As the priests of the dead at Luxor and Thebes whispered at night 
 
 as they worked; 9 
 
 Taking the senseless shapes that women bore and loved, and men 
 
 married and traded with, 
 Hiding horror and disease and the taint of tears in soft wrappings 
 
 of silence. 
 
 People who lie awake with nerves that twitch, go by and shudder. 
 But a child pauses and looks at the two green lights and longs 
 
 for them. 
 And a man with a heart like a cracked egg shell, edges night after 
 
 night nearer the great cracked window glass, 
 Finding there before him the rest that he craves and needs, 
 Knowing that in all the world this one dim room belongs to him. 
 And his tired heart tells him, 
 
 Death is one breath in an endless march of interminable atoms; 
 Through night s long passionless ecstacy. 
 
 Santa F6 2 12 19 
 
21 
 THE CORNER DRUG STORE 
 
 The children love to come here, 
 
 To sit on high wire stools before the big mirror, 
 
 To hear the Soda fountain sizzle and squirt, 
 
 To play with straws and bubbles in tall glasses, 
 
 And swallow frozen ecstacy by lingering spoonfulls. 
 
 Here is one place where all are children, 
 
 At one time or another, sooner or later, 
 
 Sundays or holidays, particularly so 
 
 Since the town and the state went dry last October. 
 
 We are children before the news stands between two big front 
 
 windows, 
 
 Like a flashy display of children s toys at Xmas time, 
 Where we see ourselves mirrored in toy magazines for toy people, 
 And cheaper Sunday papers from Denver and Los Angeles. 
 
 We are children at the candy counter. 
 
 We are children in a corner near the big mirror, 
 
 Stocked to start ten beauty factories, wholesale; working overtime, 
 
 With lip sticks and potted rouge, cold creams and face washes, 
 
 Talcum powder, radium soap, liquid shampoo, hair removers, 
 
 }31ue Jay corn plasters, rubber reducers, electric vibrators, 
 
 And superfluous vanity bags for superfluous women, 
 
 Little walking vanity bags themselves of small envies and appetites, 
 
 And small spoiled children. 
 
 Tragedy walks here too among the children, 
 
 As a huge cowman or sheriffs deputy walks with a six-gun half hidden. 
 Tragedy comes on tiptoe to a telephone and whispers tensely. 
 Tragedy stands twitching by a prescription counter watching his 
 
 watch. 
 
 Tragedy smiles thin-lipped at a friend, and stifles a cough, 
 Hurrying away with a bottle of Scott s Emulsion hidden in a muff. 
 Tragedy feels a truss, and hungrily watches the children. 
 Tragedy comes with a face no sane man might marry, and frowns 
 
 at them: 
 
 At the children for whom all our drugs and vanities are devised, 
 The children for whom we close saloons and nursery windows, and 
 
 make war and peace, 
 The children who come here as their elders come here; 
 
 From lonely ranch houses, shadowed adobes, furnished rooms, hotel 
 
 lobbies, toy town houses, 
 
 To buy aspirin and frayed aspiration in a rag time phonograph record, 
 To buy patent medicines and patent appliances for killing time and 
 
 ring worms and cockroaches, 
 For curing boils and boredom, facial defects and soul insufficiencies; 
 
 To our temple of gossip and healing of all ills real and imaginary, 
 To sit on a stool by a counter and swing their legs as the children do, 
 To see life a spectacle and a drama, hair guessed and half hoped for, 
 To watch it without them and in them in a great big mirror before 
 
 them 
 On Sundays and weekdays and holidays. 
 
 Santa Fe 12 8 18 
 
22 
 
 ROSARIO S 
 
 At the end of the street, on the roof of the shop, backed by blue 3ky, 
 An old gray Mexican ox-cart stands on solid wheels hand-sawed from 
 
 logs that sawed the desert. 
 
 Below in the ghost shop s windows are wampum and arrow heads, 
 Spear heads and cherts of flint and black obsidian, bleakly mingled 
 With Navajo bracelets and rings beaten and punched from dead 
 
 Mexican dollars. 
 Pottery rain-gods with eyes of dead men peer at you. 
 
 Inside in deep shadows are piles of dusty blankets, 
 
 Woven by long dead hands that paled as the wool sucked out 
 
 All the color from old lives till the last red thread was lost in grayness. 
 
 Long lost Navaho sheep and Mexican flocks near Chimayo 
 
 Fed and their blood beat red, and these stripes and wedges are left 
 
 of them. 
 
 Snow and midnight mix in one and the colors of springtime and sunset 
 Live in a rainbow web of wool that Rosario spreads on the floor. 
 
 Pottery from Zuni, Zia, Acoma, Laguna, clutters the dusty tables, 
 With painted shadows of flowers and leaves and birds and chain- 
 lightning. 
 
 Great black lustrous jars from San Juan and Santa Clara overshadow 
 Hopi ladles and bowls, yellow and brown like the rocks of the mesas. 
 Heavy stencil-like patterns of fire and night from San Ildefonso and 
 
 San Domingo mix 
 
 With crude Tesuque ash trays and little clay birds and animals, 
 Striped, smeared, absurd, wierd, and naively bewitching, 
 And black and gray prehistoric bowls unglazed, crooked, coil-woven. 
 
 There are baskets hanging from rafters, baskets on floor and walls; 
 Big Navaho marriage baskets with their mountains of upper and lower 
 
 worlds, 
 Black and white trays, Pima and Apache, spotted with shapes of 
 
 small men and Gila monsters, 
 Hopi placques, coarse of weave, some low-keyed, and some like fire 
 
 and sapphire, 
 Rotting bottoms of baskets made by hands that died a thousand years 
 
 ago. 
 And two frayed sandal heels of yucca fibre from an Otowi mummy a 
 
 thousand years older. 
 
23 
 
 Painted saw-edged dance sticks ending in birds and burros crowd 
 Buckskin and bead-tagged pouches and purses in dusty show cases. 
 Hopi Kachinas, masks and dolls, and shamans dead magic are jumbled 
 With carved and tinted tablitas, tall wooden tiaras for dances of 
 
 dead men, 
 And dead children s tufted rattles like slim war clubs of dim warriors 
 
 with dyed hide sewn on them. 
 
 In a corner a tall war drum blue and yellow as bare torsos of dead 
 
 dancers, 
 Stands beside a scarred metate that ground ghosts blue corn and 
 
 yellow corn. 
 There are horse hair quirts and leather quirts and belts of long dead 
 
 riders, 
 With the wicked Mexican spurs and the silver bossed and the braided 
 
 bridles, 
 And saucers filled with beads and coral, turquoise and opal and 
 
 Mexican money. 
 
 There is a huge old dusty safe that Rosario opens slowly, 
 
 Where he hides dim writings of men long dead, and trinkets and 
 
 jewels of long dead women, 
 Names written large in three races history, and mystery magnetized 
 
 and tangible, 
 In great Navaho silver bead necklaces with squash flower spurs, 
 
 and in crosses and swastikas, 
 Worn gold for fleshless fingers, and thin ear-loops for ears that 
 
 hear nothing. 
 
 He has old seals that stamped power on yellow papers, 
 
 Cut by Greeks in Rome in the image of Rome s first emperors, 
 
 And one that came down through a pope and a king and a viceroy, 
 
 reveals Rosario s profile, 
 Hard and shrewd and old as a Latin and an Indian, and loving all 
 
 things 
 
 That have gray power in themselves to make their keepers fit for them. 
 And Rosario stands with his ghosts in his hands like a priest of the 
 
 past, 
 And a ghost of the pride and the power of Spain and the Pueblos that 
 
 perishing persist here. 
 
 Santa Fe 1 29 19 
 
24 
 
 SAN MIGUEL 
 
 The old Catholic college has a gray stone front of many windows. 
 And I sometimes wonder where the eyes are that looked out of them, 
 Little fledgling priests that were homesick often and lonely, 
 Knowing as little of the world as a babe unborn and resenting it. 
 
 Compline, vespers and matins, and the length of interminable litanies, 
 Fasts and penance and prayers, forever, one after the other, 
 Midnight masses and early wakings in winter, and stories and lessons 
 
 to be learned 
 Of saints in torment, tormented by a God men worshipped tormenting 
 
 them, 
 Stories that spoiled the summer sun, and made the spring a mockery. 
 
 The little boy priests went harnessed in black and harrassed 
 
 By memories of autumn days when apples dropped in their mothers 
 
 laps, 
 Long mornings on mountains when they found the pinyon nuts and 
 
 pitched their fingers husking them, 
 Days when they watched lean horses and colts like a merry-go-round 
 
 on -shining circus days, thrashing dry wheat, 
 When dust and chaff hung high in air in yellow beams of sunlight 
 
 dancing for them. 
 
 They have gathered ripe grain for the threshing in the chapel arid 
 
 the cloisters, 
 Where gray faced priests go round and round, black shadows of God 
 
 and shamans of midnight, 
 Pondering a pit of eternity, and heirs to all the terrors and torments 
 
 of the ages. 
 
 And the dim contagion grows where they shut up boys beside them, 
 And drive lean horses of habit round and round, day by day on their 
 
 lives. 
 
 The old Catholic college is a gray barracks of bitterness. 
 But birds build nests around it, the sun and moon regard it, 
 As it looks across the valley to old gray stone walls of the State 
 
 Penitentiary. 
 And I like better to think of eyes looking out of its windows at birds 
 
 winging to the mountains, 
 
 Than of the downcast lids that serve life sentences to habit here, 
 For worshiping shadows ceaselessly and wronging life with frayed 
 
 rituals. 
 
 Santa Fe 11 18 18 
 
25 
 
 THE OLDEST CHURCH 
 
 There was a cross in the open here where the Padres planted Christ s 
 
 standard, 
 Dusty foot-soldiers of Spain and her church taking possession of the 
 
 land. 
 
 There was a cross of wood and a new strange shadow on the hills, 
 And a deepening shade in the minds and wild hearts 
 Of the Pueblos and nomads who watched it and hated it. 
 
 There was a cross of metal in old San Miguel 
 Before the Pilgrims set foot in the fog at Provincetown. 
 There was a cross of metal in a cage of sun-dried mud, 
 A cage that was made when metal first was forged and before it, 
 When the first cavemen builders roofed raw trenches, and carved 
 their rude dugouts. 
 
 There was a cage of shadows here, and the Indians hated it. 
 And they loved their kivas better, and there was bloodshed here, 
 When the great Pueblo rebellion rose in a long brown tidal wave, 
 And they stoned the priests and martyred them, and the robes of the 
 
 mass were rent and defiled, 
 Where a sunbeam brightens a gray clay wall, and a motor glides 
 
 past the last of the Trail to the Plaza. 
 
 There was a cro&s of metal in the sword hilt of each Conquistador 
 Who came and held the land and heard bronze bells and ate God s 
 
 body here, 
 In metal armor that gleamed in the light of tall pale guttering 
 
 candles. 
 And the men and the metal swords and lances, bits and spurs that 
 
 rode the land and rowelled it 
 Are lost like yesterday s snow, and these old mud walls and carved 
 
 roof beams outwore them. 
 
 There is a cross of wood in the open here on the tower of old San 
 
 Miguel, 
 Crowning a church like a slice of deeply eroded gray cliff or great 
 
 clay bank, 
 
 With two stone slanting butresses against the time-worn face of it, 
 Propping the walls of a tomb of the past with flowers like canticles 
 
 growing in front of it, 
 A crumbling tomb in an older dome of God s blue beauty embracing it. 
 
 Santa Fe 2 25 18 
 
26 
 
 THE HAT SHOP 
 
 There is a telephone pole near the First National Bank that the 
 
 horses have chewed. 
 
 Puye was standing tied there one day as I rode round the Plaza. 
 I pulled up Gray Leg and peered past the leaf-sprayed shade of the 
 
 hat shop window. 
 
 Some one was standing inside with her profile pointing to a mirror, 
 As Mike Armijo s pointer Lai stands when she flushes a bird. 
 
