Soul Over Lightning: Poems

West of West

29 | West of West 1 If you hold your hands together at San Cristobal, the cliff edge will bless you and you can see the sun between your fingers, its fire dimming west of west, behind your pounding heart that descended from the Oro Mountains on time. In his journals across the deserts of Texas, Cabeza de Baca met the people and wrote how they had to weep for half an hour before speaking, this custom keeping him alive, the visitor from the broken sky shedding his naked skin twice a year, writing how he left parts of himself behind, his body peeling in the sun that burned west of his hands and near the hungry people that refused to eat until their hunters returned. Once, Cabeza extracted a huge arrowhead from the chest of a wounded warrior, showing his people how to stitch the wound, the man recovering while the people took the arrowhead and ran from village to village, pronouncing they found a healer, exhibiting the arrowhead for years after the stranger left. 2 You are inside the mountain and can’t breathe. The ice and darkness resemble Senecú del Sur, eroding walls of dirt south of your hands and west of your sweating head, ropes tying your wrists to the stone table, whispers growing closer, the sound of water singing as if the great rooms will finally open and you can see what happened to the family after the railroads came, how your grandfather worked the line, then disappeared | 30 among the Apaches of southern Arizona, the lone witness to their creation myth where the battle of the beasts takes place across the Sonora, his version of the story bringing you the first words you set down on paper. 3 If you walk the Rio Grande southeast of El Paso, you might come upon the site where the starving Cabeza and his black companion, Estebanico, met two Indian women after seven years of wandering the desert.The two men were fed and disappeared again, heading south where your hands mark the soil with a finger or a knife, even with Spanish words forbidden by the people who knew the strangers were the gods the elders dreamed about, the vision of the mountain and the highest tree turning into a fire far from what the women believed. You can hike along the now dangerous miles, the other side of the border waiting with guns, masked men, and something left unwritten by Cabeza. You can pause and pretend there is a stone marker there though, what would it say? 4 Near the Rio Sonora, stands a tree, the only remaining evidence of the Town of Hearts where the people gave Cabeza 600 opened deer hearts. He wrote they hunted them in abundance and had plenty to eat, the hearts a gift needed to keep moving west, the threatening mountains turning purple in the wanderer’s hands, the tree surviving the centuries because it is a mago—a poisonous 31 | tree whose fruit the people picked to dip their arrows into the juice, the poison appearing as milk if there was no fruit, deer that licked the tree dropping dead, their small bodies turning to stone in the desert sun, Cabeza carrying the deer hearts across time because the leaves of the tree left marks on his hands—dark spots that resembled a map he studied before the sun disappeared each night and his arms throbbed with the weight of faith. 5 West of the mountains, Pedro Robledo died, the young conquistador falling ill after the expedition crossed one hundred miles of desert in the 110 degree heat, Don Juan de Oñate driving the men on, promising the river would appear again north of the heat, his men thirsty and lost, some of them suddenly excited when one of their dogs returned with wet, muddy feet. They followed it to the water that saved them, Perillo Springs in the Jornada del Muerto now a legend more than a place, the exact spot they were saved by a dog vanishing when the river was dammed, the springs becoming a lake—the lake spreading into heaven as heaven opened into a cool, dark place in the middle of nowhere. 6 You are inside the mountain, the terrible awakening forcing them to cut the ropes, | 32 sit you up and show you how the beasts in the tale were armed...