Vox Populi
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Michael Daley: The Kid
When the junkies stole everything in Albuquerque,
we turned north
thinking maybe Taos would unfold its risky secrets.
It was the first time I let myself believe
I may have ridden too far in the unforgiving West.
But, dropped at Las Trampas,
we stood where a morning baked the walls
of the fabled San Jose de Gracias little mud church (Cathedral, really),
threshold as they all are darkened by centuries of bare footprints.
That was when the two immortals—
as I’ve always invented them—strolled downhill
mocassined, in matched fedoras,
across their smiles a breeze twirled purple scarves of welcome
for ravaged travelers like me—and the guardian,
an angel really, armed with the requisite longbow,
oddly unstrung for peaceful transport,
who’d lost the power of speech
when geologic time lumped against colonial eons.
A burning
rubbed into those five-hundred-year adobes
still glows inside
the lit scatter of poorly remembered
villages we walked through, carrying nothing (well—a stringless bow).
More than fifty years shot past, but I’d go there now.
“The Traps” it was called.
Apaches, because it was their home, trapped
and with flawless arrows from a high perch
pinned down the first settlers, formerly
lifelong slaves, kidnapped as children, made tribeless
then abandoned here by oligarchs
in this bastion for Santa Fe’s hallowed reliquaries,
a colonial eon ago.
We drifted through the village, but no one spoke.
While rusting trucks squealed past,
he showed me his Karate leaps and kicks.
Our next ride pulled over
ten minutes later.
~~~~~
Copyright 2024 Michael Daley
Michael Daley is a retired teacher who lives near Deception Pass in Washington. His poetry collections include Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest, Of a Feather, and Born With.
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In this panormamic poetry travelogue, every sentence appears to fall easily on the page. Yet there’s great care here in the way they fall, great descriptive precision, so that the sentences arrive in pristine condition, newly minted. One example would be the second stanza, ending with these luminous five lines:
“…and the guardian,
an angel really, armed with the requisite longbow,
oddly unstrung for peaceful transport,
who’d lost the power of speech
when geologic time lumped against colonial eons.”
Thank you, Michael, for “The Kid.”
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Thanks, Ed. You describe the way the rich language of the poem seems inevitable and natural.
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Wow!
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I am transported to my birth state, New Mexico, a wonderful poem that brought up the sigh I always utter when I enter that state, and also a memory of strange masked beings who suddenly appeared on a hill above a pit stop in Mexico
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I grew up in the southwest, and I’ve always felt New Mexico is a very spiritual place.
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Such a visual narrative — so well told. And the last sentence in the second stanza: chilling.
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There’s an epic hiding inside this poem.
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