 Some one was standing inside with one finger fussing with her 
 curly hair, 
 
 In a brown leather hunting coat, tan riding breeks and wrap-puttees 
 as symmetrical 
 
 As the sweet, slim curves their close spirals defined and clung to, 
 
 Some one with a hat in her hand and four more on the counter be 
 side her, 
 
 Some one all curves that clung ,and melted and mingled in motion that 
 sang to me. 
 
 She lifted the first, and she seemed to kiss and caress her small 
 
 head with it. 
 
 Kings have been crowned with less splendor and pleasure in living. 
 She laid the red hat aside ,and the blue and yellow and lilac and 
 
 black, and they all looked well on her. 
 And she frowned a little and dimpled and smiled, and they all looked 
 
 well on her. 
 She sang a little softly, and shuddered at a hat of furred horror in 
 
 the mirror behind her, 
 As forest things stooping and drinking from a river, shiver at fear in 
 
 monstrous fur that is mirrored close behind them. 
 
 While she debated I discovered frontiers of the forest in the hat shop, 
 With its bare hat forms like empty bird nests scattered about it. 
 While she fluttered by the mirror like a bird that preens itself be 
 fore a pool that smiles at it, 
 
 I believed that the first hats for women were singing birds nests, 
 With a plume or two thrust through one side as they tried them on, 
 Naked and flushed and smiling as children who first discover beauty, 
 As they discovered their own images in pools that smiled at them, 
 and barely knew them. 
 
 Santa Fe 12 5 18 
 
27 
 
 THE TEA ROOM 
 
 There used to be a red parrot swingng over the doorway. 
 
 Time and the winds outwore it. 
 
 Now all the parrots are inside, but Vera Deane insists 
 
 They come with new novels in their muffs, and they go with stale 
 
 gossip in their mouths 
 "My dear, you musn t quote me, but between you and me and that 
 
 telephone pole" 
 
 Some day a younger Homer will wrte an epic of small-town telephones. 
 
 They borrow the use of hers and she doesn t like it. 
 
 When she is busy behind the screen they start new scandals. 
 
 And the red parrots on the walls and chintzes chatter and sneer at 
 
 them. 
 And the green parrots on the hand bells preen their painted feathers 
 
 and grin at them. 
 
 She brings us tea in yellow cups on red and green tables. 
 
 Over the mellow brew they perpetrate eternal platitudes, 
 
 And scatter litle dry social lies as they crumble bread and cake crumbs. 
 
 They sip straw-colored complacency for the tame little snobs that 
 
 they are. 
 And their souls are as brittle as china they chip, the lying little souls 
 
 that they are. 
 
 She has made us a clearing house of small lies and smaller jealousies, 
 That she sells with her candies and her cakes, that we do not suf 
 ficiently thank her for. 
 For lies must be cleared as coffee must be cleared before the truth 
 
 in them is fit to lie awake with. 
 And the wives clack back to their men at home and treat us more 
 
 humanly for it. 
 
 And I saw a prettier girl, even than V. D. there yesterday, 
 And our tea room that tagged four divorced last year, has mothered 
 eight weddings this winter already. 
 
 Santa Fe 10 22 18 
 
28 
 
 THE BANK 
 
 They have gutted the Bank Saloon and sold the stock. 
 
 But they left the big game heads, and the glassy eyes look down 
 
 Where big men clinked down big silver dollars with big guns belted 
 
 to them, 
 And drank big drinks of forty rod, and filled their hip pockets. 
 
 They had strong stuff like dynamite to get quick action when it was 
 
 needed. 
 When the West was one great construction camp, and shoot slugs In 
 
 strong men s guts; 
 To bore through blizzards with them, when the fit stood up and 
 
 survived, 
 And the weak went to hell in a hurry, and a man tied tight to his 
 
 friend. 
 
 Big men started big things here and planned bigger ones. 
 
 The army went and the cowmen came, prospectors plunked down 
 
 nuggets, 
 
 And juggled quartz with sparks in it that set eight states afire, 
 And harnessed railroads to cities, and ditched and harvested deserts. 
 
 Shades of the shaggy old timers, trappers, hunters and trailsmen, 
 Section hands, congressmen, cowboys, governors, mule skinners, 
 
 sheriffs, miners, state senators, 
 
 Linger here and look at shop girls with curls like Mae Marsh 
 Wrapping up boxes of candy fresh from Chicago for lungers from 
 
 Boston in sombreros. 
 
 A cigar clerk watches two high school pool room boys piking at a 
 
 punch-board by a soda fountain, formerly a bar, 
 And school girls dancing with the grandmothers between movie shows 
 
 at the Paris, 
 On the floor where the tenderfeet walked in the air to the sound of 
 
 the bullets splintering planks, 
 In this place that they call a cabaret, which is French today for a 
 
 rubber-stamped dance hall. 
 
 New York 10 29 19 
 
29 
 
 THE GARAGE 
 
 The gray stucco garage lies just back of the Plaza. 
 
 By the doors are two gay painted birds that the Pajarito cave men 
 
 put on pottery. 
 
 Inside is a prison for speed with two greasy pits where they torture it. 
 And a boy at a vise on a grimy bench is filing new links for its fetters. 
 
 The boy at the bench has broken bronchos 
 And he feels as often as not that his motor cars are alive, 
 On his flat gray greasy stable floor standing still for him, 
 And lolloping by outside and ripping and snorting. 
 
 He thinks it is great to bridle something that bucks 
 
 With stuff that is stronger than rope or rawhide and cinch it. 
 
 He has been here only six weeks and he hasn t had time to get 
 
 homesick 
 For the far dim ranges at dawn and the wind on the warpath. 
 
 It feels good to be here in the hot throbbing heart of the town, 
 To set a turn buckle on things, and to mix up with every one s life 
 To make of speed a modern commodity as simply sold 
 As the water one turns on and off in any one s bath room. 
 
 Out in the old livery stable yard they are staking an extension, 
 And burning up rickety stable hacks and sun-warped carriages, 
 That carried the passion and pathos of the past, and its crime and 
 
 adventuring. 
 Through fifty years of the days that are done to its homes and hotels 
 
 and the trains and the state capitol. 
 
 New York 10 29 19 
 
30 
 
 THE SWIMMING POOL 
 
 There is a swimming pool in an orchard on a side hill, 
 
 With a rough stone rim around it, and limpid laughing water running 
 
 and diving 
 From a sun-lit irrigation ditch, splashing and flashing into it. 
 
 The trees grow close around it and shelter and shade it, 
 Red barked apple trees, red as the clay of the path that tiptoes down 
 From the house where the girls are hidden, and the morning breath 
 lessly waits for them. 
 
 Sunrise lingers to see them running lightly on tiptoe, 
 Slim as two boys in their trim boys bathing suits that clirifj to them, 
 Down the red path where white apple petals fall on them lingering. 
 
 Birds in the branches sing to them, the lights and the shadows bring 
 
 to them, 
 Something soft as a butterfly s touch, and the swish of flowers and 
 
 dew on swift bare arms and feet, 
 Feeling earth and air as they fleet; and the flicker of wings, of leaves 
 
 and of light all thrill in them. 
 
 Branch tips touch them brushing by, breezes clutch their lips and their 
 
 hair. 
 The color of the sky and the scent of the day is sweet to them while 
 
 she still is a girl to greet them. 
 And the water ripples to meet them, and splashes and flashes and 
 
 dimples and plays with them. 
 
 The sun climbs high to spy on them and to dry their hair as side 
 
 by side 
 They sit on the round stone rim of the pool with their little toes 
 
 tickling the water. 
 And they laugh at the light and new nests in the trees and a little 
 
 gray kitten that cralws to them. 
 
 The snow of the mountain comes closer today like the warmth of the 
 
 spring to them, 
 Like the buds that burst, the petals that fall, the sap that rises, the 
 
 grass that grows, the breeze that blows, the scent and the song 
 
 that flows to them, 
 And every spring of all time is a pulse that quickens, a voice that 
 
 wakens, a smile that trembles in them. 
 
 For life today in Santa Fe on the last day of April, 
 Is a girl half naked and wholly happy smiling and sunning herself 
 On the mountain rim of a world of light and the sky s high bright 
 blue swimming pool. 
 
 Santa F6 2 28 19 
 
31 
 
 THE STUDIO 
 
 There is a great gray north window and a big red brick open fire place, 
 With a noble red brick shelf above the fire hole bearing pipes, Hopi 
 
 and Tesque pottery, rain gods and ash trays. 
 There are coal black jars of San Juan with pussy willows in them on 
 
 the adobe window ledge, 
 
 And a painted jar from Zia crowded with brushes to the right of them, 
 Between them red, blue, yellow, and speckled ears of corn and twisted 
 
 paint tubes, 
 And beyond them a hillside of snow and a sky too gray for painting. 
 
 On a small table by the fire stands a green typewriter backed by a 
 yellow placque from the Second Mesa. 
 
 A larger table by the window is stacked with books, papers, ink, 
 tobacco, hunting knives and photograph prints and plates. 
 
 There are two tall easels splashed with paint in front of a desk and 
 a gramaphone cabinet. 
 
 One of them bears a thumb box sketch of a canyon road with a big 
 blue mountain beyond it; 
 
 And that road goes winding away all night and day to new wonder 
 lands. 
 
 One of them carries a great brown picture of the Pueblo at Santa 
 
 Clara, 
 With three clay bee hive ovens in the foreground grouped like three 
 
 mountain peaks. 
 And the blue and green mountains beyond them carry the lines and 
 
 contours of the Pueblo roof line to the sky line. 
 There are streaky shadows of vigas, and slanting ladders and scaffolds 
 
 like well sweeps. 
 And the blue of a rifted sky comes back to blue shadows that seep 
 
 through the ground. 
 
 A black and white dog sprawls slack by a fire that smoulders gray 
 
 and black. 
 
 A man in khaki with a brindled cat in his lap writes on blue paper. 
 A man with a grizzled beard and a big pipe in it clatters at his table 
 
 in the corner. 
 
 For today is too gray to paint in his laboratory of light in the hills. 
 The experiment smoulders like the fire while he fusses with old 
 
 photograph plates, 
 Till the sun brings out new and brighter precipitates dripping from 
 
 the tips of his brushes, 
 And the lenses of his eyes clear, as the great lens of the sky clears. 
 
 Santa Fe 12 18 T8 
 
32 
 
 CAS A PINT AD A 
 
 Around the long table with two stained wood benches, 
 
 We sat and ate and drank and spread out books and pictures; 
 
 Indian colored drawings inevitably authentic, 
 
 And tags of last year s New Art, already stale and ludicrous. 
 
 We opened books for two years with little wrangling. 
 
 252 volumes of New Poetry stacked on shelves or slung in corners, 
 
 22 varieties of monthlies, weeklies, dailies and quarterlies dribbling 
 
 and quoting it. 
 We read proofs and smiled, or pinned ribald rhymes to them. 
 
 Poets and painters darkened the doors or tapped on the windows, 
 Poets cleaned pipes in corners, or orated in full focused candle light. 
 Poets and painters debated of Art and its Mission and their Mission 
 
 interminably. 
 Poets lounged on the porch, and looked at sunsets and stars, and 
 
 silently escaped to them. 
 
 One of them taken to task concerning his own stolid egotism, 
 Discoursed of painted women, painted houses, painted poets and 
 
 painted painters briefly. 
 
 "The virtue of this gray adobe in the mountains", he said 
 "Is not the red strips of paints and the framed paint patterns on 
 
 the walls. 
 
 "It is a house of life on the loma, for all its frivolities. 
 "People live here and grow, and come and go, and remember it. 
 "People are better than poems, and houses are better than pictures. 
 "Homes are better than art shops, and whoever talked shop in a 
 dream?" 
 
 Santa Fe 12 14 18 
 
33 
 
 THE OLD BELLS 
 
 Two old bells hanging in a garden back of the Sisters Sanitarium, 
 Swung on a gray wood frame the height of my ears and my eyes. 
 I had passed them a hundred times before, and never discovered them. 
 One day from Gray Leg s back beyond the old adobe wall I watched 
 and wanted them. 
 
