The title poem for this book I will read next.
"The Ripped-Out Seam."
I don't know if I need to explain.
Acoma Pueblo is considered to be the oldest inhabited city
in North America.
It's the home of the Acoma people,
though there are only about six people who actually live up
there now.
And it's a city-- a pueblo city built
on top of a very high mesa, not too
far from Grants, New Mexico.
And there's a reference here to that Pueblo,
and their particular style of pottery which is always painted
black on a white surface.
"The Ripped-Out Seam."
"I will never stitch back together the horned toad
that I halved with a shovel.
All summer, in my mind, holding itself upright,
trying to balance its torso between its front legs,
the toad has tried to drag itself forward,
to escape the agonized coils of its own entrails spilling
out of the gaping absence of its lower body.
No meaning I can think of, no matter how deft of hand,
can knit the pale distended bowels,
or reconnect the webbed feet's chaotic twitching
to the brain that lunged, leapt, propelled them forward.
I was excavating a pit for the children
to play in with their fleets of miniature cars,
and must have scooped the legs from the body in one motion.
When I lifted the shovel and saw the flayed skin resting
in the blade, I thought the thighs cavities bloodless
and filled with dirt were the ancient remains of a cat's
nightly predation, or the relic of a hibernation
from which the horned toad never awoke.
But then I saw the upper half--
alive, sitting at the edge of the heaped earth
where it, too, it had been tossed.
What shocked me was how perfect the unwounded half of the body
was--
the eye stunned gold, the jaws tiny teeth,
the spines prickled barbs, the crimson gills breathing color,
the throats throbbing rhythm, the head and four legs
trying to go on, to continue--
while the lower half had been interrupted,
in the emptying out of the blue and yellow guts, the soft pulp
of its liver and lungs.
That was June, now it's the end of August.
And in my mind, I'm still carrying the still living torso
behind a tree, where I hit it with a shovel,
fracture the skull, so it will no longer suffer
what I have done to it.
Again and again, the creature drags itself forward,
tries to reunite the two halves of what it is,
to heal the wound it keeps dragging behind.
Only in the ripped-out seams of body, of mind,
do we resemble each other--
rendered together, the horned lizard and the human figure
drawn in black on the white surface of every vessel
that the Acoma people paint and sell to tourists.
They shrug if anyone asks what the meaning is
of this design, of that one, at the idea
that everything must mean something other than it is.