Nandia

          Over McCartys

          a crow flies north

          near the house

          you lived in with Tony.

          I think of you.

          see old bones of lava beds,

          a train going towards

          Gallup,

          radio fading out

          only wind, and

          this dry mouth

          whisper thin,

          like leaves.

          We traveled this road

          before. Sixty-six

          or other names in the time

          you breathed. Knew

          red rock mesas, Indian tea

          stalks dried and empty

          and the hardened

          black ashes

          of the Malpais.

          You took me once

          to an older part of earth

          I’d never seen—

          where monsters were born

          and killed.

          They sacrificed everything

          and nothing

          for a taste of this

          life.

          I remember

          you held your baby

          tight.

          He was yours and Tony’s—

          a point inbetween

          hot baked earth

          and Oklahoma.

          We crawled a fence

          found a barren

          Laguna corral where years

          back sheep birthed and slept

          and were kept by an old man

          and woman whose children

          have grown old in L.A.

          To the Rio Puerco

          deep blood of silence

          where the sun fell

          to the western horizon

          and your voice and mine

          echoed laughter;

          carried children.

          Now footprints are mere ghosts

          washed over in the river

          and there are wings

          slapping wind

          that force sound through me.

          I drive this road again

          my children older

          and this ache

                this trembling ache

          haunts me endlessly

          like you.