You still come to me like a fresh lover
Woman of brown and pale pink
I should have left everything for you
should have gone so deep into your heart
I’d get lost in yellow aspen leaves
stand on the straw of your autumn
I should never have taken another lover
I should have walked your hills
till my soles burned
till the sky that old dwarf
opened its secrets
till someone stopped whispering your name 1,000 miles away
—
Natalie Goldberg is a poet, teacher, and the author of eleven books, including her classic, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within–which has sold more than a million and a half copies and has been translated into fourteen languages–Wild Mind, Long Quiet Highway, Living Color, and The Great Failure. She has taught seminars for thirty years to people from around the world, and lives in northern New Mexico.
200 New Mexico Poems 