 Old bells that are silent make the most beautiful music, 
 Like lips that are dead and loved and kissed by time s slow shadows, 
 By the tender touch of the years and their children remembering 
 Something that dies and yet lives in the soul of all silences. 
 
 They thrill to the clangor of old days when they flung far their 
 
 challenge, 
 Heralds of the high God of Spain to the tribes of the hills and high 
 
 plains, 
 
 Tolling the people to prayers and dead masses for the dying. 
 Calling brown kinsfolk to weddings, they clapped their bronze heels 
 
 as they danced. 
 
 They live at the summit of life and then sank to quiescence. 
 Time has left them alone with the flowers and the winds and the sun 
 To whisper back to the birds, and ring back muted centuries, 
 When the snow falls softly and stirs them, or a butterfly poises on a 
 bell. 
 
 Santa Fe 12 20 18 
 
34 
 
 THE BUND WOOD CHOPPER 
 
 Where the Acequia Madre glides like a snake below the road, 
 In the shadow of a low adobe stable and a pile of logs man-high, 
 Big and brown, rotting and charred, with ridges of snow on their 
 
 spines, 
 Backed by a cone-shaped foot-hill, through two spider fingered trees; 
 
 I saw a shape like an ape in stained overalls, 
 
 Crouching low at the end of a cross cut saw as long as himself. 
 
 He leaned on it, swaying it awkwardly, playing strange music, 
 
 With the rending of ore from rock and the crash of falling trees in it, 
 
 Till his big fiddle bow of steel had swept the last wet cutting away. 
 
 He laid the end of the log on the chip packed ground like a headless 
 
 idol. 
 
 He seemed to kneel before it as his clean axe rose and fell, 
 Its keen edge always in line with a line through the middle of his 
 
 head, his spine and his hands. 
 And the line through the middle of each round and half and quarter 
 
 log was as clean 
 As the cleavage, timed and exact, of close set machinery. 
 
 When he had finished his stint he felt for his faggots and got up 
 
 with them. 
 He went on over the water with one foot so close to the edge oT 
 
 the bridge, 
 
 Where no guard rail was, that I wanted to call out to him. 
 Children going to school passed him and followed him, 
 Making no more of him than the snow on the hills or the mud on the 
 
 road, 
 Where my ape-man at last, erect and assured, was rounding the turn 
 
 of the road. 
 
 Santa F6 1 30 19 
 
35 
 
 ARTURO 
 
 He wears a smeared red sweater. 
 
 His faded blue overalls gape at the knees. 
 
 His shoes are shaky. 
 
 His hat is dusty and black and half holes. 
 
 He walks into our kitchen and sniffs at it. 
 He walks into our dining room and looks at me. 
 He says to me, "Hello, hello, you bueno?" 
 And religiously I salute him in turn, 
 "Hello, Arturo, you bueno?" 
 
 His eyes are big and black. 
 
 His lips are large and Latin. 
 
 Hij nose is large and fit for smelling at 
 
 Meals his sister, Rosario, makes for us. 
 
 His face is large and it needs to be washeu 
 
 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, 
 
 Thursday, Friday, Saturday. 
 
 His years are four and a half. 
 
 His face is the face of a masterful lover of living, 
 
 Wise without knowing it, equal to everything, 
 
 Slowly alert and sufficient to time and itself. 
 
 His stare is the stare of youngest New Mexico, 
 
 Pondering life in a puddle of sunlight, 
 
 Wondering what we painters and poets in Canyon Road make of it, 
 
 And what all this big world is about. 
 
 His eyes are two round interrogation points. 
 
 His voice is the echo of an older wisdom. 
 
 And I know some day or other, 
 
 When I am half the world away from Santa F6, 
 
 In some land of the Latins where life is a matter of minutes and 
 
 seconds, and centuries, 
 I shall see and hear him. 
 
 I shall have him coming, standing, pondering, questioning, 
 Like a lesser Pan and a faun and a hybrid of pixies and cherubim; 
 With his black eyes of life, and his small voice of life that insists 
 
 and persists. 
 
 I am sure that at last I shall answer his slow repetition 
 "Hello, hello, you bueno, you bueno? 
 Arturo". 
 
 11 10 18 
 
36 
 
 THE YELLOW K1VA 
 
 There is a sprawling yellow kiva in our little town, 
 
 With a ground plan looking like a great lop-sided H, stenciled by 
 
 tribal tradition. 
 On forty-eight states, here and there, East and West, in ideographs 
 
 crudely inconclusive. 
 Some of us say it stands for hell today; some have a hope it may 
 
 mean heaven. 
 
 The cliff dwellers may have known better when they made their 
 
 kiva capitals: 
 
 Round ,!ow-rattered, intimate, with room for a hearth fire in the midst. 
 We have tiled our larger lodges with tainted ballots, talking paper, 
 
 dirty green backs, louder yellow backs. 
 Our State Capitol puts up a front; and falls down, when you look at 
 
 it behind, like most Americans. 
 
 We have paid too much paper money and hard money for wide stair 
 
 cases and long and lofty corridors, 
 Building a sounding box of Babel full of pigeon holes of purpose 
 
 weakly standardized; 
 Dusty office rooms where time clock type writers transcribe quantity 
 
 production; we have made the place a mill 
 For little shoddy private grafts, and public grabs of a state s greater 
 
 greediness. 
 
 Boy orators orate in our Senate and our House; paid interpreters 
 
 translate through two languages, 
 Latin to Nordic, and Nordic to Latin; Spanish and English mix as 
 
 they can; 
 Smelting man, and metals unmined; tongues of smothered fire tire 
 
 ears unresigned 
 To the endless wasting of words and time paid for, and loose power 
 
 in our mountain power house. 
 
 Sometimes it seems the old kivas were better, with their hearth-fires 
 
 for our fevered haste; and their well-weighed sentences, 
 As the peace pipe passed, of wise men who spoke, pondering their 
 
 words, face to face; 
 Without middlemen or scare heads to exploit or distort the sense of 
 
 the tribe and its purpose in time. 
 Sometimes it seems God Almighty s prize fools are those wiseacres 
 
 in Washington who would civilize the Indian. 
 
 We were going away, and looked back at that power house of machine 
 waste planted on our plateau. 
 
 Over it floated, faded in warm sunlight, the flag that means most to us, 
 time-stained and rubber stamped; 
 
 Like one tattered wing of freedom we must fly with; somehow; some 
 where; somehow we remembered 
 
 The old kivas flag tipped ladders till man s Ladder lifted there. 
 
 Santa Fe 4 29 21 
 
37 
 
 THE PARIS 
 
 Paris blazed by night, bridging San Francisco Street. 
 Through part of the war we watched it and worried a little. 
 By day the letters paled in the beauty of the mountain west of it. 
 And Paris and the war were five thousand miles away from us. 
 
 We had not thought of the Paris of cow punchers and counter jumpers, 
 Fanning a cayuse through forty miles of moonlight, and wallowing 
 
 desperately 
 Out of gray ruts of shop aisle and street, and dreamless staring and 
 
 sleeping, 
 Or of the Paris of the old who have been there, and may not go back. 
 
 In a cold cave of germs where ill-washed people coughed and flirted 
 Once we saw Olive of the Studios caught in a great gray spider web 
 That some one flashed a light on, and she shook it with her posturing, 
 (Lake live bait in a trap to tempt other girls like herself, 
 And a mannequin ghost for furs, frocks and motors they framed 
 
 her in,) 
 
 Never to emerge from the net of quics returns, in color and light, 
 A voice that sang when it spoke, and a warm and vibrant reality, 
 Truer than herself and the startled hearts of her hearers. 
 
 "It s the Easiest Way all over again", said Irene. "Let s get out 
 
 of this". 
 So for a year we soaked ourselves in the sun and snow on the 
 
 mountains. 
 And we passed the Paris at times with eyebrows lifted and slightly 
 
 superior, 
 
 We who knew Paris and the arts, and all men publish about them. 
 
 Thanksgiving night Pershing s Crusaders compelled us. 
 
 And something rose in our souls, and pushed its way and thudded 
 
 Through the pulsing hearts of the rest that pushed the Huns from 
 
 Paris, 
 With shoulder thrusts at spaded earth, and beams bridging ruined 
 
 rivers, 
 That rippled in a tide of living and lifted us. 
 
 Suddenly we perceived the purpose of this playhouse of starved people, 
 We who had starved for the great free swing of something high as 
 the stars; 
 
38 
 
 People who strive for Paris and the child in their hearts two nights 
 
 a week; 
 People who howl at custard pies slapped in your face, and are more 
 
 avid for adventure, 
 Even for farcial and thrilling acrobatics, than the vapidness of trade 
 
 vampires, 
 Thrilling a little to filmed wickedness of underworlds waked in 
 
 themselves and sickening of film sentiment. 
 
 We saw how stark contrast of light and shade come first in the 
 
 ground and growth of things, 
 Where the roots of the soul still struggle in the ruts and mud of the 
 
 road, 
 For earth had eyes before ears, and howls and shrieks before cadenced 
 
 voices and muted imaginings, 
 
 And Centaurs, Vikings, Attilas and Punchinellos, before Paris; and 
 
 these people 
 Were wiser for themselves than we were and the film spiders who 
 
 sold and seduced them. 
 
 For who has seen save by flashes at sunrise and sunset, the color 
 
 and flowering of heaven? 
 Or heard its voices yet but in swift and staggering action of cyclones 
 
 and thunder storms? 
 
 But we all see the stars at night on a screen of essential reality. 
 And we went out beneath them, and planned for Paris as we walked 
 
 through it. 
 
 Santa F6 12 3 18 
 
39 
 
 HOTEL DE OLID 
 
 We have called it a bleak old barracks, but it belongs to us. 
 
 It is bright enough when it waits for the midnight train from Lamy, 
 
 Gleaming from blackness like a porter s teeth in a desert-bound 
 Pullman, 
 
 And like the car an ante-room to kings and queens that travel in 
 cognito. 
 
 Youth lay awake here all night devising miracles, 
 
 Love slept softly at last the happiest night of its honeymoon, 
 
 Romance marched up and down shadowy corridors marking mountains 
 
 by moonlight. 
 Adventure stirred to a sunrise, and death the great adventurer set 
 
 spurs at twilight. 
 
 History wrote new pregnant lines, and staged strange meetings above 
 
 stairs. 
 Politics played queer tricks whenever the state legislature was in 
 
 session. 
 
 Art could color its own, and science came seeking fossil wonderlands, 
 And keys to the truth of life that lived and died here before Columbus 
 
 came and Coronado. 
 
 And the common people came, as still they come today, 
 To the winning of the West and the magic that still thrills in it. 
 And the townsfolk came to meet their friends and speed their parting, 
 Where once they danced all night, and nodded to eternal after dinner 
 orators. 
 
 We have come from the dust of the desert and wallowed in its big 
 
 white bath tubs, 
 We have loafed and written picture post cards, and scanned Indian 
 
 blankets and pottery. 
 
 We have thrilled to news of war and peace, and idly wondered 
 Who was that man in miner s boots, and the girl with a face like 
 
 Faustina s twin sister. 
 
 One night the lobby looked like a bank of life and a clearing house. 
 
 People came and went, and put tired bodies and souls in deposit, 
 
 To withdraw them next morning or three days later from vaults of 
 
 sleep and of silence. 
 Once it seemed to us like a club of the country we stood in on 
 
 sufferance. 
 
 Santa F< 12 IT T8 
 
40 
 
 THE OLD ADOBE 
 
 A brown mud box some one dumped by the side of the street, 
 
 It stands where time left it and fancy forgot it, 
 
 With two smeared windows that squint on each side 
 
 Of a dark and toothless door and a doorstep that sags like a lip. 
 
 But childrens eyes look out of its windows still. 
 People coming and going are a daily bread to it. 
 And the breath and the sound of life still comes from it, 
 Where two old women in dusty black stand by the sagging sill and 
 and whisper in the shadows. 
 
