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Recalling Mountainair, NM
Royal Rhodes

These pioneers made their livelihood by farming
before statehood a few fertile acres of pinto beans

until one drought after another pushed them to Texas
to labor in the lucrative but raucous fields of oil rigs.

But they still remembered the undulating horizon line
of the nearby Manzano Mountains and the clean air.

Land they worked had seen others long before them —
people whose autograph was in ritual petroglyphs —

and beneath the pictographs of curlicued cloud whirls
sat mesas that showed shells from ancient oceans.

The sun lights this arena for a long, slow-motion dance.
They stared at the land until the land became their minds.

A coyote carried a meal into the start of the far foot-hills,
leaving trespassed fields half-buried in sand storms.

The air was so arid that rainfall dried up before it reached ground,
yet those on wagons were swept up avoiding flash floods.

And if it stopped snowing, then they did not call it snow,
all those times that blizzards tired of being blizzards.

Under each hill are other hills hidden in the cloaking night,
punctuated by asterisks against the sky — black with bat flight.

These memories become like anaesthetic snow, except
for the scar still visible on my father’s furrowed brow

where as a child the tines of a tiller marked him for life.

—
Royal Rhodes taught classes on global religions and death & dying for over 40 years. His work has appeared in various literary journals, including: The Montreal Review, Cholla Needles, The Lyric, Ariel Chart, Snakeskin Poetry, and Plum Tree Tavern. His art and poetry collaborations have been published in several hand-crafted collections with The Catbird-on-the-Yadkin Press in North Carolina.

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