SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
John Macker
Santa Fe, New Mexico
John has published 9 full-length books of poetry, 2 audio recordings and several broadsides and chapbooks over 30 years. His most recent are The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, Gorge Songs (with Denver woodblock artist Leon Loughridge)
Blood in the Mix (with El Paso poet Lawrence Welsh) and part three of his “Badlands” trilogy, Disassembled Badlands published by Colorado’s Turkey Buzzard Press, 2014. His recent essays on poets and poetry have been appearing in Albuquerque’s Malpais Review (where he is contributing editor) and Cultural Weekly.
Borrowed time in Chaco Canyon
John Macker
(with a line by Ted Berrigan)
For no particular reason,
borrowed time has given us
another day
upright on the earth,
in all of its exhausted duskiness
and anxious ancient first lights
of morning:
the serene immutability of
eternity, the sunlight piled
up in the doorway, here
in these greathouse ruins
of the canyon.
This must be where real peace abides,
where they keep the blood mysteries
in the deep kivas and the burning
yellow bulging chamisa
roadsides of September.
All forty-nine years of me trudged seven
miles to Peñasco Blanco and back,
where an eight hundred year old shaman
tried to pray away the killer drought
at the nexus of river and desert
with a fresh macaw feather in his hair.
I thought of fire-breathing
Charles Bowden
Author of Blood Orchid and
Blues For Cannibals
deconstructing
/reassembling
border consciousness,
who marched in the
summer heat across the Sand Tank
mountains to Gila Bend carrying a fist-
full of water, serene in the cold sweat of his ritual−
because it was there.
This is where real peace resides:
with these bellowing clouds that
melt like whispers on the dry horizon over
Chacra Mesa,
its pottery shards,
fossil sea shells,
parrot feathers,
copper bells and bird points,
the furnace hell of the far ruin in the hiking heat
eating peanut butter on wheat bread
upright against an Anasazi wall
every brick whispers:
all time is simultaneous.
I listened carefully, I could hear a
scorpion cast its shadow on the bare
slickrock and a flute-voiced woman
singing in the river:
“This is what we do. This is living,
taking its walk.”
first appeared in the book,
Disassembled Badlands.