Checkerboard Mesa
Dear mesa, dome of rock, do you remember your deep past? Vast seas, minerals pinwheeling through torrents, slabs sunk in silt? Do you remember giant clams, their ridged shells, a primordial fish buried to its globule marble eye? Mottled gravel carried by streams, dumped into your valley, layer after layer compressed & thrust by tectonic shifts? Remember ice spearing into your pores, wind whittling lines across your face, where now a few plants survive in summer scorch? Where now I lie, trying to remember my scant descent. A great grandmother’s Yiddish name, the blue of my father’s eyes, my mother’s brown. Her smile before her memory-thieving disease. I can hardly remember my first home. Was my father really there? The after-that house built of stone (granite & sandstone, like you, mesa). Where five kids & our mother moved. The breakfast room, the dog waiting for gifts of liver & limp vegetables, slyly tossed. The backyard. The boy. Trees, rhododendron, grass, an abundance. Huckleberries in the nearby field, our buckets of plump fruit, its purple stain. The boy’s pocketknife we used to prick our fingertips & mix our blood—a forever bond. (Have two kids done that here?) The beloved creek in front & back. Salamanders cupped in the boy’s hand. In mine, a crayfish, its front claw brandishing air, desperate for something to grasp & hold. Like us back then. Like me, now. Searching for memories that slip away—like dirt falling between my fingers. A meager pile beside me, on top of you, immortal rock.
