The meeting in Lamy this afternoon was not about losing our train—although I hope in the future that will be addressed—but about the plan, discovered by accident a week ago when workmen began to lay a concrete pad near the train station (there was no state, county or federal oversight, no permits required because of the special status the railroads hold here) where Pacer Oil Company of Farmington, New Mexico is planning to built a depot for the deposit of twenty-five to fifty double-tanker-trailer loads of crude oil weekly, to wait for shipment on tanker cars that somehow can travel on tracks that are unsafe for passenger trains.
Hopper Light
Hopper light doesn’t protect, but neither does it isolate; in his mysterious paintings, it sometimes seems to me that the slightest movement—getting up off a bed, going out a door—would change not only the composition and the meanings we gladly ascribe to it, but the light, itself.
Ten Favorites: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class.
Ten Favorites: The Fire Next Time
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning: Adrienne Rich and Colette
So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class.
Water… Cool, Clear Water
We seem particularly unable, here in the desert Southwest, to learn from these earlier techniques; there are no light-proof shades over the windows here in the middle of the day, no habit of closing early and opening late (which used to be the rule in the U.S. South), no planting of trees to provide crucial shade.
A Perhaps Hand
“Spring is like a perhaps hand in the window,” e e cummings wrote, and while I can never literally explain what he meant—what line of poetry can be literally explained?—the line always comes to mind when I see the first hints that spring will eventually be here, even in the mountains of northern New Mexico: a bud encrusted with snow, a nest that will soon be used, the first leaves of the daffodil bulbs I planted last fall.
Chicken Picking and Flag Flying
As the snows begin to recede here in the southern Rockies, the descansos by the sides of our roads come back into view. These are shrines created by families who have lost someone in a car wreck at that spot.
Getting Ready to Read: 48 Hours Ahead of Time
Preparing to read from my new collection Mending: New and Selected Stories, at the Alamosa Bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, goes beyond wondering who will be there, which is always impossible to predict.
The Fire Next Time
For us here in Santa Fe, the worst has passed, since we are directly across the valley from Los Alamos and therefore most disturbed by heavy smoke and the terrifying vision of huge plumes rising thousand of feet into the air.