River

I drank from it.
Daddy threw me in and
I swam so next time he wouldn’t have to.

In late spring flow we seined with a tow sack
And river shrimp and red horses wiggled with the shiners and toppers.
We dug mussels – the conchos the Cuahuiltecans lived on,
Their stink left them uneaten but for the nocturnal coons.

Channel cats, blues, appaloosa, some perch and gaspergou,
Then high class entries – crappie, whites and largemouths.
The monster gars ruled them all with their long, sharp teeth.
Gators left their tracks and tail drags in the flood mud as if to tell:
“There’s somebody here a sight bigger than you.”

Our river, the last river, the last dependable water for a hundred miles
Cooled us, flowing through our “marginal steppe”
To a city who would do better with desalination.
We swam, rise or trickle – even the drought let us run and splash most years.

The river was not a girl place by the time I arrived.
The pool in ’62 meant female swimmers could keep their heads up.
Where had they learned to swim without our river?

Noon’s suspended cotton picking brought a horde of teen testosterone
To jump from chalk bluffs and wear out a labor force
That dragged itself back to the fields in the zenith of heat.

The river’s “owners’” pride grew.
First the locks, then the signs.
No more my daddy knew your daddy.
Not any my mama rode her horse into the river right there back in ’22.

What’s a blocked resource?
No more dank mud smell or tiny frog midday complaint,
Cicada riots and tail splashes are silenced.
It may as well dry up.

Yet once or three times
I drank from it.

Keehiho

Named, called, recalled, renamed
Nomer, misnomer – San, Sin, Cajo, Caja, mountain, hill, mesa
Boxes, saints, with, without, holy coffins, bones, treasure chests -marked by a highest hill
Viewed from Granny’s mesquite, Korchinski’s hill, Tilden road, Mountain View,
Rising above planar plains, shimmering in August simmer,
It beckons me like nothing else, ever.

This singular rise enters my sleeping dreams like no other place.
I go alone – it is my place; companions are peripheral.
I gain its summit and gaze to the far lands, to Mexico perhaps, overlooking a wasteland
That’s a Narnia space that promises me a longed-for homeland
I cannot perceive nor conceive of upon waking.

The beasts and varmints define the place in my childhood
With rattlesnake’s staccato off under packrat middens and sand racer’s zipping,
Rabbits and ground squirrels scurrying, avoiding the approaching platoon
Wild hogs give scares on the way and full racked white tails burst through the brush.
The sky never lacks for buzzard, hawk or caracara.
At the cliffs, in the holes are bobcats, javelinas, fleas and bats.
On the bluffs, panthers might be waiting ‘cause we want so badly to see one.
Skunk flavors the air along with the chapollo blossoms
And a colossal comb with hordes of bees drips honey in the rocks.

The crown is thicketed with chapote, guajillo, granjeno, mesquite, palito and palo blanco
Woven with tassajillo, nopales, comida de bibora and agarita,
Opening up for manca caballo and sangre de drago.
And rocks – big rocks not seen for miles around but for the Lomas
With collared and spiny lizards and horny toads, sunning and
Shading cross country pokings of tortoises, tarantulas and giant velvet ants.
And the one, the only fern, soaking up northside drips on the lower rocks.

My lone hill figures in the history of others, I concede.
Maybe someone buried treasure on or near here.
A last Indian fight gave the locals a chance to meet death through violence,
So someone looked for the treasure, digging tunnels
And then someone’s lawyer had him fill’em in.
A place of picnics evolved to big buck hunter’s preserve
Then a place of exclusion, a resource blocked to adventure,
A place for owners to use the law to seclude and bar.
We who long just for the sight and the smell and the sounds
Own it still in our souls – we sought treasure there, but of an eternal kind.