Gutted River

GUTTTED RIVER

By Patricia Grodd

An arroya once passed behind my bedroom window

I awakened to its rushing Hummmmm.

It ran and sang. It is true, I tell my little brother who has never heard its nightly lullaby.

I now wake up tired because it is so early, the night is still upon us.

The work on our fields must be done by noon, the hottest part of the day.

This struggle to grow food at seven thousand feet, with little water;

So arid that only the chilies have met the challenge of surviving in this harshness.

Time is not linear, in any sense, on a farm.

You need to know the tricks of proper irrigation, how to feel the heart of the water.

To coax it where you want it to go.

How to use the earth like a sponge.

There are few that realize that this is an art form.

Blessings are chanted in the lower farmlands of Aqua Fria at the beginning

Of every season over the acequias,

Honoring the sacredness of water and the land.

Still, secularization affronts the sensibilities of those who rejoice in the seasonal

Cycles and hold great celebrations that honor the spirit of a place.

Perhaps, my grandfather says,

That communal force has a connection to our empty watersheds.

It will enlighten us so that we may re-incarnate the winding blue of memory.

People to land.

We remember the river dreams of P'oe tsawa, the rivers protector and archivist.

Her people, the Tewa, pray at the mountain top of sangre de cristo for the return of

The consecrated waters

They sing canciones encantados to please it.

In their throats a parched silence hangs all the while blistering their songs.

The sounds of the wind and sand travels into them.

Thinking like a watershed is possibly the clearest way to understand homeland.

My mother and father tell me stories of the great river:

How they fished in it and how they skated in it in winter.

How there were great duck ponds and large cottonwoods on its banks

Now amongst the beer cans, cigarette butts, vertebrae, fossils, and fish bones,

People still try to honor the river with sculptural stone pilings and rare feathers

In the dry canyons.

Time imprints itself with fading footsteps tracking across the red clay of the basins' floor.

It reminds me of some sort of ghost-like memorial, such a strange landscape.

I watch as a snake jellies up a large sun-baked rock to shed its skin.

He lies there, iridescent, exhausted by his labor, for days.

There is a silent vocabulary of devotion, belief, and mourning.

The language of motion, vision. What is possible and what is not.

There is no avocado, no grapes. We are treading water now.

Nothing is sacred.