Colcha

a letter to an adopted son

53 a letter to an adopted son dear Marcos, We have both made that trip into the valle, the long straight road from Pueblo to Walsenburg, where you think you will travel into the heart of the Spanish Peaks. They rise like two breasts left there to suckle the universe, their milk flowing in two directions. One goes back to our mother, through the desert of Sonora, through the railhead at Celaya, back in time to her womb of water on Tezcoco. She is standing knee deep. Her bare brown feet have gathered mud between the toes. She is from two worlds, like you. Marcos, you are the milk which flows in two directions, and you are not sure which way to flow. South toward the valle looking for a mother who gave birth to you in a town named after cottonwoods, or south further still to a woman standing knee deep in Tezcoco. So you shuffle through papers of year in which the water kept no record. So that when you stand knee deep in the Conejos you will look at home, the water turning in slow green ripples around your legs, the soft line from your pole searching the bottom of the river for a piece of your history. i watch as you read the scales of a fish as though they were maps to somewhere else. The red streak on the fish’s belly tells you that she is spawning, that within her belly there are orange eggs which she will lay beneath a rock, and that they will hatch without knowing their mother. You hold her, this mother, in your hand; you feel the turning of her spine as she slips from your hand into the green water. i know now, why you let her go. ...