Indian Summer

For Indigenous People's Day and Columbus Day celebrated simultaneously, kudos to the ancient people who built the magnificent Great Houses we went to see a couple weeks ago in the wilderness of New Mexico. All photos by the author.

//INDIAN SUMMER\\

From sun to earth,

collapsed in powdered rock

[the mountains are melting];

dead desert highway zooms to

where They lie—

where a high plateau becomes a canyon

through forces of erosion/

whether wind’s or water’s, formed in volcanic extinction,

it becomes a series of cloud-topped mesas,

whose summits, raw cut, stand on

weathered bases,

mantled earth-wards

in slope of pulverized sandstone

until the mesa melts away

into a sand-dune…

DRY! a floodplain invokes

tectonic action to resurrect canyonlands by the

Great Gambler—

Casino by Casino

Church by church

Winner of Men builds

a temple to the sun, possessing the Commoners for Himself.

The Gambling God lays out a buffalo hide, exotic goods here, with images drawn in the four sacred colors, white yellow red and black like the ants, an image of the cosmos and in perpetuity engages in games of chance, betting on the lives of the Earth Surface People,

and their Corn:

Dirt Pile.

He casts the rattling bones

long past Dragon Rock////

But now our footfalls kick up dust

with a regular and gravelly crunch,

trekking across Ruins and Landscapes,

wheeled or shoed. On road and trail. Lines—the watermark.

Ascent,

by the path of the ancients,

in dry warmth of fresh air

dispelling road hypnosis.

Deserted, hardly a soul here but you and me.

Typified desert in which

you can see

clearly how the hills and sand-dunes

from canyon and mesa become flat plain.

A terraced snapshot in shifting geological time offers

a sacred route to

the Crescent of the greatest of Great Houses.

We end up wandering the honeycomb

of stonework, room by room

the mirrored doorway, never the same but always repeated.

Upheld by zigzag of post,

walls doorways and windows,

which used to protect

the ancient storerooms of turquoise,

hive-work of stone shrouding

bounty of precious crystal and white shell

as well as the cornmeal’s pounded flesh

and corn-pollen perfume

in a windblown sacrifice to the sun.

A Spirit calls it Whirlwind House: reduced to a floor plan

retelling spiral reckonings

of the blueprint of upward Emergence.

Arroyo,

from the cliff-fed washes—is a source of

EDIFICE, and the organization of labor

The Reward:

a paradise

where laughing children

climb sunflowers as if they were ladders, spectral, weightless:

House-Where-Wind-Swirls

Every gust fragmented or refracted

by each angle of partial brickwork

tracing every sloping or fractured line.

Here too was the trail to Black House

along the horseshoe curve—

so vast as to be imperceptible—

white cliff and crystal bluff,

abode of the Towering House Clan, ancient People of the Rock

seen in the tightness or slackness of stonework

binding miles of masonry,

which jut out

like the fossils that shadow the slate

of the cliff.

Preterit to this Past.

HOUSE-RISING-

UP-HIGH [covered hole]

////the ants

emerging from their kivas

scry through quartz

the rise of Yellow House

now mantled in the dust

of its own pulverized mortar.

Or

Black Wood Place,

Charcoal Place,

petrified in petroglyphs leading

Each Small House, Great House—each High and Goodly Pueblo—

to venerate the SUN,

most obvious of outside existences,

requiring no missionaries

to deliver its presence,

or convince of its being. Beams crosswise.

From roof to ladder

it is a game of angles

played in Pueblo space, in Pueblo mystique

on the virgin white of the under-hide of bison was

a labyrinth of adjoining chambers

sustained by the bones of ancient timber beams.

We were

stooping past the hallowed

threshold of t-form doorways dendro-chronicled

angled windows in a blare of blue

where every sun-point is a four-beam prism

of a rainbow bridge in red archways.

In order to deliver the presence

of the Sun

to the subterranean pit-house

or pillared kiva.

CANYON HOUSE in a slate show of fossils,

the village by the wash, pretty village.

That is what a Great House is,

an entire community in ONE HOUSE,

each is a village

in the House Where The Canyons Meet

Rockwhite

called CHACO (seen through a covered hole)

They have sometimes called it a place of crying, others a place of slavery, or else an Eden of innocent children who never knew strife, dominated in a creeping-place of cryptids which was

vague in the dark and phased out in the sun, a place that only giants could have built, and never without the aid of extra-terrestrials.

None of that.

It was only a Town-House where the canyons meet,

on the razor’s edge of sun and water,

tributary to the Rio Grande

which is now a dried-out wash

which still sometimes floods.

Still ascending

the mesa through a crack in the rock

to go in safety on all fours like a lizard.

Piddle

puddle

sandstone perforation.

Collection pools, flowing into one another

along the

slithering mesa top

green water

heavily silted

recent rain but drying

where, far from

the trailer-park meth-labs

the Ephedra Kachina

clings with rabbit-brush

to sips of source—

[wasn’t there supposed to be

a left turn at Albuquerque?]

