Salado Markings
Rent from DeepDyve- Salado Markings
The Salado people were the best known descendants of the Hohokam.
They built hundreds of miles of irrigation canals along the Salt and Gila Rivers.
—Casa Grande Ruins National Monument
I
Lent begins. A lengthening dawn as pink lightcrests the Superstition peaks. Not much moisture here.Still mute deer seek out hidden springs, and the jackrabbitsand pocket gophers scamper between saguaro and paloverde,prickly pear and mesquite, all prospecting the fast-falling water table.
II
We migrants hoard the hope of spring in our bones,searching like divining rods for any thaw. The Tohono O'odhammarked the new year at the ripening of saguaro fruit,harvesting the buried seeds to grind on metate stones into flour.Juniper and piñón log, saguaro ribs fortify the mudof jacal ramada and vatro shelters still markingthe Sonoran desert with agile shade.
III
Reverence echoes in the soft call of okokokoi—the white-winged dove.A great horned owl hides in the towering shelter over Casa Grande—until the park ranger discerns his cry.The Hohokam venerated eagles, hawks and vultures,mountain sheep. Awls of cactus needles, whorls [End Page 80] of potshards, censers and palettes of stone remain. Yet they left no bones for us to measure them.Only the aligned portals through which the equinox sun rose and set, rose and set.
Kathleen O'Toole has combined a more than thirty-year professional life in community organizing with teaching and writing. Her creativity was nurtured in a family of actors in Wilmington, Delaware, where her parents founded and ran a dinner theatre, and her mother introduced young people to drama. In 1991 O'Toole received an ma from Johns Hopkins University, and she has taught writing at Hopkins and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals. A chapbook, Practice, was published in 2005, and her first full-length collection, Meanwhile, is now out from David Robert Books.
