Back to Fall 2024

Acequia Madre

Sheila Black | Poetry, Fall 2024

You never saw our house by the canal,

the sky yellow in monsoon season,

adobe walls that breathed a little, always,

Eden-green, when the ditch riders came and loosed the headgates,

but mostly gray or brown.

Trees so brittle they might be dead, but weren’t,

breaking into leaf as soon as the hard rains came.

Water seeping across the cheat-grass fields,

scorpions, black widows— beautiful red violins

jeweling their small backs. I would tell you not to waste your time

loving what is difficult, but we do it every time.

Sour-milk smell of horses, honey, and grass, sun-dried

and heaped high. I have never known anything like those fields

in winter when the grass bleaches to bone under an austere sun.

In that house, we all had the same dream of people walking,

walking to the water, which was often not even there,

or only one dusty stream in the middle of a cracked

bed. I want you to know these things—where you

come from, a place mockingbirds keep their eggs alive

by hovering just over their nests, flapping, circling to form

a slender umbrella of shade, what it is to be born that way—

almost featherless, basted in light.

______________________________________

Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?

“I love the idea of the trace - fossil footprint marking a passage across or through.  For many years, I was lucky to live in the house described in the poem - in Las Cruces New Mexico, along the Acequia Madre, there before Oñate and his conquest of the lands along the Camino Real.  I felt as if I belonged there and would happily live there forever, but it was also a place that made you feel the presence of long time. Everyone who slept in what we called "the guest bedroom" had a dream - the same dream of people walking across and through - exiles, climate wanders, people pushed out?  The dream didn't say, but I think it was all those things, and now that I've left that house and lived in other houses I've loved, but never perhaps quite as acutely as that one, I think back and wonder about  what is the leaving of footprints, what is it to belong?  The poem I think tries to answer that - perhaps with some idea of the force of our caring for the moment - or for the holiness of memory.”

Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Radium Dream from Salmon Poetry, Ireland. Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares,The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She lives in San Antonio, TX and Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).

Back to Fall 2024

Acequia Madre

Sheila Black | Poetry, Fall 2024

You never saw our house by the canal,

the sky yellow in monsoon season,

adobe walls that breathed a little, always,

Eden-green, when the ditch riders came and loosed the headgates,

but mostly gray or brown.

Trees so brittle they might be dead, but weren’t,

breaking into leaf as soon as the hard rains came.

Water seeping across the cheat-grass fields,

scorpions, black widows— beautiful red violins

jeweling their small backs. I would tell you not to waste your time

loving what is difficult, but we do it every time.

Sour-milk smell of horses, honey, and grass, sun-dried

and heaped high. I have never known anything like those fields

in winter when the grass bleaches to bone under an austere sun.

In that house, we all had the same dream of people walking,

walking to the water, which was often not even there,

or only one dusty stream in the middle of a cracked

bed. I want you to know these things—where you

come from, a place mockingbirds keep their eggs alive by

hovering just over their nests, flapping, circling to form

a slender umbrella of shade, what it is to be born that way—

almost featherless, basted in light.

________________________________________________________________________

Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?

“I love the idea of the trace - fossil footprint marking a passage across or through.  For many years, I was lucky to live in the house described in the poem - in Las Cruces New Mexico, along the Acequia Madre, there before Oñate and his conquest of the lands along the Camino Real.  I felt as if I belonged there and would happily live there forever, but it was also a place that made you feel the presence of long time. Everyone who slept in what we called "the guest bedroom" had a dream - the same dream of people walking across and through - exiles, climate wanders, people pushed out?  The dream didn't say, but I think it was all those things, and now that I've left that house and lived in other houses I've loved, but never perhaps quite as acutely as that one, I think back and wonder about  what is the leaving of footprints, what is it to belong?  The poem I think tries to answer that - perhaps with some idea of the force of our caring for the moment - or for the holiness of memory.”

Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Radium Dream from Salmon Poetry, Ireland. Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares,The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She lives in San Antonio, TX and Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).

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