#47 Next Time by Jane Lipman

for James McGrath

I’ll be tamarisks
below sandstone cliffs
a pool of deep clear water
transparent to the bottom

I’ll be cougar
climbing rimrock
hundreds of feet high
over a gliding rill

I’ll be a broken place
a fissure where driftwood
bobcat or child
can curl and rest

I’ll be water hurtling down a dry bed of sand
wave following wave
plunging, tumbling
into flood

I’ll be gorge sculpted by water and time
grand arches flaring red
reflected in quiet water
I’ll be steps to steep summit
carved into rock

I’ll be reverberations between cliffs
echoing wall to wall
I’ll be crags and curved terraces
shadow-filled; rococo silhouettes carved
in beige and mauve, purple and umber

I’ll be canyon cathedrals
domes and pinnacles
jubilation of sun, rain and wind
in thrall to streams pelting swift
a thousand feet below
at the heart of it all

—

Jane Lipman’s chapbooks, The Rapture of Tulips and White Crow’s Secret Life, Pudding House Publications, were finalists for New Mexico Book Awards in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Her poems have appeared in Runes, Santa Fe Literary Review, Sin Fronteras, New Mexico Poetry Review, Adobe Walls, and are forthcoming in Malpais Review.

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#46 Taos at Sunset by Scott Wiggerman

The long expanse of nothing

            is partly what makes it everything.

                        Beyond phone lines and brush,

 

past the occasional adobe home

            and its tiny spattering of lights,

                        stretch mountains across the horizon,

 

backlit now with blinding orange,

            which mellows soon to a gentle pink

                        rippling across the underbelly of clouds.

 

Later these mountains and clouds

            turn an identical charcoal blue,

                        mirror one another as they turn deeper,

 

almost purple.  The last vestiges

            of pink edge into the fading skyline  

                        and the land before us goes black,

 

leaving only skies as wide as the West,

as promising as a lover’s dream,

            as memorable as the first time.

 —

Scott Wiggerman is the author of two books of poetry, Presence, from Pecan Grove Press, and Vegetables and Other Relationships.  A workshop instructor, he also an editor for Dos Gatos Press, publisher of the annual Texas Poetry Calendar, and the recent collection of poetry exercises, Wingbeats.  His website is http://swig.tripod.com