 They stand in the shadow of the past and smile at it. 
 They are living in longing and memory that walks with it, 
 Through the dear, dead days that are gone, now dearer than ever. 
 And the very voice and soul of the past that is pain and prophesy, 
 Stirs the dim lips that slowly part and smile at life and repeat: 
 "Buenos dias Senor. si, buenos dias Senor." 
 
 Santa Fe 11 7 18 
 
41 
 
 PENITENTES 
 
 Ten half naked men are marching, 
 
 Like boys following their leader, flogging themselves, 
 
 In a staggering file down a stony trail near Taos. 
 
 Their yucca scourges drip and their drawers drip red on the stones. 
 
 Their brown backs are raw and rutted and slowly shuddering 
 
 With writhing nests of red snakes that feed and breed on them, 
 
 Like writhing snakes of blood in brains beating to bursting. . 
 
 Little gray snakes of pain writhe and strike 
 
 In wild brown faces set and distorted like masks 
 
 Of something starker than bull-fights, burnings and rackings, 
 
 That persist and insist in pain s surgeons and Inquisitors. 
 
 This is the torture of self linked breath by breath, stride by stride, 
 
 stroke by stroke, 
 
 Like the intimate tearing torture of lovers begetting birth pangs, 
 With the shuddering torture of brothers in blood s burning sacrament. 
 
 Their women follow, and shudder or thrill to them. 
 Children follow and whimper, but half grown boys are burning to begin. 
 Mothers look on and loathe it and women unwedded and ripe, 
 Fear and hate a greater cruelty than women s cruelty, 
 And a redder ritual than any woman s ritual, 
 And a wilder madness than any woman s madness, 
 As they march to the cross that stands at the end of their road 6f 
 the cross. 
 
 There for a moment of suffering and torment, 
 
 Beside men and boys who gash themselves with cactus and writhe 
 
 on heaps of it, 
 The supreme personage in this drama of pain that is older than all 
 
 actors, 
 
 Pain and the will to pain that is old as blood is, 
 Old as the heart of life that stirs and beats and throbs and flogs 
 
 in men and women, 
 
 Pulsing through their lips and tongues, and breasts and fingertips, 
 Through their maddest emotions and passion s pale and poignant 
 
 intensities of tenderness: 
 Christ s old prototype, alive and adored today, Good Friday, in his 
 
 valley by Taos, 
 Naked and ecstatic, is waiting for the rest of them. 
 
 Santa Fe 2 27 18 
 
42 
 
 SANTA FE FORENOON 
 
 The foothills are striped with long shadows of little pinyon trees. 
 
 They are brindled, tufted, sleek and rounded. 
 
 And they seem to stretch ever so little, 
 
 Like cats half asleep in the sun one yawns at me. 
 
 The little brown adobe houses perched between their paws, 
 
 Love them and cuddle closer to the earth they grow from. 
 
 The road to the canyon rising slowly and twisting, 
 
 Lies like a piece of tangled fishing line they have tired of playing with. 
 
 A lizard in the sun slides past with a flicker of his tail, 
 And a little river in a crease of the hills glides by as silently. 
 The grease-wood is gray again. Its yellow flowers have faded 
 To the tint of the cottonwoods faintly turning and barely swaying 
 Above gray trunks that dusty brown and tawny bronchos browse 
 between. 
 
 And my thoughts are yawning thoughts that browse with them, 
 Past the smell of ripening apples in the orchards and the grease-wood 
 
 by the wayside, 
 Past the purple lustre of cabbages in the garden where our red hens 
 
 are hunting, 
 Past a dark green tide of alfalfa lapping past fence post after fence 
 
 post, 
 Up to the red hillside of the stone crusher where the picks of convicts 
 
 flicker on the skyline. 
 
 On the brown road ruled between the green alfalfa edge, and pinyon 
 
 trees that tuft the ridge, 
 Two Mexican women in thin black skirts and shawls are tracking 
 
 to town. 
 
 And behind them a brown boy and three gray burros, 
 With firewood bound round backs and flanks in huge brown horse 
 
 shoes go silently. 
 And the whole is a frieze as old as the brown and umber vases of 
 
 Mycenae and Corinth and older. 
 
 There is a patina of days of dust and slow delight on this pattern of 
 
 the world today. 
 There is a gray glaze like the glaze of olives and old olive trees in 
 
 Italy on this brown and sun-burned pottery, 
 A gray glaze and patterning of shadow on walls and stones, 
 On garden soil and roadside and hillside. 
 
 And higher than all, and harder and softer in day s mirror 
 
 There burns a blue flame, cloudless and flawless, stirless and 
 
 mellowing 
 The earth and all that grows from her, the yellow apples on the bough 
 
 beside me, 
 And a million aspens turning yellow at last on a huge round shoulder 
 
 toward Truchas. 
 
 And a mountain that I love, like a girl half waking, 
 Thrusts from the crumpled folds of the foot hills spotted coverlet, 
 An elbow white and shning as the snows the clouds come close to, 
 And yawns as she smiles at me at the top of the morning. 
 
 Santa Fe 19 13 18 
 
43 
 
 THE TOWER 
 
 There is no cloud in the world today. 
 And the sky is blue beyond belief or desire, 
 Blue light that knows no shadow; the horses stand motionless 
 High in the middle of the mountains, on the top of the tower of the 
 world. 
 
 Round us the ranges run and eddy and circle. 
 
 Could one but creep past the last and peep from the parapet 
 
 Into the splendor of space without shadow or mist: 
 
 One might see stars for pebbles around the rounded rim, and the 
 
 hollow below it 
 Of a pool of clear spring water with his own soul for a still face in it. 
 
 This is the tower of Maya; they pitched the blue sky for a tent on it. 
 And round the parapet sleeping lie the last shapes of illusion; 
 Mountain on mountain mixed and asleep in the sun s vast, silent 
 
 seraglio; 
 
 Evereywhere breasts and hips of women, shoulders and flanks, 
 Stirless, strong and remote, the mothers of mothers forgotten and 
 
 older 
 Than the first flower that bloomed or the first river that ran. 
 
 One could see sea nymphs there, bathing and basking, 
 
 Shapes that swim in the light and float on blue air like foam, 
 
 On the verge of the surf of the ranges where the great earth waves 
 
 gather, 
 
 Billow and come like combers suddenly frozen and fixed; 
 Power and purpose that pulses eternally, shaped and reshaped. 
 
 Here the Kindler of stars colored the power of His purpose, 
 
 Drew from the sea its depth of shadow and sunlight, 
 
 Rippled the notes of Hs song that soars to a snow peak suddenly; 
 
 Palls to a valley and rests; here the Forger of words 
 
 Made for the dumb a sign till the fires of His forging were finished, 
 
 And set it spaciously forth to wait and bear witness, 
 
 Till the riders awake and arrive at this Vision of Maya s tower. 
 
 Santa Fe 11 2 18 
 
44 
 
 STILL LIFE 
 
 Cold clear dawn on a world that wakes from huddled sleep 
 A wide window sill lifted twelve inches to let in the day, 
 Six feet from my pillow at six; white sky, shadow cultures below 
 In a long oblong microscope slide that daybreak slowly focuses. 
 
 Static imensities emerge through the long blue profile of the main 
 
 range, 
 
 Sloping slowly to the right in a sky line that sings and cannot cease. 
 Blue gray valleys of shadow and snow beyond grow more beautiful. 
 Below the low brown adobes flatten frosted roofs in parallel planes. 
 
 Leafless trees stenciled on the sky line lift to the levels of a massive 
 
 of mountain tops, 
 Forming a net work for fancy that waits for birds winging back, 
 
 singing spring 
 Nests growing warm, living leaves of emerald cells netting together In 
 
 new blue April weather. 
 Those frozen fringes sway ever so little, as a little cool breeze starts 
 
 to eddy and stir. 
 One black bird, drifting down dawn, lights on a bare bough; and the 
 
 sap stirs underneath. 
 
 Santa F6 4 16 21 
 
45 
 
 STAR SPRAY 
 
 My cot is set in the midst of mountains and stars. 
 
 The mountains are dull and low on a sky line flattened by starlight. 
 
 The stars are too many to count or confute, and I turn from them 
 
 To a peach tree, half stripped, that stands in the center of our orchard. 
 
 Our orchard is a garden of dreams, of stars tangled in fruit trees. 
 They are sheep caught in thickets, 
 They are apples of silver that shine, 
 They are birds that have homed to new nestings. 
 
 They are silver ships stranded in shadowy bays with jungles joining 
 far margins. 
 
 Our orchard is a garden of truth, and star spray in fruit trees, 
 
 Like light filtered through to sea slugs on sea weeds in rock pools 
 
 where the surf crashes thundering. 
 For we live in the shadow of a wave of all life that curls and imperils 
 
 and impends. 
 And we live in the hollow of a pulsing of being that is breaking 
 
 and rending us. 
 
 And jungles and sheep folds, passage of birds and landfalls of sailors 
 
 are all crushed together and constrained 
 To the urge of an impulse that throbs overarching, and stresses far 
 
 forelands of night, 
 Where meteors and stars are the froth and the foam of a comber of 
 
 midnight that menaces 
 
 Earth and our orchard and island that crumbles, assailed 
 By the crash and the gride of the drift of the stars, and the beat of the 
 
 surf of all being. 
 
 Santa Fe 147 
 
46 
 
 WINTER MIDNIGHT 
 
 There are triptyches, panels, lunettes, in Holland, Paris, Italy; 
 That one might rent for a million or more for a life time. 
 But I could give them all if some painter would paint me perfectly 
 All that I see these moonlit nights from my tent s east gable, 
 In two tall triangles my leaning tent pole parts and marries. 
 
 It is all silver and white, gray and black with browns in it like half- 
 charred charcoal; 
 
 The tent and the pole and the stubble of the field in the foreground, 
 
 The stripped fruit trees of the orchard with stars stabbing through 
 them, 
 
 The white wreaths of snow that climb higher and farther through the 
 foot hills, 
 
 And a lean sky line climbing past thin branches to a star poised 
 near a peak in fathomless grayness. 
 
 It is all silent, cold and still. 
 And I wake and dream and wake to it again, 
 Till a faint gleam of gold from the forecourt of morning 
 Thrills in a gray adobe window to the right of me, 
 And flashes and beckons to the sunrise, 
 Waiting and welling behind that slate gray eastern range, 
 Waiting to leak and to flow and to flood and to pour past the peaks 
 and the passes. 
 
 Santa F6 11 22 18 
 
47 
 
 WINTER MORNING 
 
 The sky is as gray as the glass of the studio window, 
 The telephone wires are thin black lines against it. 
 The trees are as thin and gray and brown 
 As sea weed in rock pools unstirred by one ripple. 
 
 The dobes huddle into the hillside, 
 
 Lying low and lean like a hungry dog asleep with his nose to the 
 
 ground, 
 
 A spotted dog that is dirty white with the snow that still falls on him. 
 The pinyons are almost black and as cold as the rest of him. 
 
 A black wagon rolls slowly down the white road to Santa Fe, 
 With four small Mexicans huddled in cloaks and the driver s hands 
 
 clutching like claws. 
 Two dun cows and a brown horse browse in the greasewood by the 
 
 river 
 Sucking the dry dugs of earth, and their throats throb with the 
 
 weight of her. 
 
 A yellow dog snuffs out a cold trail through the greasewood, 
 
 The gray greasewood with snow-white flowers that bloomed afresh 
 
 this morning. 
 A black broncho in a gray blanket with a trailing lariat runs kicking 
 
 and bucking to the river, 
 Trying to buck off the blanket of gray silence that sinks and wraps 
 
 the world today, 
 
 Nine blackbirds, like living notes escaped from the scale of slim bars 
 Of frost rimed telephone wires, are darting and dancing 
 Against the wide gray sky and the high white hillside, 
 Like soaring chords of a song that leaps and lilts and persists: 
 As swinging, singing wings beat up against the thin and slowly sifted 
 snowflakes. 
 
