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JEANNE SIMONELLI
Department of Anthropology
Wake Forest University,
P.O. Box 7807
Winston-Salem, NC 27109-7807

Sacred Sights

Thunder slides out of the canyon
into the thin darkness;
not as black as the guardian shape
of resting Dog Rock,
where the spent storm moon
reaches into cracks and crevices,
burial creches where infants with skeletal eyes
stare out from rotting cradle boards
hidden in places Coyote can't slip.

And Aunt Irene,
with face as round as her lunar twin,
stands in the Wash near the sentinel shadow
holds fast to the ceremonies,
and the sacred locations,
the words the word-keepers passed on
in a time when the praying
fit to the problem--
proper songs, remedies for imbalance

She knew to say:
Bless these legs kept safe
from marauding ghost shapes;
Bless this horse moving faster
than pursuing ghost shapes.

Cannot bless this S10 blazer,
four-wheel Ranger,
bought with too much down
for too many months
outside Gallop, sad town
of drive-thru liquor
"20-20" solace in a place too lost
for even a ghost visit.

Aunt Irene kept the ceremonies
safe from would-be chroniclers
and earnest nieces;
she simply could not be sure
what form Coyote might take
in the telephone, internet universe

where all the sad encounters are stored
in a small wooden cask--
the remains of Kit Carson
or three bleached skulls with bullet holes
shot clear through the forehead,
displayed in the tourist shop,
down at Fort Sumner,
at the end of the Long Walk;

the long walk out of the world
where the sheep grazed on warm grass
in moist canyons
before the arroyos cut through--
sharp, like dying and drinking
like not enough corn fields;

though these are not battles being fought
or needing to be exhumed
just something gone awry,
in need of a singer
a bundle of sage,

the sacred datura
which shows the full story
in the bleak and black midnight
becoming silent by day--

like Aunt Irene
standing alone in the Wash
beneath the sentinel shape
of looming Dog Rock.

Send the Biligana,
that unbalanced white woman,
to check on the babies
and the velveteen grandmas
all the dead laid to rest--

while Irene weighs the telling
of the sites and the stories
against a world that has changed too fast--
weighs and waits
until the sugar sickness takes her

centuries of wisdom,
drain out through dialysis tubing,
unheard.

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