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Tribe
I’m driving towards Santa Fe with my old friend. Around us a landscape as alien as the moon. Sandy ground with tumbleweed and cholla, yellow haze of chamisa. Each mountain we pass is distinct, grooved by time and erosion. They make me think of the portrait on slate of an elderly Native American man that hung in my family’s house. Something in his lined features oddly reminded me of my mother, who looked like her immigrant father I can’t recall although I was with him, there’s a photo. The reach between here and there so sharp, so filled with its own distance. I stare at the dark tribe of junipers marching one by one across the hills. You come from a desert people, I tell myself. How can I ever journey back to that? If I want to. So much of it dried up, blown away, for generations now. I glance over at my friend, trying to hold the moment. And now I hear words rise, a phrase turned inside out: without memory, what blessing?
Running Backwards
—after Lucille Clifton
I’m running into the new year backwards,
twisting my eyes toward a horizon
so close yet shrouded in strangeness,
following blessings like breadcrumbs
on a road that rises and falls.
I can’t explain this longing, to gallop
awkwardly, limbs gangly and stiff,
while a mob hurls curses from the shoulder
beside ditches full of broken glass.
It dizzies me so I can hardly determine
whether I’m heading forward or back,
I just know somehow I’m traveling
toward a place that has always waited—
a home beyond home, its heavy furniture
shined and shattered, rooms filled
with candle-glow and lamentation,
where they’ll have been expecting me,
the ancestors, when I stagger in late
and breathless, gasping here I am.
Siddur
Black letters quiver on the snowy page,
angled branches unreadable as trees.
Syllables rustle, clatter, creak—
I stumble along with the transliteration,
echo its phrases, unknowing as a bird.
The English praises no God I can believe in,
yet I try to see beyond, grope for the presence
in any patch of woods, in a tumbling creek,
in the pond I glanced at one January long ago
to see it looking back, hear crow-call from my own throat—
whatever holy I know being that. A stillness,
the world cut clear, the piercing of a winter day.
At the brim of sleep, I recall the woodcut
hanging on the wall in a house now lost—
back before I understood anything I’d long for,
alone with the mystery of what we were,
and everything that went unspoken, discarded.
The boughs leaned in, a stream over rocks
flowing towards me out of whatever came before.
A breath held in it, so distant, under glass.
Its black and white had been pressed and pressed,
lines graven before my birth with a sharp tool:
the image of a world I could step into,
belonging more than I could imagine.
______________
Anne Myles is the author of Late Epistle (Headmistress Press, 2023), and What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer(Final Thursday Press, 2022). She is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa and holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. Learn more at annemyles.com.