Clarissa Bueno
CUESTAS
Quiet in the moon light I found juniper & hickory took four winters
to find the mother the soothsay hallowed beneath years of dreams.
In loud sun crows & leatherwood more than a year late I left, our desert
filled & not even rain could trace ironsand arroyo I came back a mother
hands cupping buds of light & taken into cuestas & the skyline interrupted with wall. If there were a way to go back, it would be like trying to speak of water
without mention of the moon I was all moon then my wound my womb
became separate a deer scouring the cliff in search of shade. It was not our home
it was a vision one that made us. In the loud sun I watch how rain still falls
even when there is so much light. Our desert what makes it survive despite all
the burns all thirst it thrives. Because you did not hold it. To speak of holding
is to speak of loss flower no longer a bloom. How soon to be so close
to blooms blood & womanhood resilient in the waning forever in company of
loss & birth. To pull on the water & summon a moon when the soul is split
from breast the bowl shattered treated as object instead of source. From where
it all returns. I’ve seen it tie roots to a tree. It takes water to rinse that. It takes
a mother to lay cope & balm. There’s an arroyo filling with monsoon so I must
be river blessed gaze of a sunset. Did you ever see such sky? Soon
I throw these rocks back into the river & pray the sun take me back &
lay me in your red dirt.
EXILE
Morning grieves a shadow, a body is followed by one.
Just yesterday I saw beneath me blades of cave light.
When I was a girl I gave seeds to a steep-walled canyon of my keeping.
Fill yourself with honey, mama told me. And the words fell below.
Trust follows itself. Lies move toward company.
The heart makes masks for them. Creatures
whose eyes are hallowed, whose bodies
want to grow. Remember, says the dreamer. Body is a temple.
I know a mother who despite the dimmed
bodies of her children, raised guardians to build her walls.
In dreams she holds me underwater. By morning I have forgotten. To grieve
is to be haunted. Remember, that death is a woman who desires not love
but lovers. The heart, she says, is not a hollow thing but one to be hallowed.
My mother painted walls and covered us with places where we could grow.
Eyes closed and I could still see the glare. It makes me see
what she has been trying to forget. Where we slept the walls grew taller.
Around us the wings of cicadas.
As a girl I used to wander our desert deep step in clay. A longing to be left.
Hiding the things I had broken, my braids I had cut from the root.
Wanting to separate light from dark as if one could live
without the other. Digging until my knuckles bled as if shame
was something that could be buried. Holding my hand up to the light
and staring into the blue eye of the sun. My mother wore masks. She taught me
how to fasten them in a crowd or room. Loneliness didn’t owe us anything
didn’t belong to anyone, it was to be learned as most things are. As much as dark
belonged to light, a body to a shadow. At night I whisper words etched over the shrine.
I remember a shadow is only a body of a dream, walls could be repainted or built.
Mama, I can see your temple and it is burning.
[8]
I cleaned the arroyo dust off your mouth with my dress.
Now that we are rooted we can wait for our bodies to ascend
preferably from light as that seems to dispel other forces
You had a nice morning in the arroyo. I stood next to you
even in June or July waiting for a six-week wound,
to mend. Blaring drone on the record, bees
and widows and lizards and ants. The snakes slept in the wash
every night or so, rivered and menaced. Sitting Bull rested
within the confines of a frame before us, a far more sanctified man
than we ever could be. We can hardly guide our own bodies and he led
tribes of thousands into spirit dance. He wasn’t god
though he had four children and five wives when one is usually
enough. These past years I have been assembling myself into
various entities. I have the mind of a woman twice my age
and this is as essential a virtue as any to mistake. Red Tomahawk was
adamant, incidentally, when the Police shot the many dancing
naked women and children. It was believed providence. History is
full of patterns. They wait around like shallow graves
waiting to be hallowed. The ants crawled around for seven years
building chambers for August the twentieth, 1890, when I took his life
and rinsed his blood. Just as we may see shadows in corners next to
our loved ones whose bodies slowly decay. All this dusk just to
to become dolent. Yours held a Hotchkiss, metallic, straight from
your father. But we don’t deduce to such reasoning.
The dusk scoffs at such fidelity. You cannot buy a shadow.
Out in a ghost river in the desert the other day I climbed up
a wall of mica and mourned a little for her. We all know the hardest
time is morning. The palm lines say I’m halfway there, much
time I can only give away, twenty-one years of a moment.