MaverickMagazine - http://www.maverickmagazine.com
Seeing in the True Light
http://www.maverickmagazine.com/articles/25/1/Seeing-in-the-True-Light/Page1.html
Ramón E. Martínez
Ramón E. Martínez grew up in New Mexico and Arizona. Poems from his full-length collection, The Receipt of Fern Seed have appeared in: A Poetry Mag, American Poetry Review, Balcones, Bilingual Review, Black Warrior Review, Cape Rock, Century, Contact II, Croton Review, Gila Review, Glens Falls Review, Graham House Review, The Greenfield Review, Inlet, Inscape, Panoply, Rio Grande Writer's Newsletter, Riversedge, Víaztlan, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He is currently seeking a publisher for The Receipt of Fern Seed.
 
By Ramón E. Martínez
Published on 10/1/1999
 
Making it is glazing a pot with running stars.

Success in this private congress
is natural as the pomegranate, fallen
heart up, dying in the road; the fence
that blows toward invisibility at dusk,

Making it is glazing a pot with running stars.

Success in this private congress
is natural as the pomegranate, fallen
heart up, dying in the road; the fence
that blows toward invisibility at dusk,
posts choked by red and black paisley bandanas.

Crickets slowly count out the temperature--
part of the trade we make with time.

We lease our towers to light and singing,
beneath dark ladders
to be part of the sun's golden dancers.

Lights shine over the stockyards,
empty corrals--
vaqueros in black chaps are
dead and gone. Moths turn,
windmills of small wings,
losing altitude.

Indians took the last Appaloosas
to Wind River, maybe, or Gilt Edge, Montana;
leaving half-moons of horseshoes in the sand,
shreds of blankets bleeding from mesquite.

 

Copyright © Ramón E. Martinez, 1999, 2009.  All Rights Reserved.