Snow Brooms

Like brooms against snow

shadows of the rabbitbrush

sweep a restless mind. 

Snow fell again on Saturday night. Its planes and hollows are laced with tracks -- birds, coyotes, rabbits, dogs, humans -- like frenetic thoughts crisscrossing the mind. The rabbitbrush blossoms turn dark bronze in the winter, their fine branches spreading like broom straws agains the snow. The sagebrush have turned powdery silver against white. 

Yesterday morning I was lighting the propane stove, when I remembered that we've always had the tank refilled in December. I checked the tank level, and it's down to zero. Why can't I remember this? Meanwhile, we have just ordered a truckload of aspen logs to heat the house for the rest of the winter. We use propane for the stove and for the hot water heater, but those two appliances are responsible for hot showers and coffee -- two of my only remaining addictions. Filling the tank and loading up on firewood can get expensive, but it's still cheaper than heating Eric's turn-of-the-century house in Denver. 

My thoughts are as scattered as the snowtracks. I come home late from the nursing home, and my brain is still numb from the alarms and call lights. I fall into bed and dream of charting I forgot to do. In the morning I have to ask Eric to repeat things that he told me the night before. I worry about forgetting something important. I worry that I've inadvertently harmed someone.

The blue snow shadows calm my mind a little. 

Winter Maze

Walking in a maze

of prickly pear at sunset,

I lose the dirt road. 

Hard Frost

After a hard frost

the last of the tomato vines

freeze into brown bones. 

The frost and snow were late this year. We didn't have our first snow until Sunday; for the first time this season, Blanca is truly white. Our tomato plants have withered to skeletons in the greenhouse. The plants in our sunroom are still eking out a few orange tomatoes, their sweetness concentrated by the cold. We eat the small, candy-like segments on our salads. Their flavor is a ghost of summer.  

This is the time of year when everything shrinks into itself, hardening against the cold. The dirt roads have turned into rutted ribbons. The rabbitbrush and tumbleweeds are stiff hands, raised plaintively against the North wind. 

Shadows Roll In

Up the green foothills

the South wind pushes the clouds

in a shadow tide. 

On a windy autumn afternoon, masses of clouds roll across the Valley, darkening the plains and flooding the roads with shadows. The shadow wave moves over the Blanca Massif; the clouds will hover over the peaks all night and leave a dusting of snow by morning. 

I watch the wave of darkness roll towards me as I jog down the road. I wait for the moment when the wave will overtake me the way I used to wait for the waves of the Pacific to fill my mouth and nostrils with salt and the taste of seaweed when I was a little girl. 

The months go by quickly. It's already November. The little pile of firewood that was left from last winter is already dwindling; we've started lighting up the wood stove at night. The clouds roll fast. The shadows come in. I walk and jog and stretch to keep my body as straight and supple as I can, but at times I already feel the pull of the earth below my feet. 

Autumn Weeds

Dry weed bracts glitter

distracting the downturned eye; 

October sunrise. 

Gravel

Sifting damp gravel

over a red wheelbarrow

I smell last week's rain. 

This pile of gravel is our latest Sisyphean project; we have to sift through it to remove the dirt. I like big, apparently insurmountable projects like this. I spent over an hour shoveling and sifting today, burying my fingers in the damp soil as I spread the stones across the sieve that Eric made. He constructed the sieve by nailing a piece of mesh to an antique window frame. We sift the dirt out into the wheelbarrow, then haul the soil over to a ridge we're creating to defend our struggling flowerbed against rabbits. The gravel will fill the trenches that will form the foundation of the strawbale addition to the house. The addition is intended to be a mudroom, but it will also provide extra insulation against the winter wind.

I can't believe winter is on the way already. The sooner we fill up the trenches and finish the addition, the warmer we'll be when the winter winds start in earnest.

Sublimation

The coyotes glide

below the dry chamiso --

my forgotten fears. 

Clouds without Rain

Four or five raindrops.

Thunderheads darken the mountain,

hover . . . and move on.

One Sunflower

Like a tiny hand

a single flower's shadow

spreads across the dust. 

Empty House

Abandoned A-frame,

between your shattered rafters

winged ghosts come to rest. 

