Take it out in the rain sometimes.
It has vast, invisible wings that gather dirt
and need rinsing.
When it tries to kill you
that is because you've forgotten
to let it look into someone's eyes
for longer than a minute.
It needs that the way a bee needs nectar
in the early morning dew.
Every so often, take it on a journey.
Let it read long, hard books
and let it stare into the depths of the sea.
Yes, you can give it chips and whiskey
but from time to time let it kneel
in a place that is holy
like the simple cathedral of the willows.
All it wants is to live, to keep becoming.
Nourish it, and it puts down roots, it opens.
But starve it, and the mind, the flesh is empty;
the world breaks down; symphonies go unwritten;
the rockets fall; the children die
in flames.
Listen. It is not too late
to wake it. Say the names
of the wild, the forgotten things:
bluebird, red wolf, robin; violet, child, clover.
You cannot save the world but you can open
the window for the trapped wren in the cellar.
Read a book to a blind man, to your father.
Tell a child you do believe her anger.
Make your life the first life that you save.

Who made the world? 
Who made the swan, and the black bear? 
Who made the grasshopper? 
This grasshopper, I mean— 
the one who has flung herself out of the grass, 
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— 
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. 
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. 
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. 
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. 
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down 
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, 
which is what I have been doing all day. 
Tell me, what else should I have done? 
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? 
Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let's call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to 
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just 
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I 
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

This is New Mexico,
Where dusk
lights the Sandias ablaze,

each evening
a lesson in how to burn
without apology.

Where the wind
braids many tongues,
Tiwa,
Español,
English,
Dine,
       Zuni.
Keres,
 each one
heavy with history,
each one a river of memory

carrying both wound and wisdom,
each one
singing.

We were here before borders
had names,

before the state wore a seal.
And
The land remembers.

The land remembers every tear
dried into dust,
every name buried too quickly,
every prayer whispered into the wind.

We are a people of art and language,
Agriculture and spirit.
We are survival
shaped into story,
                                 stitched with
scar and ceremony,
History
Delivered in drumbeat

and defiance, with every beauty
this bruised and blessed State   still holds.
Here, the land remembers.
It holds our stories in sandstone,
carves our names into cottonwood bark,
remembers the weight of brown hands
bending to plant beans,
pull weeds,
raise children.

The land remembers not just who we are
but what we give back.
It is in the dirt beneath our fingernails.
That's prayer too.
This is for the ranchers
who wait out winter storms,
The farmers
who rise before sun,
the abuelos
who taught us when to plant by the phase of the moon,
The land remembers
how we show up
with seed and sweat,
how we
ask permission before we dig,
how we
bury our dead,
Our seeds
and our dreams
with equal ceremony.
The land remembers
                                             the hoe striking caliche,
          the blistered hands
                                              of field workers
                                turning soil
                                                                       into sustenance.
It remembers
                    irrigators
walking acequia banks
in dawnlight,
carrying shovels
as sacred
as rosaries.
It remembers
the ranchers
reading clouds
like scripture,
and the grandmothers
planting chile
that starts
with seeds of songs in their throats.

The land remembers
children chasing chickens,
families gathered
at matanzas,
and the quiet strength
of fathers
fixing fence posts
by moonlight.
We are not just from the land,
we are of it.
our backs shaped by harvest,
our calendars tied to planting,
to rain,
to corn,
beans,
and calabacitas blooming.
Our elders
held the line
with rosaries
and wisdom,
blue corn prayers
and red chile hunger,
Backs
bent
beneath
both
blessing
and
burden,
But
still showing up to pray,
to plant,
to plow.
because our spirit is stubborn.

Here,
our prayers
learn the language of dirt
through danza.
Duende
And
Corazon.
                        We summon ancestors
with
copal smoke
and
santuario sand
and chile ristras
thick as memory..
we confess our sins
on the mesas beneath the skies that reach forever.

We pray with piñon
and eagle feathers.

We survived,
cracked breath
Open hearted song
sung With Sangre.

New Mexico’s artists
harvest their art
from the land.

Muralists learn color
from sunsets.
Poets learn rhythm
from the river.

New Mexico is
mural and molcajete,
altar and asphalt,
it’s Tias folding chisme into tamales.

We are the
breath
borrowed from ancestors
and returned
as
vow.

New Mexico,
this sacred convergence of
Pueblo and Chicano,
Diné and Black,
Indo-Hispano,
Anglo,
Queer and Catholic,
ceremonial
and unsanctioned,

we breathe the same burning breath.

We sing the same songs
With hearts pumping
the same red blood

But
We do not seek sameness.

We seek harmony,
where difference can sing
Because each of us brings something
unique,
A different note
to make the melody authentic.

Together, we are New Mexico.

So
Here,
Today,
In this place of
laws
and government.

Every decision made here
           lands in a body
touches a field,
a family,
a future.
Budgets
become
breath.
Bills
become
blessings or
Burdens.

Language becomes either shelter
or scar.

We are New Mexico,
forged in sweat lodge
and barrio street,
in vigils lit with copal smoke
and candles to la virgen,

in verses stitched from
saxophone grief
And a brown boy’s prayer.

So as you open this session,

please understand

You are not
opening a meeting.
You are
entering a ceremony.
You are
stepping into story.
And story
as weight.
Story has

Consequence.

Story outlives us all.

So speak
like someone
whose words
will be remembered.

Write law
like it’s a lifeline.

Let your language
be shelter.

Let your budgets
remember
they are connected to bodies.
Let your policies ponder that
                                           they touch
breath,
                                  they touch
blood,
they touch
the tender places
where
a whole state

keeps its hurt hidden.

Because
the land remembers.

New Mexico
remembers,
with rancheras
and ristras
still ringing in its bones,
with dust
still holy on its tongue,
we are still here.
Still breathing.
Still singing.
Still sacred.

Nesting, the turtle seems to be crying even though she is simply secreting
her salt. Her dozens bud limbs inside amniotic pillows

as she leaves every egg in a cup of sand the size of her body,
shaped like a tilting teardrop—and both cryings

are mentioned by scientists. My niece Eve is startle-eyed when you feed her
avocado and when you feed her sweet potato. She lives mouth first:

she would eat  the sidewalk and piano, the symmetrical petals of the Bradford pear,
as if she could learn which parts of the world are made and how,

and yesterday she put her mouth on the image of her own face
in the mirror. Larkin says what will survive of us is love,

but the scientists say that the end of the decay-chain is lead and uranium and after that,
plastics. Just now the zooplankton are swallowing micro pearls of plastic

and the sea is  aflame with waste caught in the moon’s light.
Here is the darkening hour and here, the shore, as she droplets her eggs,

bright as ping pong balls, into the sand.  She can’t find the spot.
The beach is saltined with lights, neoned with spectacular

globes of light, a dozen moons instead of the one moon. Still, she lets them go
and one month later, tiny turtles hatch. They seem groggy,

carrying their houses of bone and cartilage to the ocean,
scrambling toward the horizon alongside the earth’s magnetic field.

Less than one percent of the hatchlings make it past
the seagulls and crabs, so Noah spent a summer dashing them to the water.

But my poem is not about the moment when a bird dove and bore
into the underflesh and into Noah’s memory.

My poem is about how we are gathered around Eve
in the kitchen as she eats a fruit she has never tried before

and each newness in the world
stops the world’s ending in its tracks.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.