 Santa Fe 11 24 18 
 
48 
 
 WINTER NOON 
 
 Gray Leg wound on and up in a snail shell spiral, 
 Round a round brown hill that looked to me like a sea snail. 
 He dipped down through a high arroyo of snow and red rocks. 
 He slipped on the cold north side of a horse shoe ridge that rose, 
 Like a giant fossil from the sea, stranded and frozen on top of the 
 foot hills. 
 
 He found an old trail that angled faintly. 
 
 And he sawed back and forth and he jerked on and up, 
 
 Past little red rocks and little green trees and white patches of snow, 
 
 With his brown sides heaving and his heart beating between my legs 
 
 when we halted. 
 We started again and we mounted past the last brown bulge of the 
 
 ground. 
 And I swung him around to the west at last, and we watched all 
 
 time together. 
 
 We stood on the scarp of the world, and below us 
 
 A wide brown beach spread past red buttes like rocks tumbling 
 
 seaward. 
 Below on upland levels toward Bernalillo the snow lay white and 
 
 shining, 
 
 Like sea sand wet by tides and sea ice thrusting landward 
 Past snow-capped rocks that were the peaks of farther ranges. 
 And the sun blazed out on it in golden channels like fiery water 
 
 flowing and rending the floe pack. 
 Beyond lay the lights and shadows and snow berg summits of still 
 
 greater ranges. 
 
 And the sun rose higher and higher. 
 
 And the tide of life like liquid fire was widening, 
 
 As the tide of white before it rose and widened, 
 
 Rose from the sea and spread and fell in air waves whose fringes 
 
 were snow flakes. 
 
 The sun at noon blazed down on a snow fringed rock pool 
 That the sea once made; and the waves of a greater sea 
 That washed the whole world like an island when time was a babe 
 
 in its womb, 
 
 And the glaciers were the scouring of the long slow surf in it. 
 And the ocean today is the dregs and blue ooze of it. 
 
49 
 
 The clear air freshened around us, 
 
 And played with Gray Leg s mane and our nostrils widened. 
 
 My eyes widened and my thought grew greater at the se^e and the 
 
 thought of it 
 As the world grew wider, and the air grew wider, and life grew 
 
 greater interminably, 
 Till all the sea was one rock pool; 
 
 And main ranges low rock ridges of New Mexico under the sea, 
 That plainsmen blindly believed long since had deserted us; 
 The sea that was here, and is here, and will be 
 When earth like a wave-washed rock topples down to be ground round 
 
 to atoms. 
 
 And I saw the sun in the sky, and I saw new clouds in blue water, 
 Little light flecks of foam, each slight and white as a snow flake. 
 
 And I knew that this snow was the froth of one wave in an eddy s 
 
 little tumult of air. 
 And I breathed in one breath and one drop of a wave wide as ocean 
 
 and wider, 
 
 That lifts to the light of the sun, and ebbs to the deepest pits of night, 
 And knows neither tide marks nor margin beside or beyond them; 
 That leaves our gray mountains like tangled tide ridges of sand, 
 For a day on the way of all living, on the quest and unrest of the sea 
 
 born slow spirit of man. 
 
 Santa Fe 12 10 18 
 
50 
 
 THE RIDE HOME 
 
 We rode home last night by the river. 
 
 Turning to the right at the iron bridge with its frost rimed planks, 
 
 We galloped by high banks till your flying shadow was lost 
 
 In the matted shade of leafless ranks of willows. 
 
 And I watched you bend and sway as Gray Leg threaded through them. 
 
 We forded narrow channels where cold water gleamed and wavered 
 Through a waste of sand and scrub where your shadow toiled like the 
 
 feet of the horses, 
 
 Through shapeless pools of dusk as cool and dry and shifting as sand, 
 Where the shadows of the rocks were painted on white ice rims and 
 
 snow islands, 
 On the edge of a grease-wood pasture: and once more the willows 
 
 swallowed us. 
 
 We emerged in the middle of a valley that widened and climbed, 
 Rising softly to meet the mountains as your breast sometimes breathes 
 
 to them. 
 
 And the moon was an open well head with all the silver in heaven 
 Spilling straight down on your spurs and the bits of your bridle, 
 Rippling away with the wash of the river, and the starlight leaked 
 
 through it. 
 
 I let you ride before me: I wanted to watch you. 
 
 With your slim .straight back and shoulders, boylike and beautiful 
 
 As your body that gripped your horse and silently swayed him; 
 
 So your spirit sways your heart; you rode and you never looked back. 
 
 And I followed your shadow that followed you, and loved it. 
 
 Through a corridor of mountains that opened on the stars 
 We rode without speaking a word and all the while we were drinking in 
 The silver flood of moonlight that made the night a miracle. 
 And I wanted to go straight on and follow you 
 Riding forever through space to the rim of the range and beyond. 
 There in the air was our empire, and there we went riding, 
 Riding on the moonlight rim of a planet that galloped through the 
 night. 
 
 Santa F< 11 18 18 
 
51 
 
 RITO DEL FRIJOLES 
 
 The Spaniards called it Pajarito because they saw ther 
 Greater colonies of swallows nests in taller mud banks, 
 Where caves star the cliffs and the canyons run to the river. 
 But something stronger and stranger lingers here like an echo, 
 Like the sound of dry waters that run below these last year s nests 
 of stone. 
 
 The winds first sang here, dancing on rock pools and dizzy ledges. 
 They ground grit in rock crevices in airy whirlpools. 
 The caves grew and remained till men found and fashioned them. 
 There was a sound of chipping of stone on stone, and of fragments 
 
 falling. 
 
 There was a sound of felling of trees with stone axes. 
 There was a hoisting of vigas home and a building of balconies. 
 
 The women ground blue corn in querns and sang to the grinding. 
 They mado sandals of cactus fibre and wove baskets of reeds and 
 
 grasses. 
 
 The hunters brought deer meat home and the old men dried it. 
 Boys stoned rabbits, girls made warm robes from furry skins sewed 
 
 fast with sinews. 
 Men found eagles feathers that they traded for turquoise and obsidian 
 
 for arrow heads. 
 They made their first black pots from snakes of clay coiled outward 
 
 and upwards. 
 They harnessed the river with trenches, they stabbed the earth and 
 
 pitted it with seed corn. 
 
 They made ladders of tree trunks that leaned and led to their great 
 
 high cave of ceremony, 
 
 With its rock half dome that shadowed the stone kiva they built there, 
 Round and barely above ground like a bird s nest till they covered it. 
 Lest any should lightly see their threshold to the underworld, 
 Sunk in the center of the floor, that spirits like serpents come crawling 
 
 through. 
 
 They were primitive people, closer than today to their origins. 
 Their racial memories reached to days when the first birds were flyiflg 
 
 snakes with scales, and men fought them with flints and sling 
 
 stones. 
 
52 
 
 They pictured birds on their pottery, they carved them on rocks and 
 
 cliffs in petroglyphs. 
 
 They saw serpents in the windings of rivers and the twistings of trails. 
 The Avanyu, the great winged serpent, was the guardian of all springs 
 
 and water sources. 
 When he was angered they dried and men died, and his ways were 
 
 past determining. 
 They worshiped the eagles that fed on serpents before the Aztecs, 
 
 their fathers, revered them. 
 
 They were a bird-like people who fled from the tribes of the plains 
 of torment. 
 
 But steel and powder flew faster, and the swift horses of the Spaniards 
 rode at them. 
 
 On them Apaches and Navahoes who had crawled like serpents stalk 
 ing them, were winds to winnow them. 
 
 They cut the trails to the fields, and the water trails and the hunting 
 trails. 
 
 Meanwhile the Avanyu was angered, and the water died and the 
 people died. 
 
 For they had no wings like the birds who flew to new nests and, 
 full drinking pools. 
 
 The sky was blue above them, cloudless, rainless, merciless. 
 
 The rocks were as hard as before and as gray with no help or hope 
 
 in them, 
 
 The sun was bright as before, and it burned and tortured them. 
 The snow was white when it fell like one breath of cool air on the 
 
 fire of their fever and hunger. 
 The wind was as free as before on wild nights when it hooted and 
 
 yelled at them. 
 The birds were free as before, their song was as sweet as before and 
 
 rarer and dearer. 
 And the last lovers clasped lean hands and lips, and the last old women 
 
 wailed for the last child of the tribe and the ending of all things. 
 The last water went with the last echo of its falling, the last fire fell 
 
 with the last eyes that looked at it. 
 
 And the serpents of shadow silently stole into the place and pos 
 sessed it; 
 Till the white man came at last and cleared out drift-filled caves, and 
 
 filled the empty city with his dreams of it. 
 
 Santa F6 11 2 18 
 
53 
 
 CORN DANCE, SAN DOMINGO 
 
 Motors are planted in ranks in gray dust by a dusty gray church. 
 Motors are plowing the roads from Santa Fe to Bernalillo. 
 Horses are dancing along the dusty roads through the sand hills, 
 Indians on sorrel and paint ponies come trotting down distant trails. 
 Mexican teams and toy burros are pushing through the crowd on foot 
 to the Fiesta. 
 
 Mass is still being sung; through the open door one discerns 
 Shadowy worshippers kneeling and rising in ranks to slow chanting. 
 Mexicans set up shop in stands, south of the Plaza and sell 
 Candy, quirts, cigarettes, soap, Navajo bracelets and rings and raw 
 
 turquoise. 
 Indian women in dim doorways lift mottled pottery and toy bows 
 
 and arrows. 
 Children bring firewood and apples, and smoke rises fast from gay 
 
 chimney pots. 
 
 In the great square of South and North, of the summer and winter 
 
 peoples, 
 The crowd is gathering and black heads are showing in hatchway s 
 
 of kivas, 
 
 Like huge butt ends of logs protruding from earth and coated with it. 
 Ladder ends slant from low tops with red feathered pennants at their 
 
 tips. 
 
 The church disgorges at last a crowd chromatic and intense. 
 More and more heads of dancers are massed on kiva tops, looking 
 
 around. 
 Past the throng on the ground to strangers and friends crowning long 
 
 roofs and crowding strong ladders. 
 
 Domingo s Koshare appear like old heralds of tribal tradition. 
 Green corn sheaves bound round their ears, black spots daubed on 
 
 white bodies. 
 North, South, East and West they start to report the land is safe for 
 
 the harvest. 
 
 One by one they return to begin the abundant fun of full harvest, 
 When old gray grandsires frisk and grin, and each bin is full of 
 
 speckled blue ears; 
 And good spirits have smiled on the harvest. 
 
54 
 
 Three hundred men and women begin to dance the great dance of 
 
 the harvest. 
 They come pair by pair in line like planted corn and they hold green 
 
 sprigs of pine. 
 
 And the rattle of elk teeth rattles and silvery sleigh bells simulates, 
 The cackle of the pregnant corn in great heat, and the swish of winds 
 
 like the swish of flames through corn fields. 
 The women s black blankets are earth, and the long tassels of the 
 
 men s trailing waist scarves 
 Are trailing tassels of corn that is born of the heat of the harvest. 
 
 They shuffle like the first slow days of faint green growth of the 
 
 harvest. 
 They circle and eddy as the suns and shadows of green growing 
 
 circle and eddy; 
 They stamp with furred feet and claws of wild things that crept and 
 
 ran through the ranks of the harvest. 
 They tramp with the dull weight of days that bore down hour by 
 
 hour in great heat. 
 And always the turpuoise green tablitas, tall woolen tiaras of the 
 
 dancing women, 
 Are the blue green tips of growing corn, and swaying flickering 
 
 spear heads of harvest. 
 
 They halt like the sultry heat of high noon in mid summer, 
 
 When the corn grows high though all earth is still, and stands still 
 
 as it grows ; 
 
 Till a wave of slow chanting and clamor of long drums stirs them again 
 As low thunder stirs a sultry sky, and low drumming of rain comes 
 
 closer and closer, 
 To hearts that beat high in July growing glad in the hope of the 
 
 harvest. 
 