This is one of the many empty dwellings here on Blanca Flats. "It's always the women who want to leave," our real estate agent told us when we bought our own A-frame about two miles from this one. "They miss their families; they miss the shops." This house was built for a family who lived here for awhile before the wife declared that she couldn't take the isolation. Behind the house is an old moving van that yawns open, as if the family stopped in the very process of moving their belongings into the house. Doves and pigeons have taken up residence in the van and in the house. If you walk around the property, which I've done before, the house seems to explode in an agitated whir of wings. 

September Sky

One windless morning,

mounds of golden rabbitbrush

below mounds of cloud.

Greenhouse Tomatoes

Dipping and pouring

I water the tomatoes

with a warm glass jar.

Dirt Road

Taking the dirt road

instead of the new highway

we cross paths with crows. 

When we first moved to Blanca Flats, I thought I'd never be able to deal with the three miles of rutted dirt that lead from Highway 160 to our house. I didn't know then that the roads are graded at least a couple of times a month by huge, dinosaur-like machines, making the washboard effect slightly less jarring. I also hadn't learned to appreciate the fact that the wind carves those ruts in the roads the way it leaves ripples on the surface of water. 

Highway 160 -- broad and freshly paved -- is relatively new. At one time, the primary route from the town of Blanca to Alamosa was a dirt road called Estrella. Estrella still exists, winding all the way to Alamosa (by far the largest city in the Valley, with a population of around 9,000). Estrella is still somewhat of a thoroughfare for locals who don't feel like dealing with the super-sized RVs or out-of-state drivers who are just passing through. 

I love driving around on the dirt roads now, admiring the self-built hybrid homes and trailer compounds. I love the road signs out stuck in the middle of nowhere, like some rural existentialist's idea of a joke. I love driving fast and sending up a long tail of dust when the road's just been graded. And I love the way the crows insist on sailing in front of my car at a stately pace, their black wings scissoring the air. 

Rosh Hashanah

September new year

a northeast wind pelts my cheek

with winter's sharp seeds. 

After a long string of balmy days, a slap of winter. Sunday the southwest wind coasted over the flats like a breeze caressing the ocean; Monday her northeastern sister took over and brought currents of bone-chilling cold. A rain laced with dust from the potato harvest spattered the windows all day as the wind beat at the roof. By afternoon the sun returned, and the clouds lifted to reveal a thick cloak of snow along the spine of the Culebra. 

Dawn Light

This view of Blanca at dawn reminds me of one of my favorite Mary TallMountain poems.

Bright Shining

Companion to me in every place,
You stretch your hand: I see
Majesties of mountains
Crowned with living light.

Your arm flings wide: I see
Wild little islands wrapt in fog
Grey luminous; hidden folds
Of emerald and ermine earth.

I fly free clean through glowing
Cat's eye aquamarine
Filled with light air breath

Swaddled in this cocoon
This dense and lifeless mass
Yet weightless I
soaring with it shall be for you

Light bright shining


by Mary TallMountain
The Light on the Tent Wall
Los Angeles: University of California, 1990

August Shadows

Clouds over granite --

suddenly your face appears

in August's shadows.

I haven't written any new haiku since August. I guess I've been in a survival mode, trying to finish my reflexology program while scraping together enough income to keep things going. But I also believe that poetry and photography are also necessary for survival; maybe that's why I've had such a deep sense of fatigue lately. I want to be able to stop worrying about money, bills, taxes, etc., but I also need to start writing poems and stories again, and taking walks with my camera the way I used to.

Uninvited Guests

Golden June morning--

in every coffee cup

a tiny brown bug.

Rain Offering

I throw coffee grounds

at the foot of Mount Blanca:

Bring us summer rain. 

This blog feels like a dusty house, closed up for months. Everything looks and smells different, but I'm the one who's changed. I couldn't write haiku for several months. I finally realized that I was grasping too hard at them--struggling to make them work. Then I stopped for awhile to focus on other things. A couple of weeks ago I read a copy of Clark Strand's Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey. I read it from the perspective of someone who's lost the ability to write haiku, and then one day, after I'd finally stopped trying, the fragments started coming back. 

Every afternoon the sky fills up with water, but we rarely get any actual moisture. Thunder growls, and a hot, white wind blows dust into the kitchen, but no rain. The coffee grounds are my rain offering. In the morning when I make coffee, I throw the old grounds at the mountain in hopes that she'll make the clouds let go of their burden by the end of the day. With these wildfires, we need it more than ever.

Hoofprints

We walked up to the Dome recently to see the new green lichen growing on the rocks. There may be pooled water or even a small spring under the rocks; the Dome attracts a lot of wildlife. The earth around the Dome had been marked by dozens of hooves in various sizes.

