Passing
Because many artists move to Taos, I thought the colors would be bright.
The mountainsides are showing me what little I know about form.
I’ve seen height, not this contrast, a rolling softness
turning rough then soft again along the drive. The afternoon sun
shutters all texture inside my body. A reminder that the most protected pain
can allow touch. I’ve never had interest in light. My new friend Jaynie
says she hasn’t seen this kind. She has thirty years on me
and a Jewish understanding of grief. In her neighborhood, everyone knows
to give it a year. Jaynie lives in New York. Her beauty, a bothness
of sharp and smooth, attracts the intrigue of retired CEOs and townies.
She practices driving by accelerating down a valley and breaking
where she wants to hike. My casita has a window seat
overlooking the cottonwoods. When they lose their leaves, I can see the crow
calling his friends to tell them I’m awake which means their daily peanuts
will soon arrive on a stump. Sometimes the magpies beat them there.
They fight with one another while the crows share. You’re the town gossip
of corvids, Jaynie says. Her casita is a small meadow away.
There, she sculpts abstract slopes by rolling paper tightly and gluing it on casts.
On a gallery wall, they look like a breast’s dream of community.
A year I did not expect to survive is passing while tarantulas are out looking
for lovers. My muscles, my softest organs, have exacted anniversary.
They recount each old minute while a bighorn sheep watches me watch him
his hooves anchoring on the gorge edge. A hawk hovers so close above
I can see the kaleidoscope of each red marking. Everyone around me
wants to live. Has learned movement around what is dry. Jaynie doesn’t relax
well. On our drive, the setting sun fills her with height and sage and pastel.
Her gestures fling all of it our way. Will you LOOK! At this light.
***
Author photograph courtesy of K. Iver
