POETRY

Abiquiu, 1

Into the West Sonnet Series

Abiquiu, near Ghost Ranch, NM | Hasselblad, Kodak Ektar image by author

Painted landscape, geology’s graveyard,
where the sacred table is always laid,
bones of eruptions and oceans as far
as your sightline allows. Where river craves
progress, it juggles stones clean, bleaches trees.
The Chama wrestles with the land, mining
millennia of layers, while ladies
rustle their skirts and dance, sunlight stunning
their audience with flashes of mica,
purple, red, and gold, precious deposits
twirl in the twilight. Lightning heats up a
piece of the sky, a flint strike, electric.
Where opened ground wears away night by night,
desert life sits on the edge of a knife.

Abiquiu, NM is incredible. It’s such a profound place that it’s difficult to describe: you have to BE there and experience it. We found it, like most things we have discovered, by accident. We were driving south through New Mexico looking for somewhere to camp for the night — and that night of camping was a disaster of hilarious proportions that I won’t go into here, but the end result was we were up out and with the sunrise and…