March Voices

Like a lion March has swept in with winds so loud you become part of the roar if you stay out long enough. But with that wind has, thankfully, come some moisture, pebbles of snow and hail, lashes of rain against the pocked pumice walls. We're in a constant gale, windows rattling, sometimes curving in parabolas, the tips of the sage plants shuddering, closing their eyes against it. And that sage has, in the span of days, gone from olive and sepia to dusty blue-green and has kicked into the world the swirling aroma of late season grapes and a tenacious cleansing spearmint. I am drawn out from this desk into the unraveling cold, the serape-slapping southerly rip, into the crumbly, scarred yellow clay, where the whistle blows through my chest, and presses my temples. I am barefoot on the gray gravel, claw-toeing my way to the sirens, again to lay low among these plants that rise only a few feet off the pliable earth; snuggle in with the zephyrs diving, rising, puncturing, dancing back, hovering, fainting, and then pouring in on the back of a gray whale. It is snowing in the mountains, open bowled Wheeler Peak - which cannot be its real name, Tankwantanda to me - baptized at the highest reaches in a winter white thunderhead, spilling its riches onto the back ridges, opening a mouth toward the sacred mountain, Pueblo Peak, Tinkantookoto, to coat the still ice covered Blue Lake. Tall aspens shiver and sway in the narrow, winding canyon trail up toward the lake, rising over the folds of the mountain that show from below in shadowy triangles. An inner sanctum tucked deep in the kingdom of this mountain, a source, a birthing canal, a place where the ancients of this land can tell you where you are. I cannot go, friends tell me, although they sometimes tease, but in the not going, I am there. The bark of those aspens is familiar, the funneled wetness seeping off the high ground has reached me from El Salto, riding an easterly in the summer, and, today, in a tempest of this world-reflecting teacup, a battle of seasons at work in the sky just over me in the sage. I lay down on my back and close my eyes facing west and listen. It is late afternoon, March 7, 2009, a whole world of talking going on beyond my border, but here all I can hear is the wind and my toes are being tickled, they are not cold, and my right hand feels the sting of a cactus hidden in the clumped straw, and my ass feels nothing but easy ground giving up some moisture, but not much. There are people in the wind, voices and information, headlines and backstories, histories. Dust to dust is what I think, people in black huddled around a grave. Here it is, I'm sitting in that dust that has turned to clay and I also see little animal bones and ash, pollen drifts along the dark roots. It is late afternoon on March 7 and nobody is here, no cars, no dogs barking, no rabbits sniffing, just the blue rises and volcanic chimneys, clouds masking the sun, and the tilt of the earth toward the south.