Found rolled in a rusted can by a cairn. Not far from us, halfway between the ridge and Sangre de Cristo. I asked at East Mountain, even at Zimmerman, nothing. Not sure who wrote it. Not sure when. Send thoughts.

With love, 

1.

There is much left of the valley. Cactus and rimrock. Scrub oak. The broken chair we found in the woods, preserved in its age. 

There are the steps we made together, still pressed into the dirt.

And the tenement below the cliffside— do you remember? We found it on a July morning climbing the ridgeline, trying to get out of the rain. Scattered rocks. Placed carefully. Have they been here long?

No, I thought. Someone put them here.

But don’t you think, you said to me, they might have been here for a very long time? They have settled into what is quickly becoming mud. 

Sometimes, in the old summers especially, a stream would run through the valley. We could hear it from the house. Complement to the rain.

2.

I went to feed the chickens their many-colored grain. Up the scree early yet so the sky is deep like water. Past prickly pear still blooming. Limbs catching on juniper. The air loud as I reached the ridgeline.

A lion waited for me. Its claws were blood and feathers, halved corpses splayed on the rocks. The wire front of the coop bent and twisted; it lifted a foaming paw. Tongue brushing a tooth, eggshell-white.

Why are you here? it asked. 

To feed the chickens.

But there are no chickens to feed. 

I want to run. I want to tumble down the path skidding, blood on my knees. 

It notices me. Blinks, eyes violet. I remember what mother told me: mountain lions hunt at dawn and at dusk.

I can’t move.

Will I see you again? I say, quietly.

Yes, it says. Some other time. With gray fur—except where the blood has already started to dry—it becomes a shadow. Twists down into the valley. Sun painting hills golds and blues.

3.

I grew up in a house within a lull. A small house: two rooms. Some mornings, light would come through the windows, catching terracotta Mother kept so clean.

 

I remember leaving that house, grandmother’s house, for the other, the skeleton, on a day without flowers.

We walked. The day was gray. Dark like the lightning-struck tree, barbed wire rusting with yucca.

The wind blew. It was breaking something away.

And there was Father’s house, in front of us. Flat fronted. Crooked teeth of wooden supports. Windows like the eyes of owls. 

 

In the little house, Mother woke early. Still dark. Took water in a kettle, baked it, turned it to steam and bitterness.

One moment there were stars. Then the sky was just blue enough to drown them out. Only the silhouettes of familiar trees, junipers and the ponderosa from our window.

There were things to do, dishes to scrub, corn to mash, garden to tend. Quiet to be kept, broken, worn to a ball.

 

I woke. Confused by the light. I tried to see the sun rise. I was always too late.

Then there was Father, still sleeping, light soft but enough to find lines upon his face. Could never see them, any other time. 

By the time he stirred, was over the hills. 

4.

Through Carnuel he came last night.

At sunset he walked, like a stranger, gold-flecked dust. But steady. The people watched: they knew him, tall, even spider-like, long face, skin and red veins. 

 

He went quickly. Rotting town above him. A shelf up the mountainside, rock choked, houses. Sandia granite, juniper, and grama.

Houses until Tijeras, stream and the cottonwoods. One day, they will build a highway here.

 

They will roll blacktop down the canyon, where it fits best. Cars will never stop running eastwards from the living edge of Albuquerque. They will glance at homes – the ones that remain – to their left and right.

They will build a highway to cut Carnuel in half. He reached the place where the canyon curves. Sandstone red before him. If he looked, he could see the sun perched on slopes all the way to the crest.

He does not look. He is sunburnt. Passing through Tijeras. He is going home.

5.

Mother spoke once of a man she met. Not a stranger. Old man who walked along the old dirt tracks— cart tracks, before they were mangled in the wash.

This was before the rain stopped.

He walked with her, talking about the way things had been.

6.

He remembered when they came to the valley, Grandmother and Grandfather.

Grandfather from the east. Indiana, water, mud, green and flat. And hot. He left without saying goodbye.

The rumor and time took him to Quemado. He met the daughter of a curandera and a goatherd. They spoke in her narrow house, one room, in the dark.

My grandfather, she was telling him, was struck by lightning.

Yes? He did not believe her; her English was not good.

You can still find the spot it hit him. On the mesa.

They left in the night. She had been married, but not in the church. They moved along the plain, by days, by nights. Towards the center.

 

Front edge of the Sandias caught them at dawn. Flame on the basin.

 

A lull for a house, past Tijeras, past the great hill. Half a mile down the ridge scree.

Grandmother started on the garden. Destroyed by the cottontails. He moved rocks, he did not understand adobe. The neighbors came to watch. Sometimes they helped. 

Soon he built a house. A two-room house. They had a daughter in this house who would be my mother. Grandmother built the garden again; the deer stayed away, the cottontails stayed away.

 

Mother sat here as a child. On the granite bluff, over the streambed. Dry usually but today a tepid stream. She sat and looked at the dead top of a piñon sapling. Felt her fingers brush blue-gray lichen beside her.

Again and again she thought, I know this place.

 

Twice Grandmother’s sisters came from Datil and Farmington, to inspect the house. They had spoken the other language, while Father lingered by the pine grove, while the sisters sent side glances at the child.

 

It was raining. The yuccas were blooming. There was a mistake.

Grandfather was mucking out a packrat. Fever the next day; two mornings, there were black spots on his skin. Granny Hornbeck came to wash his skin with water and corn liquor. Night fell. It was dark, very cold for the summer.

 

I see bones, he was saying. I see bones in the ditch, I feel sand between my teeth.

When Hornbeck returned, they had already buried him in the place with the curved stones. Grandmother always meant to carve his name. There was never enough time.

I go to visit sometimes. It has an ache.

 

7.

A chunk of limestone, revealed by the groundbreaking. Unremarkable except for the outline of a ochre shell, fine as the pressed wing of a cabbage fly. Edge blurred like a shadow cast in early summer.

(It swam here. When this place was an ocean, death and weather rubbed its mantle on the seafloor. Then a shell. Time pressed sand and chitin to stone. The fault—fire beneath—broke limestone in silver ridges from the dirt.

 

In Tijeras, they will build a factory. Smoke on the hills, and a thin metal frame. Around will be treeless dust, terraced walls of gray dust.

Inside, bonds will be broken. Stone and silken cement; it will smell like dead air. The factory stretches at night. In winter they will mark it with a star. 

It will be quiet. Soon part of the landscape, inextricable. It will be the first thing my mother sees on the drive to Albuquerque.)

 

We put the stone in a ring around a tree, where mother planted an iris. Globemallow bloom indiscriminate. After a year or two, the fossil disappears.