 All day they advance and retreat through the heat of the dance of 
 
 the harvest: 
 Till the last motor rolls away, the last cowboy rides away, and the 
 
 Mexican and Navajo riders, 
 Like a painted frieze that flamed above the horses heads, and the 
 
 dancers tablitas, 
 Are scattered like colors of sunset; and the Plaza lies shadowed 
 
 and dun: 
 
 And the last old Indian woman lets down her rusty sun umbrella, 
 And lets herself heavily down a long and dusty ladder, 
 To the feasting already begun, in glad homes of corn harvesting. 
 
 Santa Fe 12 1 15 
 
55 
 
 THE HERITAGE 
 
 She wanted to go to a hut hospital on the western front. 
 Because she got sick herself they would not let her. 
 Then came the influenza, and in the midst of it 
 She found a western front of her own, right here at home, 
 Somewhere in northern New Mexico. 
 
 Some of us know New Mexico as a land of beauty, 
 A land of color, of romance, of mountains and mystery, 
 A place for hunting, fishing, riding, climbing and motoring; 
 A land of prehistoric ruins and ruins since the Spaniards came, 
 Of cliff dwellings, terraced houses, Pueblo dances and dim rituals; 
 A land of rattlesnakes and sage brush and red and black traditions, 
 Of grim Penitentes who scourge and crucify themselves afresh on each 
 Good Friday. 
 
 Few of us know New Mexico as a land of squalor and gray ignorance, 
 Of hidden villages and lone adobes where life is hard as it was in the 
 
 ages of flint and of bronze, 
 
 Of little efforts to live as pitiful as winter starved horses 
 Wandering through spring time, staggering and dying 
 In the running of new waters and the blossoming of fruit trees, 
 In the blue of April s beauty and her showers of pink and white. 
 
 But she knew them because they belonged to her; 
 Hard by the valley of beauty, around the bend in the road, 
 In the shadows of low foot hills in the windings of little rivers, 
 In the sands of parched arroyos and dry ditches where the sickness 
 lay heavy on the land. 
 
 Little pitiful stories came to her by word of mouth, 
 
 Of dead and dying mothers and babies starving and neglected, 
 
 Of infected houses and infected wounds, and sores that spread as the 
 
 sickness spread, 
 And because she cured one, and word of it spread, they sent for her 
 
 and trusted her; 
 People who never know a doctor from birth to death, because there 
 
 are no doctors to seek them out and succor them; 
 People who live and die as the beasts die, 
 People who yet are human and remember her and love her. 
 
56 
 
 She went with her mother and her little brown horse and mountain 
 
 wagon, 
 And her big knitting bag full of bandages and pads, lysol and aspirin 
 
 and little bottles and tubes. 
 She went with a white mask soaked in alcohol, and a love that was 
 
 her whiter disinfectant. 
 And they could not see her face clearly, but they knew the light m 
 
 her eyes. 
 And they felt the healing in her hands in the shadows of dark houses 
 
 and adored her. 
 
 She went by day and night, in the magic of the moonlight on the 
 
 mountains, 
 Through the splendor of blue days, and golden sunlight glad and 
 
 dear as the warm breath of life itself. 
 Through a mountain world, and a warm mould of beauty that was 
 
 made for beauty and belonged to her, 
 Through a moonlit world of cooler, tenderer shadows of the truth 
 
 that beauty barely breathes and promises. 
 And from it all she took them something lasting in herself that they 
 
 believed in and remember, 
 Part of her heritage and theirs that life s true lovers share in shadowed 
 
 sacraments in France and somewhere on life s lonliest firing line. 
 This is the only real religion in the world that men and women live 
 
 and love and die by and remember. 
 
 Santa Fe 11 12 18 
 
57 
 
 THE TRAIL MENDER 
 
 We came back from the summit where snow rifts in August. 
 
 We scraped past rock stairs, we slithered over shale slopes. 
 
 We thrashed through aspen thickets where the horses nipped dry 
 
 grasses. 
 We stroked down the spine of a ridge and stopped to tighten cinches. 
 
 We slid down guttered channels where the trail angled sharply, 
 And twisted and snarled through great gnarled roots that held it 
 
 clinging 
 To the sides of a funnel in the hills; we plunged down shuddering 1 
 
 sand slopes, 
 Till Puye stretched his steaming neck to the gleam of a stream in 
 
 a canyon. 
 
 Here there was quiet stirred alone by the splash of water that rippled 
 From rock pool to rock pool; from shade pool to shade pool we 
 
 threaded, 
 
 Where the cotton woods stand in gray islands in seas of green grasses. 
 And the trail wound brown between them, shining and warm in ttte 
 
 sun. 
 
 Near a six-inch ditch that brings living water from the Rito 
 
 Round a harsh hill shoulder evenly, we saw a lunger at work. 
 
 Slowly he stooped, and with infinite care he pried and he lifted at 
 
 A little dry pine tree wind-cast across the trail in the night. 
 
 We were past before he had levered it down hill to suit him. 
 
 I looked back and saw him picking up stones and trimming trailing 
 
 branches 
 
 That slap one straight in the eyes, and stooping again and again. 
 And every line of his tired body was a line of life s gospel telling me: 
 
 "Others may tread the high trails, taking earth by the throat on the 
 
 way. 
 
 They may breathe in half the sky at one stride but I cannot. 
 They may seize the summits in turn like posts boys vault past at 
 
 leap-frog, 
 And watch all the wonder of the world suddenly spread at their feet, 
 
 but I may not. 
 
 Others scrape hand holds to see lightnings splintered on lone summits, 
 
 Or feel the flail of hail and sleet on razor-edged ridges; but I 
 
 Am grateful that life lets me live by great trees and green glades and 
 
 bright waters, 
 Smoothing the way for the weak, and the strong that stumble and 
 
 trip in the night." 
 
 On the trail we all are keepers of. 
 
 Santa Fe 12 10 18 
 
58 
 
 GOATS 
 
 White, gray, brown, black, the goats track by together, 
 
 Blending over and flowing around baby arroyos and humps in the 
 
 hills, 
 Like a brindled patch on the hide and the play of lean muscles on 
 
 the back 
 Of a sharp-nosed dog that pens them in the open persistently. 
 
 They browse by old trails and the strength of the earth flows into 
 
 them. 
 
 The blue sky, the brown hills and the gray weeds are one with them. 
 The she-goats chew their food and the sagging udders are filled, 
 And the dog and his master are drift on the weight of the wave that 
 
 moves with them. 
 
 It ripples through worn channels and runnels in the hills. 
 And the tide turns back at twilight and the goats go home again, 
 With white milk for brown babieis, white sunlight liquid and warm. 
 And the strength that they strained out of chinks in the rocks is 
 
 strained again 
 Into little, glad, greedy lips that lap, till the lips of brown mothers 
 
 drink love deeply. 
 
 Santa Fe 11 11 18 
 
59 
 
 COYOTE 
 
 He howls in the hunger of winter, 
 
 Where a starved moon sinks into nothingness, 
 
 Near an earth scabbed with shadow and leprous 
 
 With livid patches of silver along her thin shoulders and flanks. 
 
 He howls as a leper howls 
 
 When health and wholeness and human touch are taken from him. 
 
 He howls as evil men must howl in evil dreams, 
 
 Seeing lost happiness they maimed and murdered. 
 
 He howls as a blind man howls when his eyes are put out. 
 
 He howls as madmen howl at shifting shapes that trick and betray 
 
 them. 
 He howls as devils howl when Hell damns the innocent. 
 
 He howls when the earth is sick and mad in wan winter moonlight, 
 
 When ghosts walk thick, and wake and stir at the sound 
 
 Of his long, laughing, wailing mocking, yelling ululations. 
 
 He howls like a leper, a devil, a dead man, a blind man, a bad man, 
 
 a mad man. 
 He howls with the wailing of the winds and low laughter of snoV 
 
 trolls that rick men to murder them. 
 
 Santa Fe 12 8 18 
 
60 
 
 PROCESSIONAL 
 
 Coming down hill from Casa Pintada, past the Acequia Madre, 
 Suddenly appeared at the end of the street plodding down Canyon 
 
 Road, 
 Five little white brides of Mary in procession, two women in black 
 
 walked behind them; 
 Five little girls bearing flowers in glass vases, and two women with 
 
 yellow candles in their hands. 
 
 Carrying candles in white and red bouquets, candles unlit the shade 
 
 of pale gold; 
 Going in golden sunlight to the great church of St. Francis, they 
 
 went down through brown dust, through the mothers month of 
 
 May 
 
 To the motherhood of Mary, of our Lady of Love who smiles mildly 
 On all mothers and girls who go to her, and those others whose 
 
 smiles is spring. 
 
 Santa Fe 5 4 21 
 
61 
 
 THE DIMPLE 
 
 I have learned to love this land, 
 
 As one loves the body of a woman one begins to possess, 
 And the clouds in the skies that change and make her subtle afld 
 wonderful. 
 
 I love the swells and the troughs like the sea of her sky line, 
 
 The sudden hollows and circling eddies of earth lying sunken and 
 
 shadowed 
 By the crest of the ranges. 
 
 One day I found a dimple in the earth with flowers that thrilled in it, 
 Behind a hill that hid it like yesterday s dear secret 
 And I made it a shadowy, dreamy funnel of delight and of peace that 
 poured into me. 
 
 Why should people think it any more shameful to love 
 
 The dimples in a woman s body, behind her knees, below her shoulders, 
 
 And in every fair and fertile fold of her; 
 
 Than those in her cheeks and her chin? 
 
 Santa Fe 3 4 17 
 
62 
 
 THE SPRING 
 
 The springs are hard to find 
 In this old brown land of ours. 
 
 But I know one that I found one day in November, 
 High on the breast of a hill 
 Heaving out of canyon, 
 
 Like the heaving breast of the girl that climbed that trail with me, 
 Till we fell on our faces side by side and kissed the still water to 
 gether. 
 
 There were grains of brown sand in the still round basin, 
 
 Cool and blue as the skies and her eyes with brown flecks in them, 
 
 Looking out on a widening vista of space and of splendor, 
 
 And a riot of red and gold, aspens and oak scrub that climbed to us; 
 
 All the leaves of the year burning up for us, 
 
 To warm our Indian summer, 
 
 As all the year s waters were strained 
 
 To make that cup cool for us. 
 
 If I could find that spring again, 
 
 And see her face again, 
 
 Grave and glowing and good for me 
 
 As the taste of that water was good for me, 
 
 And feel the clasp of her hand 
 
 As we climbed the rocks to the summit of the range; 
 
 I could go back with her again 
 
 To the days of life s beginning 
 
 When we lay with our lips at the breast of the mother of all, 
 
 Guiltless of sinning or sorrow or desire, 
 
 And happy as children are happy. 
 
 Santa Fe 11 20 18 
 
63 
 
 LOST LAKE 
 
 Two snow peaks looked down on it over their shoulders, 
 
 As it lay in a green pit below them. 
 
 And it smiled for one hour each day 
 
 When the sun stooped straight down and kissed it. 
 
 More still and cool than cloistered nuns and novices, 
 It lay in the shade of the pine trees and mirrored stars more con 
 stantly 
 
 Than any lake in the world, and the shadows guarded it. 
 Many have fought to find it and failed for a lifetime. 
 
 One I caught, looking down from my tallest snow peak s shoulder, 
 The gleam of its water at noon, and I left all the world at my feet. 
 And I went crashing down, thrashing down, through shale and aspens 
 
 and pines 
 Straight to the mark that I missed; and must climb to discover it 
 
 again. 
 
 Once in the eyes of a child that was a woman for a moment, 
 As the sun warmed her and waked old and strange pregnant appeals, 
 I caught a light like the smile of Lost Lake, and I lost it 
 When her heart that was hardly awake, lay asleep in the shadows 
 again. 
 
 Santa F* 12 11 18 
 
64 
 
 TESUQUE CHURCH 
 
 A blue square of sky with two bells in it 
 
 Is fretted in the wedge of a lean white-washed gable. 
 
 Below through a great gray square of shadow 
 
 A woman in a pale blue blanket leans and looks out of the door. 
 
