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.