A message in dust,

letters from a wild font:

antelope hoofprints.

Morning Mist

Gray morning drenched with sage --

snow on the mountain's crest

turns to mist at her feet.

Blanca Meets Alma

Eric hand-painted this sign to mark one of the roads on the way to our house. The sign had been missing for months, and we were worried that our friends would get lost trying to find our place. We have very few visitors, so we try to make it as easy as possible for those who venture out here to find us.

Writing haiku and tanka has been very hard for me lately. I've been distracted by work and by worries about finding work. I've applied for jobs in larger areas. I worry about leaving the Valley. Thinking about leaving makes me feel like I should start to separate myself from the area. But then I wonder why I eventually detach myself from everything that's deeply important to me.

A Place in the World

When the world outside meets the world inside,
the ragged edges of a torn self
find each other, settle in,
and form a seam.

And you learn that gravity is not a force
that keeps your body on the earth
when you most want to leave,
but something more like grace,
guiding you to a place
you never left.

Season of Wind

The night wind

sighed without stopping;

in my dream

all was erased

but sand and stone.

Bone Mask

Mask-shaped bone:

a mute mystery

we would not touch.

Bones are a prominent feature of this arid landscape. We find bones from rabbits and other small animals, as well as larger bones from elk, antelope or cattle. The dogs, of course, are much better at finding these bones than we are, especially the fresh bones left by hunters. One afternoon, as we walked along an electric fence beside the highway, our blue heeler Shelby found an extravagant display of deer bones scattered across the ground. Tissue and skin still clung to the electric fence. The deer had apparently been struck by a passing vehicle and torn to pieces by the wire.

One afternoon we found a bone shaped like a mask, with three holes positioned at the points of the eyes and mouth. It was probably a pelvis, but it was somehow eerie in its simple rendering of a human face. I picked it up briefly, then put it back on the ground. We often bring bones, rocks and dried wood back to the house with us, but we wouldn't bring the mask bone home.

Sand Dunes

On winter dunes

the wind breathes a spine and ribs

into cold sand.

We went for a hike at Sand Dunes National Park a couple of weeks ago. It was a Monday morning, and the admissions booth was deserted. A note taped to the window said that admission was free that day.

On the Sand Dunes, the sky is an inversion of the ocean. We climbed to the crest of a dune and looked out into a bowl of blue space.

I lay in the sand and made a sand angel. If you look closely, you can make out her wings and the skirt of her robe. I accidentally stepped on her abdomen when I got up.

I was very happy that day; I felt free. As I lay on my back, swimming in the sand and watching the sky, I thought:

I was here.

I saw the moon.

Morning Smoke

One skein of smoke

rising against brown hills,

solitary fire.

I suspect that living in a remote area encourages a morbid fascination with neighbors. I'm especially fascinated with the little settlement to the South of us, a collection of hybrid dwellings that appear to be uninhabited -- most of the time. But every now and then, I spot a tantalizing scrap of evidence of life. A plume of smoke on a frosty winter morning, a battered white truck pulling up to the settlement, an outdoor fire burning on a windy January evening. We've actually seen our neighbor walking around his property, and Eric met him once at the Polish convenience store in Blanca. In the evening, when I turn the solar panels to the East to catch the next sunrise, I look to the South to see if I can spot the lights on our neighbor's house. We're never really sure if he's there or not, or how he comes and goes, or what he does. But we are certain he exists. A neighbor's existence is always reassuring.

The second photo is not our neighbor's house; it's our front yard. The wooden structure once held a cistern that collected water from our well pump. I later filled it with tumbleweeds and left it in the yard, where I've unofficially declared it "land art." In Denver, this would violate about ten different zoning regulations.

Firewood

Under morning frost

a fragrant massif of pine --

winter's last firewood.

Widows

I know the wooden widows.

With their silvered backs to the mountain

they wait.

These posts mark the site of a ranch that has vanished. The stones that lined the foundation of the house still exist, but the walls have fallen away, and the barbed wire of the corrals is warped and rusted. These posts line the road that leads to the highway. On my early morning drive to work, I used to silently greet the posts, especially the one above, which I called "the Widow." I envied her unmoving solitude, her stoic stance against the hard Northern wind.

