SALLIE BINGHAM
APACHE
Fiercest, most nearly
unbroken, they harbor
silence. Peach trees
bloom, timber
roughs their hilltops,
the government gives
houses. Nothing buys
their words, more
closely held
than wives.
I kneel. What you have made
is spread on cloth. It’s cold here
under the arches of the governors’
palace. The brooch and belt
are ingot-made, you say, not cast
from metal filings. I don’t ask
where you found your silver—
in what wash or well. Blind
exchange helps my heart. You take
what’s worthless, hand me, wrapped
in film, this grainy silver.
Packed in my pick-up, the saints are smiling.
Soon they will regain
mantelpiece, table top where once they reigned
before the brief departure of their making.
My mother saw saints, too,
different ones:
Saint Rita, who is too pure to live;
Raphael, the archangel,
who healed a man’s blindness by annointing his eyes
with cooked fish.
I know she saw the martrydom of Saint Julita,
who wears a stigmata like a rose on
her forehead.
But I do not believe she saw Our Lady of Wisdom
and Young Hearts,
who is a skull, who carries hearts in her hands,
or the retalbo
of Adam and Eve, sleek as sunbathers,
smiling over their serpent,
or Fantasma, that coy skeleton,
showing her bones
through her red net skirt.
THE PUEBLO REBELLION:
AUGUST 10TH, 1680
A knotted cord carried
by a runner from town to town
signalled the chosen date: undo
a knot, you move closer
to the uprising. The last town
breached a boundary
not to be rebuilt: adobe bricks
under a hard rain slide
into the dirt.
The knot’s loosed, death is loosed
like sheep around the low walls,
ground with the corn under the metate.
In the forward-seeing eyes
of the old men, the end is already
pictured: encomienda, repartimiento—
taxes, servitude, bitterer when it comes
a second time, each town alone,
sinking like a blackened pot
into its own ashes.