 Beyond and above the flat white facade is blueness illimitable. 
 And the great black and white bulk of the main range builds 
 
 toward it. 
 And the high white dome of Baldy, rounded and fuller than Fuji s 
 
 high note of ecstasy, 
 Swells to the greater dome of the sky s blue beauty forever and ever. 
 
 Below on the steps of the church a row of Indian women and 
 children, 
 
 Two, doll-like, Japanese, red and remote, with eyes obliquely ob 
 livious, 
 
 One in a purple shawl with a face like a fate intent and terrible; 
 
 All with hard heavy black bangs falling low down brown foreheads 
 are watching the dancing. 
 
 Santa Fe 12 27 18 
 
65 
 
 TEN CANDLES 
 
 Before the gold and white altar in our old cathedral aisle, 
 
 Before the painted statue of Christ with a burning heart and a scarlet 
 
 robe, 
 Before "they brought him to the temple" lettered in lace below 
 
 wounded feet, 
 Before two tall yellow candles unlit in brass candlesticks yellower 
 
 columns : 
 
 In a brass skeleton lectern rack, with tiers of round and empty 
 
 sockets 
 Slanting up toward Christ, ten candles are lighted out of seven and 
 
 thirty : 
 Ten small white and gold ardent altar flames, burning softly and 
 
 steadily. 
 One is so near the end of its mission that the flame is taller than 
 
 the whiteness that remains. 
 
 Underneath, the bottom of the rack looks like the floor of a bird cage. 
 Here is a no-man s land of dead candles, candles time has done with, 
 
 charred and guttered out 
 In the fever of a worship of wounds that burns before him, waiting 
 
 for his Judgment Day; 
 All the blood from the pale face of the girl who kneels here drained 
 
 away to redden the burning heart and the scarlet robe of Christ. 
 
 Santa F 4 3 21 
 
THE CABIN 
 
 The cabin has yellow log walls and a front porch with a hammock in it, 
 
 And a great gray stone fire-place built into the side hill at the back. 
 
 There are two big beds by the fire; and two long low windows be 
 side them 
 
 Look up and down the valley of a river that slips through the arms 
 of the hills. 
 
 There is a row of books on the mantel that I made there. 
 
 A row of pegs in a corner supports sweaters, slickers, frayed riding 
 
 breeches and fisherman s waders. 
 There is a typewriter on a table beside papers, newspapers, magazines 
 
 and a cribbage board. 
 There are trout rods, rifles, quirts on the walls, and webbed snow 
 
 shoes for winter. 
 
 There is a bay horse who puts his white nose through my window 
 
 each morning I wake, 
 And a black and white dog who sleeps on the foot of my bed every 
 
 night, and shakes hand with me. 
 There is a gray squirrel with fringed ears that cracks nuts on my 
 
 mantel piece. 
 And a boy who comes and plays cribbage with me, and finds worms 
 
 for my fishing. 
 
 All these are good in their way, and I manage to live with them, 
 Like the pines on the mountains that march to the sky, and the 
 
 river that runs to the ocean. 
 
 But they all point to something above and beyond and inscrutable. 
 They have taught me to reach out and take hold of life, and to tell 
 
 of her. 
 
 They have taught me to wake in the moonlight and want her, 
 And to see in the shadow by the foot of my bed her small pair of shoes, 
 And a little, light lacy heap on a chair, like a cloud half asleep in 
 
 the moonlight, 
 And a little gray gauntlet unmated all day on my table reaching to me. 
 
 Sometimes I see it when I ride laid lightly on Gray Leg s shoulder. 
 Sometimes I feel those little brown shoes in my hands when we 
 
 climb the high trails. 
 Sometimes I hear a voice that is tuned to the whisper of winds and 
 
 the song of the river. 
 Sometimes I see on the summits a face that the flush of the sunrise 
 
 foretold. 
 
 Sometimes when I write I feel two finger tips sealing my eyelids, 
 Or someone saying "Who am I? Where am I?" with the ghost of a 
 
 kiss when the fire dies, 
 Or a warm little hand half awake that reaches for mine when I wake 
 
 from dim dreams in the midnight. 
 But I think she comes closest of all when her profile is sculptured 
 
 in shadow, 
 And her feet falter closer to our cabin while we count the first stars 
 
 in the skies. 
 
 Santa Fe 11 15 18 
 
67 
 
 THE SANTA FE TRAIL 
 
 The high plains were a stage for it, the rolling prairies gave its tempo. 
 
 The mountains were its climax, the desert its insistence, 
 
 On this trail that tied together the tie rihs of a nation, 
 
 This new wild folk migration that went traveling with the sun. 
 
 By salt buffalo wallows, beside slow running rivers, 
 Past mountain passes threaded by big horns and wild stallions, 
 Over mesas gray with grease-wood, by foot hills cactus spined, 
 Where snow that flecked the desert left blind stains from day to day: 
 
 Across the great arena between Missouri and the Rockies, 
 
 Past black stains of death s dark foot prints across the dreary plains, 
 
 Where they burned brave men and women in the ashes of wrecked 
 
 wagons, 
 And Apaches and Kiowas, Utes and Sioux tore off their scalps: 
 
 Where highwaymen murdered men who rode in low ox-carts and raw 
 
 new Concord coaches, 
 
 Mexicans killing Gringos, and Gringos scalping Greasers like Indians, 
 Where they buried bags of silver by tall trees on shallow river islands, 
 And came back to find them sometimes; where they marked the trail 
 
 with graves: 
 
 Where the red men tombed their war chiefs on lofty sapling scaf 
 foldings, 
 
 Wrapped in furs they stripped from women waiting underneath in 
 winter to follow them, 
 
 Where trappers piled up stones upon their silent partners lest the 
 wolves should paw them out, 
 
 Where blizzard-whitened mounds grew flat as sodded graves grow 
 flat more slowly: 
 
 Where the pack trains bore charred corpses on their sweating mules 
 
 and horses, 
 And Comanches with trained bell mares yelled, and shot stampeding 
 
 them at night, 
 Where ox-trains plodded steadily, and babes were born in canvas tilts 
 
 to fill their thinning ranks, 
 And men made love to women like lovers on sinking ships: 
 
68 
 
 Where the buffalo ran in rivers on their northward spring migration, 
 
 Black rivers splitting past still wagons like rocks, wild rivers stam 
 peding, black rapids overwhelming them; 
 
 Where red rivers of prairie fires swept past the trail and wiped it 
 out, 
 
 Till men trod out the ashes in the ruts that time had worn: 
 
 Where their escorts trotted in ragged ranks to the New Mexico bor 
 der line, 
 
 Bearded dragoons in dull blue coats and dusty caps, and Mexican 
 lancers in steeple hats and silver tricked trappings, 
 
 Where red-shirted miners, and raw Forty-Niners in newly beaded 
 buckskins, sang and shouted, betted and doubted death and tall 
 stories, 
 
 And gamblers like black priests of chance tried out their eyes and 
 hands: 
 
 Where fat French and Spanish priests and rawboned Moravian mis 
 sionaries 
 
 Met and scowled or smiled at wayside weddings and christenings, 
 
 Where lean New England spinsters stared at Mormon and Indian 
 women and fat Latin prostitutes, 
 
 And at last struck hands together by some death-bed, squaw and maid : 
 
 The high plains were a stage for it, the rolling prairies swept it 
 
 westward, 
 Past the mountains, past the desert, past all suffering and dying to the 
 
 fruit trees of Tesuque and the sunset, 
 Where the buffalo ran, and the Indian rode, and the Lancers spurred, 
 
 and the trappers tramped; and the world rolls after them, 
 In a new steel folk migration just begun where theirs is done. 
 
 Santa F 12 4 18 
 
69 
 THE OLD DIM TRAIL 
 
 The old, dim trail is gray and faint as a memory of many years ago. 
 
 It sags down past the foot hills like a sick snake in autumn. 
 
 It crawls through a shallow valley of bones that are bleached and 
 
 lusterless. 
 
 It sidles into a bone-dry arroyo and wearily heaves itself out of it. 
 It inches past rock ledges bare and brown as the ribs of earth s rotting 
 
 carcass. 
 It is a fading trace of the past and of feet that have no power now 
 
 to warm or wear it. 
 
 It creeps to the loma s edge and laps over it. 
 
 It falls into great new gullies that gash and distort it. 
 
 Pitching past them, it persists through a shallow wash full of wagon 
 
 tracks. 
 Passing fence posts and telephone posts where men staked out two 
 
 rods of it for a wagon road. 
 
 It goes on beside a footpath by a fence at the side of a field, 
 A field built up in shallow terraces with a gray ditch high and dry 
 
 at the top of it. 
 
 It points to Santa Fe that lies below it, 
 
 A city old and gray in the gray dust of November under November 
 
 skies, 
 With the crumbling gray adobes in the foreground with their fruit 
 
 trees, 
 
 With its gray roofs in the hollow of its little hidden river, 
 With one great gray dome that rises higher than the spires of tall 
 
 poplar trees surrounding it, 
 And the slow gray spirals floating light against the sullen, high, gray, 
 
 northern ridge that dominates the whole of it. 
 
 It lies there, nestling in the great gray hollow, 
 
 Like a city long asleep and barely breathing, 
 
 A city of gray ghosts of traders, trappers and trailsmen, 
 
 Horsemen and hunters, soldiers and captains, 
 
 Padres with their burros, bishops and governors, 
 
 Mothers and their children, cowboys, scouts and Indians, 
 
 Husbandmen with burdens, and the flocks they drove before them, 
 
 Down this old trail that died here like last year s water in dry and 
 
 dusty ditches, 
 To be one raveled fringe of a dream of a city forgotten. 
 
 Others may delve in the past and dusty pages and parchments in the 
 
 Old Palace library, 
 
 To track life down to the death and old trails to extinction, 
 Like rivers that sink in the sea and the dead in the midnight. 
 I and another I know will follow backward and steadily upward. 
 For every trail leads two ways; past the fence posts and ditches, 
 Past the arroyos like wounds, and the ledges and bare ribs of earth 
 
 and animals, 
 Past green pinyons like plumes of the great folded wings of the foot 
 
 hills, 
 To the tall mountains gray brows, and the dazzling white veils of the 
 
 snow peaks. 
 Up to a past that is older than all earth s dreams and her cities, 
 
 and new as sunrise this morning, 
 Up to a sunlight unshadowed by dust; that first trails start for. 
 
 Santa F 11 13 18 
 
70 
 
 THE RE VENA NT 
 
 I sit in the New Museum Patio, 
 
 At a long brown, bare writing table, in Santa Fe. 
 
 And the cool gray walls are good to me, and the gray shadows 
 
 Of the vigas round the courtyard shift and lengthen, 
 
 Like the dark green shadows on the green grass plot in the center. 
 
 The round, brown pine tree pillars of the cloister stand up sturdily. 
 They have found peace at last in a place of long and ceaseless silences. 
 That only the tireless ticking of a typewriter or the foot-fall of a 
 
 careless tourist distracts or distrubs. 
 It is a place of peace and cool repose for people worn threadbare by 
 
 the world s vast restlessness 
 With its open hatchway to Heaven and the sunlight that smiles on 
 
 them. 
 
 I have sailed on many ships and shall sail again 
 
 On blue days and on still days, with their hidden engines throbbing 
 steadily. 
 
 But here in mid land high on the roof of Mountain America, 
 
 Ships and the makers and movers of ships are as far from me and as 
 unfit for me 
 
 As they were for the brown Franciscans who planted the brown pine 
 tree crosses here three hundred years ago. 
 
 But they planted the masts and yards of ships wherever they set 
 them up; 
 
 Brown symbols of a world that sails a sea unfathomed and shoreless; 
 
 A sea of space and of terror and time, death and midnight and mys 
 tery. 
 
 For this world is a world of sailors who stand on earth and water 
 
 ridges, 
 And who watch the sky and the winds and the clouds perforce or die 
 
 in the din of machines. 
 So much the West has taught me; and yesterday when I took the 
 
 train at Lamy 
 B or the last time in a year or two, perhaps, I loved this mountain 
 
 land of ours 
 More than ever before, it seemed, with its storm that swept down 
 
 on us; 
 
71 
 
 Drowning far blue mountain vistas, and the yuccas budded and bloom 
 ing- by the fringes of raw, red arroyos; 
 
 And its high clear nearness to the sky and to space that we sail m 
 forever and forever. 
 
