“Where does my poetry come from?  I answer that I came from my poetry, I draw myself from poetry, I create myself from language, I sustain myself on poetry, I bare myself on poetry, I walk upright on two feet because of poetry.”

          -Jimmy Santiago Baca


I will miss this place . . .

“I have explored some of its lines and landscapes . . . but I remain a stranger, though the light of New Mexico seems to permeate whatever I write.”

            -Lucile Adler, poet

DIGGING

We were young

Digging between the bones of ancestors
Not our own
Bathing in powdered sugar dust
That never mixed with rain
As rain
The dust washing away
The conquest of Anglo time

Digging in the name of science

But really because we were hollowed-out
Searching for ancient ways
Human ways of moving in the world
And through
The way time blanketed a basket with dust
For two thousand years
Still visible

We dug a hole and left our watches there

And have been late for everything
That’s supposed to matter
Ever since

Lamy, New Mexico

“We were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past.  We sailed into the past.  We were young.  We knew power and great finance were temporary things.  We all slept with Herodotus, ‘for those cities that were great in earlier times must have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before.  Man’s good fortune never abides in the same place.’” 

            -from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje