Coma; Flight; Skullduggery

Coma

Sister, asleep for three days, I notice small broken
glass sparkling near your bedroom door at home,
placed there by the cat. The glass matches your beads
and wills you back to the movement of thread and
needles. A baby attempting to walk, you sang
and danced instead. Our grandfather smilingly called
them Indian Doctor songs. Through our childhood we rested for school
in a noisy metal bed, telling one another to "Sleep."
or "Be Still." You cry in this present sleep.
The dried saline tracks are washed off in the
mornings. We pull your memory to your still body with
the vernacular of family endearments, the pet names.
Fearful to disturb the tubes attached to your arms,
reaching carefully into the square order of medicine,
I notice your body is hot. No response. Brain waves
tell me you dream. Do you see me? Are you perched
above us? Is our grandfather here with you? This room
is too white. I sit here in the allotted hours for
worry, waiting for the bells to strike, like the
Washat bell's clangor before a hymn. Waiting, time is
a stoic machine. The room fills with talk. Our
grandmother, who is not here, vibrates in a small
voice, a rhythm that is a peaceful breathing. The
clever thoughts of people buzz in the machinery. How
did you learn to kill yourself? Who dared to teach
you? Perhaps it was me and now I must ravel the
twisted example.

I wail in sleep for you to live, welled tears rolled to
dry salt and wounds in the morning.

 

Flight

Eagle hovers.
Immobile Cross.
The blue clarity of tableau,
critical shrine of intimation and detachment.
It drops from vision as simple hunter.

Afternoon hail, rain lightning and mist light
blue-gray years between birth and mother.
Color-filled finch and mourning dove,
and canyon wrens sing.

Smell sage rolling back and forth between fingers.
At the edge of juniper berries is the matter of prayer.
The evergreen crests collect arches of pinion to mingle with cloud.

Locate a circle of copper in a sliver of rock.
A burning red draws eye to the circle.
Palm open with hot lifeline, the rock fits along the path of light's shadow,
in comfortable small mounds of muscle.

Our eagle plume stands up in the path.
Breath on the brown edge of filmy down,
as divination, unattached, in the proper direction.

The wind picks up boxes, moving out.
Whirlwind, dust and body.
The haze is a firmament of less altitude.
Clouds remain static.
Air is clear above the rearrangement of small items.
Rabbits cross and zigzag in shadow,
oblivious of the cruciform that hovers above change.

There is prayer to a small whirlwind.
Those who believe it a portent.
Others who spiral in enigma.
Modest dust flickers in decay and storming parchment.
Faith matters leaving habitual root
to rummage between the potency of frigidity and delirium.

Sangre de Cristo's vermillion is a daily ritual.
Mother's head is a white veil in supplication to age.
Over Jemez, the body of pine and fir is dark and serene.
Sandia Peak is gnarled inside as these wrists that weave.
Light and the rivers spark
the canyon below, stream over mountains, pools on terraces of high desert.

Step into the white spread of ozone, between and on the verge
of the fall's memory of gravity, vulnerable peace.
The strike's breaking crack upon mountain desert resemble smallest fissures.
The pattern similar to the canyon's wear from movement.
Rain bounces diamonds on Red Earth.

Aspen, as sisters, genetically one, lean in comparable angle.
Radiance overtakes the iris of their bark.
Heated rocks crumble from the maternal anchor and fall.
Between mother and offspring, rock and gravity,
core and circle, is personal distance.
The creek song is mingled filament and clarity.
It moves to the edge of crevasse with unclouded sentiment.

Four Corners, Shiprock, hazy and gray, and
Lukachukai...