 I must go East again to the cities and seaports of all tall mountain 
 
 voyaging, 
 Cities that are sirens painted and purblind, and homes of marred 
 
 mothers and masters of men. 
 I shall go East to be lost for a time in the dazzle of the arc-lights and 
 
 the coils of tortured subways. 
 As a diver toils through a sea wall of surf with strange stars in his 
 
 eyes, and his heart and lungs tense with laboring, 
 I shall come out again in a wide world of air in the far-flung furrows 
 
 of high snow-crested ranges, 
 There on the sinuous crest of the world, in the sun that is life to 
 
 all living. 
 
 Here in this hatchway of time with the blue sky brooding white 
 
 clouds above me 
 And the green earth growing white hollyhocks that bloom in the 
 
 corners of our courtyard: 
 As a sailor sits cross-legged in a calm, dreaming a little as he stitches 
 
 sails for tomorrow s adventuring; 
 I set my stitches of ink on white sails of paper for me or another; 
 
 and I know 
 
 I shall come back again whatever may meet me tomorrow 
 To this West that I love best of all in the still, deep, hidden, human 
 
 heart of me. 
 For when I die the winds of the sky shall bring back here what is 
 
 left of me. 
 
 Santa Fe 7 1 19 
 
72 
 
 TREASURE SEEKERS 
 
 Near their studio two friends of ours found scattered potsherds. 
 They started to look for lost foundations on the loma slope in April 
 
 light. 
 We traced the stone oblong of a house that looked at sunrise as we 
 
 looked at it. 
 Tomorrow I may go there and dig beside them, near the corner or the 
 
 crossing of two walls. 
 
 We may find treasure of turquoise, or obsidian, spear heads and arrow 
 
 heads, 
 
 Perfect burial bowls, or a bone flute that lay mute five hundred years, 
 Yucca fibre wet with sweat, blood or tears that dried to dust. 
 We must make haste with our digging, while the dream of it all is 
 
 stuff of spring. 
 
 We who try to paint and write today, may bring to our dead brothers 
 Something that is good for their ghosts, though we never find an idol 
 
 at all; 
 Never disinter one skeleton; there is treasure on our loma when we 
 
 try for it, 
 Stooping in the shadow of lost walls to make a memory, of a house of 
 
 life that stood here four square to sun and storm. 
 
 Santa Fe 4 3 21 
 
73 
 
 PUPPETS AND PEOPLE 
 
 We had a community theatre here two years ago. 
 Something happened, or failed to happen, and it disappeared. 
 Now we have a new little Art Theatre, intimately narrowing, 
 Fairly efficient as the French say, the good ever fights with the best. 
 
 Clever comedies cleverly staged are all very well in their way. 
 Once every month or two is too long to wait for all we must go without. 
 Someday this community thing will come back to stay in our hearts; 
 
 we ll wonder at 
 Miracle plays and other plays of many clans in our tribe, and Greek 
 
 and Spanish dances done as San Domingo does. 
 
 V. D. says that nowadays she d rather see a first magnitude track 
 meet, 
 
 Or a big base ball game, breaking hard in the ninth, than most of their 
 minor puppet shows. 
 
 V. D. would rather be than act; being what she is, I m not blaming her. 
 
 There are times when I prefer tennis to oratorios, and hiking to Ber 
 nard Shaw. 
 
 "Acting, like dancing, has its use," says V. D.; "So has war when 
 
 you re keyed up to it. 
 There are mobs that we hate but we want to live in a crowd, now 
 
 and then, going strong; 
 Something more modern than Greece and minuets, something as bfg 
 
 and heart stirring as those mountain tops. 
 Tragedy poises there, the high plains sustain then Whitman s men 
 
 and women, to match all out of doors." 
 
 Santa Fe 5 7 21 
 
74 
 
 PUSSY CATS AND CHERUBIM 
 
 There are certain rooms upstairs in our museum of art that belong 
 
 More to an artist dead and little known than to anyone alive. 
 
 People see the pictures, but sunrise and moonlight see more than 
 Beauregard s beauty slowly spelled 
 
 Through the long gallery and the two ante rooms and the corner room 
 resplendent 
 
 With its hand carved and color patterned great vigas and pine fur 
 niture, and the tall copper tea urn whose shadow slowly shifts. 
 
 "We ought to use this room more," said Vera Deane, one day when 
 we looked in after lunch. 
 
 "In spite of their hand picked lady profiteer patronesses of the sort 
 that keeps culture to itself. 
 
 Once in a while Notabilities arrive, linger in the state, meet our Cap 
 ital City. 
 
 A Function is arranged; then they throw open the doors of their toy 
 house of littleness to some of us. 
 
 Anyhow they haven t locked them up yet, to keep trippers from Kansas 
 and Texas in their places. 
 
 Men are such egotistic brutes with their treasure houses of small art 
 
 strivings 
 We small town women have to copy them; you will stage your big 
 
 book tea elsewhere. 
 Men and women and artists forever are divided into sharers and 
 
 hoarders. 
 It takes both kinds to go on with; the little ones play safe when 
 
 they can. 
 It takes a big person to get life across from a studio or a tea urn and 
 
 stay with it. 
 
 Little folks get together in cliques and clubs; they graft on Institu 
 tions men have never yet learned to use. 
 
 You have a community center of a sort, and a Stranger s Club down 
 stairs; be thankful for that. 
 
 Hoarders are better than wasters sometimes though they put their 
 Impossible Pussy cats 
 
 In our corner Pueblo fire place yonder, and elsewhere; if you get 
 what I mean. 
 
 Life wished social andirons on us as well as warmer things; I like the 
 dumb ones better; let s go and take a ride." 
 
75 
 
 Half an hour later, by an adobe on the loma, four brown dolls of the 
 dirt 
 
 Stared at us speechless till V. D. startled in them symptoms of cher 
 ubim starting chuckling. 
 
 That night she sighed and told me "They never known how much they 
 miss, 
 
 Those club women and culture hoarders, who have one or two, or node 
 at all. 
 
 I d rather share my life with my man and my last bora s brothers and 
 sisters broken playthings. 
 
 Toy houses are for fun, my dear, each empty one like empty eyes 
 means tragedy play Mousorgsky." 
 
 Santa F6 5 6 21 
 
76 
 
 SUNSET -NEW MEXICO 
 
 On the loma shoulder by the gray adobe, 
 
 Two horses stand by a well head high on the sky line. 
 
 The first snow lingers still in a lonely hollow, 
 
 Like a handkerchief dropped by a dancer as she hurries. 
 
 Scraps of it hide in the creases and cracks of the foot hills. 
 
 They are crumpled heaps of clothes that slid past the knees of the 
 
 mountains 
 
 A hundred thousand thousand years ago, when they began 
 To make them ready for music whiter than moonlight at midnight. 
 
 Twilight is their tire woman, eternally patient. 
 
 The shadows are her dusky slaves that slip on tiptoe 
 
 Into hidden closets behind the clouds low curtains, 
 
 Into distant corners of far gardens in high ranges treasure cities, 
 
 Bringing the elements of bueaty out of dimness for her high and 
 
 nightly ritual. 
 
 The sunset flames and glows and tremoles, 
 Like an island of opals disintegrating and flooding 
 Blue lakes with scarlet flakes, and bare gray beaches with reaches 
 
 of mirrored amber. 
 And the sky changes as a woman s gray eyes brighten in a round and 
 
 silver banded mirror, 
 When her face is flushing softly in the light of her own loveliness. 
 
 Heaven has lit her footlights, 
 
 And lifted up her great drop curtain ever so little. 
 
 And here on the edge of her radiance, 
 
 Where the dancers feet begin to beat ever so little to new pulses 
 
 stirring them, 
 
 The trailing borders of their robes appear; 
 Ultramarine and crimson, pale green, pearl gray and lilac; 
 Purple deeper than twilight s own deep hem as she lets fall, 
 All the flowers that flame and dicker on far mesas for the mazes of 
 
 her dance. 
 
 All the fruits of all the plantations of earth are glowing together there ; 
 Airy orbs and ardent apples for dream orchards and vineyards, and 
 
 red and blue berries bright with dew. 
 And they tread them under their feet in the harvest vat of the dusk, 
 
 and slowly distil 
 The cool, dark wine of the night that she lifts to the lips of her 
 
 dancers. 
 
77 
 
 Twilight swings strings of jewels that iall and flash before their wait 
 ing feet; 
 
 Rubies, beryls, spinels; topaz, jaspar and turquoise; 
 Sapphires, pearls, opals, emeralds; sardonyx and amethyst; 
 And dull gray agates at last, like pebbles for the feet of the dancers. 
 
 But the feet of the dancers cannot feel either pebbles or apples. 
 Their feet are of air, their bodies are air, their breasts are air, and 
 
 their lips that whisper it. 
 Their faces are phantoms of light and beauty beyond all beauty men 
 
 image or mirror. 
 Dreams of the Lord of all Light who made His mountains old women 
 
 who wait for His singers and dancers; 
 With their heads in the night where the stars are coronets and tall 
 
 tiaras and high halos, 
 Rounding their brows and their throats like falling notes of the song 
 
 all space is ringing with at sunset 
 ATiere high on the loma s shoulder beside their horses by the well 
 
 head, 
 A woman and a girl are standing; looking and longing, and listening. 
 
 Santa F6 10 31 18 
 
78 
 
 HIGH SCHOOL TENNIS COURT 
 
 A girl with a racket sweeping high, smashing to the back line 
 
 An arc like a crescent moon inverted Diana Valkyrie, 
 
 Swinging speed and stark will to the mark wth the weight of a 
 
 war hammar 
 Etched against a skyline of glowing snow peaks and sunset light. 
 
 Day grows grayer as she drives duller balls to dimmer corners. 
 There is a Woman of the Worlds somewhere who serves spinning 
 
 planets and plunging meteors so; 
 
 Shifting speed and matter through surer meshes that move tomorrow, 
 To make the mothers of a nation of men fit to fight forever failing 
 
 light. 
 
 Santa Fe 5 8 21 
 
79 
 
 ENVOY 
 
 I have come back again to this mountain land I always love, 
 
 After many joumeyings, farther east and west. 
 
 I have seen two oceans, and tall cities I am tiring of. 
 
 And the ranges spell long purpose through blue beauty s dome of rest. 
 
 The ranges of lost wonderlands men loved and longed for yesterday, 
 Where their ghosts go slowly through the dust of dim and distant 
 
 trails ; 
 And the little winds of morning rise, and dead hearts stir and start 
 
 away. 
 And the singing skyline changes till the twilight dulls r.nd fails. 
 
 Here is freedom from perdition, in the jangled wills of driven men, 
 And sick souls of wasted women, in her high, clear amber light; 
 And a timeless gray tradition that old bells twice blessed intone again, 
 When the twilight like God s kiss comes down to wish this world 
 good night. 
 
 Here is solace in sunrises, when her eastern stubborn wall of stone 
 Seems to lift to airy altar lights; past timber line and snow 
 The shadows some caressing earth; and here a man may lie alone 
 With the eye of heaven that warms today, and what the wind may 
 know. 
 
 There is sound of running water where her hidden rivers glide, 
 There are pine trees talking to red rocks, and to any human ear 
 That can spell one least still letter of truth her trembling aspens hide, 
 And forget those fevered cities while her secrets whisper here. 
 
 Santa Fe 554 
 
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS 
 
 WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN 
 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
 WILL INCREASE TO 5O CENTS ON THE FOURTH 
 DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY 
 OVERDUE. 
 
 AUG 28193J 
 
 LD 21-50m-l, 33 
 
/v- 
 
 Underwood 
 trail s e 
 
 J.C 
 d. 
 
 
 
 959 
 U56 
 
 ^73725 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY