HOUSE AT OTOWI BRIDGE
Wooden bridge suspended between
cement abutments has survived, while
the adobe restaurant run by a woman
with help of a San Ildefonso man has not,
where Oppenheimer would come to talk,
away from what was going on up the hill.
If conversations ever crossed the boundary
between a woman alone in the desert
and a man's obligation to government,
it was she who could see, each day
from where she sat, the interweave
of twisted steel supporting planks that
brought him to her door in a blinding sun.
Oppenheimer followed through even with
doubts, and she day by day accepted more
help from the one who had always lived
on a dark and turmoiled river.
The restaurant's gone, torn down when
they put in a new highway to Los Alamos,
no longer any reason to be remote, unknown.
From the new bridge, I spy two wooden
crosses inside a crumbling roof and wall.
Not the graves of two who ran a restaurant
in this unlikely place, but a monument that
transcends time and space.
Appeared in Malpaís Review
and the book So Bright to Blind
