YOU WILL FIND NO IMPURITY
Weigh my heart, summon me by night,
melt me down; you will find no impurity in me.
—Psalm 17
It is not myself that I speak of,
but the land which I traverse,
the land which I inhabit.
I have lived in extremes.
And, if there is one criticism of me
that may be valid, down so deep,
as to be inseparable from soul,
it is that I am a risk taker.
I lack timidity, reticence,
as the bay I lived on lacked control
over the moon that shifted tides from
bulkhead to the edge of fifth sandbar.
It may have been more than five,
but more seems not to matter when there
is the muck between the risen land
under a sea to traverse, such that the act
of Moses required no imagination as a child:
we witnessed it twice a day.
Or the desert cliffs I have walked for years,
not surprised that they contain the remains
of a sea, but that the fascination continues,
such that when I saw a painting on a wall
of a gallery last spring, larger than what
the remaining uncovered walls where I reside
can hold, I not only remember the answer,
but the intricate details of the telling:
a nautilus, a chamber, which was found inside
a baculite, for which the mesa east is named,
which when the artist asked about the color
best to paint, the answer was red, because in
the land of Sangre de Cristos we have become
accustomed to red. The artist, instead,
chose the other side of the color spectrum:
she chose blue.
Appeared in Contrarywise: An Anthology and the chapbook Going into Exile
