The Storm That Tames Us
La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, NM, 1999
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The Storm Theat Tames Us

We must do more than look
at the flowers. The gardener’s pleasure:
labor and the fruits of labor. The digging
and the careful placing of seeds, the tending, the waiting.
When the green shoot first breaks ground,
it is the sound of birthing we like most.

We must begin. We’ve loved over continents and cultures
to bring ourselves here, on the road between barrio and village,
loving with a yearning toward intelligence,
if intelligence is a kind of fire of the mind.

I have watched you come at me
like watching clouds gather on the far horizon
toward storm. I have watched the storm of you
gather and have felt it in my breasts
like the wet scent of near-rain in the northeast
air of my beginnings, or like smelling sage after rain.

Once, I was in the sky all the way to you, asking:
Is this the territory of my dead?
--endless azure and cotton, the roads
snaking far below. There were lights sparkling
across the distant backdrop of a sprawling city.
I come closer to the buildings that house those lights,
just to see the structure there.

Yes, I’m terrified to begin again, as if beginning
holds already the tenuous seeds of loss, made to break us.
Yet the deads’ shadows have circled and embraced us.
I ask myself: What was all that’s gone before?
Your hands resonate years of lived desire.
I hear the way the leaves are falling.

I have said yes to the question of union.
I’ve watched you crawl under the colors
of your death-blanket and didn’t turn away.
On Xmas, we came through the church door
at Taos Pueblo, from inner dark to the night’s dark,
stunning with fire.

I stood in the courtyard looking under the wooden lintel,
through the doorway into more dark, into the white canopy
held over the queen’s head, into the wind lifting
the canopy and, beyond, the smoked sky and air
shot the color of pomegranate. The open door,
and again, the white canopy lifting.

We walk the earth with something like intent
circling our days, leave with something more than intent
taking us away. Do we know the seeds of our dying?
You are the vehicle of my return
to this place of silence where objects begin
to live again. Where your eyes save me.

Last summer, at someone else’s wedding, I rose up
out of the crowd of single women, as if lifting an arm
to light a torch I could barely reach. I grabbed
that bouquet out of thin mountain air, out of the grips
of another woman, knowing in my blood I am next.
It was a move of pure instinct, born of waiting.

Labor and the fruits of labor.
Days all you get is the digging.
Days all you get is the fruit.
This storm has arrived to tame us. All these years
the air heavy with it and we knew nothing else.
Now we get the release. At last we get the release.

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