When I worked at a nursing home about 30 miles from here, one of the elderly residents told me that a rancher had hired him years ago to graze cattle out in Blanca Flats, but there wasn't enough vegetation for the livestock to eat. Ironically, the disappearance of edible vegetation and the thinness of the soil may be caused partly by the lack of grazing -- the symbiosis between livestock and the land has been broken. The land grows increasingly dry, the brush more sparse. The old irrigation ditches are parched seams, and the sheep trails have faded to gray threads. Space and silence are our bumper crops now.

Between Mesas

Clear twilight

fills the bowl

between two mesas,

a cup of water

for the weary heart.

I love the mesas in winter; the snow highlights their hollows and planes, revealing the crevices that aren't visible in the warmer months. I spent over an hour trying to find a phrase to describe the way the sky fills the space between these ancient formations, how the parabola between them seems to offer itself like an open bowl. A woman I know once said that God is space, and having lived out here for awhile, I believe she was right.

Two Birds

A small bird's question:

three rising notes

before the gathering snow.

Desert thaw --

across snow and sand

dances the first sparrow.

Iron Grass

Iron tufts of hair:

drought has hardened you,

wind gently combs you.

These gray grasses, toughened by sun and drought, embody what I love about this micro-environment. The metallic blades of these grass tufts will never see green again, but they'll be here for years, simply enduring. I love the colorless, indestructible presence of these plants, which are no longer living but are nevertheless still here. They are survivors of prolonged thirst and parched air, and like many survivors, there's a profound stillness about them. I imagine that even the harsh wind slows down to touch them gently.

Scouring Season

Spring is not

the growing season

but the scouring season,

when hard winds

batter the earth to bone.

Lunar Maria

A rising moon

meets the basalt hill

at the slope of earth's memory.

The inception of the Rio Grande Rift in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado was accompanied by voluminous mafic volcanism preserved in part as erosional remnants on an intrarift horst within the current axial rift graben of the San Luis Valley.

Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 96, no. B8: "Oligocene Basaltic Volcanism of the Northern Rio Grande Rift: San Luis Hills Colorado"; R.A. Thompson, C.M. Johnson and H.H. Mehnert; 1991.

* * * *

The basalt hills behind our house are ancient shapes, the soft aftermath of ancient volcanic activity. In the evening the hills seem to embody the earth's memory, gently sloping into darkness.

Basalt is an igneous rock, porous yet dense, the color of charcoal. The lunar maria are the basalt plains of the moon. Once believed to be seas, the mare basalts are actually vast, dark plains created by volcanic explosions.

Beach Combing in Winter

With snakes asleep

and prickly pear softened by snow

we wade into the winter desert.

One of my favorite activities in the world is a land-based version of "beach combing" -- wandering through the sparse ocean of sage, rabbitbrush and prickly pear to hunt for rocks, bones, sticks, colored glass and other bits and pieces. I once found some casino tokens that had been corroded to black slivers by the sun, and occasionally I'll come across someone's tidy graveyard of beer bottles and coffee cans. I feel safer beach combing in the winter, when the rattlesnakes are hibernating underground. The thorns of the cacti are either soft and mushy after a snow or brittle and frail after a few dry weeks, so they're not as hazardous to the feet.

This land looks like an ancient, dry lake bed . . . because that's what it is. That's la Culebra in the background, the mountain range named for its serpentine curves.

Old House

House of the absent heart:

your cracked eye

holds a memory of fire.

The Visitors

After summer winds,

their scattered belongings

transformed by winter sky

This land appeared to be uninhabited until the owners temporarily took over in the summer. Like everyone who visits the Valley for the first time, or who innocently attempts to set up house here, they weren't ready for the wind. They set up a tent for their fishing gear and cooking equipment -- the wind blew it down. They installed a plastic shed to store their things -- the wind ripped it apart. So now our visitors have given up, it seems, and have left their belongings to the vagaries of the wind.

Ever since they surrendered to the forces of nature, their stuff hasn't gone anywhere.

Sage

brittle blossoms

cling to the sage brush --

winter's pungent ghosts

Three Sisters

Three wooden sisters

recall the homebound cattle

at the death of day.

I call these wooden corral posts "the three sisters." The old posts and ruined fences out here seem to take on their own identity. Weathered by wind, silvered by sun, they have faces, knots and shoulders. At one time, cattle and sheep grazed here; before that, there were buffalo. Now there are just a lot of tumbleweeds, prickly pear, rocks and a handful of human loners who are looking after the space.