This is spot overlooking the Village by the Wash

Half Moon pocked as if with stone wells,

Here overlooking the

Ruins the ghosts are still chipping

the plaster from the crevices,

Flint was broken and collected,

quartz refuse like broken glass

still catches the sun

glitter and harvest

of Hard Substances, and

Pottery sherds

like the bleached bones of Ancestors

poke out here and there from the earth.

Here they had their

harvest of hard stone,

eaten by our eye

[like the bones of our grandmothers and grandfathers, it all collapses back into the earth]

Descent eventually, by crevice

to the head of the Water-Serpent

plumed rattlesnake, horned,

for watershed, waterspout,

rain and river,

the SNAKE is all world waters

whose strike is lightning

venom and healing

perennial yet evanescent

SPRING and wellspring of cisterns

He squiggles spiral wise

into the coil at the bottom of clay pots—

petrified in wood

in flint

in high-windowed eyes that

squint in the sunshine

all Four Corners and Five Directions

include the CENTER, feathered in

whichever color sequence

identified the GROUP

Descent to Blue House, or a place named

Greasewood House

always and forever changing,

shifting sinking walls

still uphold the window in the upper corner

of the House of the Non-Sun-Struck Maidens

[the wood bears signs of fire-damage

though the sun was never supposed

to touch the skin of the Maidens]

peephole window, blocked shut,

outline of a trapezoid

concealing the blue blare

[from Outside]

Inside, pinpointed fires

could be seen at night

from the mesa-top amphitheater. What a show.

Sound of martial drumming,

In or outside?

The ghostly metate

of the Maidens, left,

ransomed for the scalps—

known by the turquoise ornament on the one

and the white shell ornament of the other.

The feather of a Macaw (exotic goods here)

is a crimson reminder

of the fate of the Two Non-Sun-Struck Maidens

the bloody glimpse out of the corner

of the eye of folklore

razor flint chipped near

the House in the Corner

SHINING HOUSE

No cryptids, but rainbow bridge in red arches browned,

a burnished autumn spent

lounging like a lizard on a heated rock.

Couldn’t you see it all as it was, scrying through

the crystal?

Looming tall in the canyon,

the series of Great Houses,

plastered pseudo pyramid

shining in prism of sun

whitewashed

red-banded, windows like the nests of cliff-swallows

rows of supporting beams poking out from the walls.

Like the faux vigas of Santa Fe.

The surrounding waterworks

sandstone lime filtered,

scaling the cliffs to maintain and clean them

dripped through pools of stone COLLECTION.

The Ancients

who in legend first warmed their crops with fire

for an Indian Summer

harvesting CANDYCORN with

squashblossom or cactusfruit for earrings.

What ceremonial complex snaked its way

through the plaza and over the rooftop spaces,

descending into the kivas

in processions of masked dancers

they memorized in dolls? These are

the spirits of the mountain and mesa tops

who chant for rain

[disarticulated doll, paint weathered away]

and dance to the bean and to the squash

to the corn

and the humble cottonseed boy,

all who

distribute feasts of plenty

doling out gifts or

threatening to strike

with their yucca whips

besmear you in mud

or sever your…

hair with a flint knife.

Repeatedly the drum pounds,

sounding nothing like before

by minute gradations

[transformed]

The Ant-People taught

the secrets of the pithouse;

the Swallow-People taught

the secrets of the cliff-nest;

the Wolf and Coyote-People taught

the secrets of human bones as if butchered for game

by anvil abrasion, pot polish,

and other signs—Canyon Cannibals

[sensationalized!]

where corn is the flesh of humankind,

and humankind is the flesh of corn

there’s no telling where that cycle leads

or if

the burden or refrain

said to be meaningless

are vestiges of ancient words

or some animist animalistic onomatopoeia

conjuring the cactus plant

on the ruin wall.

Rest for the

GERMINATOR

Once ushering in feasts of plenty—

How it all dried up, so to speak,

the seed of the Ancient Ones scattered

Southwards

to known and unknown dwellings.

A mystery that is not a mystery:

Ancestor Other,

Called Enemy Ancestor

in the Navajo tongue

the ANASAZI

Ancestral Pueblo point of reference to

the masonry

through add-ons and renovations

possibly additional fortifications

[again, the scorching on the ancient timber]

Fall colors have followed

disintegrating brick by brick

stone by stone

in grain by grain of sand

forming an hourglass in geological time.

Black on White

in sherds protruding

Corded Ware for cooking. Pottery,

broken for the rest of the dead

broken for the destruction of the village

broken by accident while travelling.

Pots broken,

they sing a chant for

Rain

RAIN

for the thirsty dust, so easily made green, but briefly

seduced by the many acts of a vast theatrical spectacle

and ritual that no one person can witness or know in entirety

the initiates of this or that cult are

edified by this and that scene,

a drama in itself,

privy to the moonflower madness alone,

but never seen by all

and all from different angles.

The ruin stands strong, chipped away like archways.

We follow fall colors from earth to sun

from stone to sand and sand to stone

[the mountains are melting].

All this mirage of landscape

and hard stone harvest

eaten by the eye

is made part of the body.

Sun-struck,

emerging from the pit-house

and clinging to constellations and solstices,

the ants toil, constructing their

torch-clustered space observatory

in the House of Houses

and marking

the affinity of stardust for stardust.