Places of Peace - Y Magazine
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Places of Peace


 Anasazi ruins By Mary Lynn Bahr

Like all who are truly wise, the Anasazi built their houses on rocks. They built beneath high canyon walls, where the sheltering cliffs provide shade in the summer and capture southern light in the winter. They built watchtowers and places of refuge to guard their families, their sacred places, and the canyon valleys where the corn grew. On some walls they painted figures and made handprints, like signatures.

Though these ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians moved further south six centuries ago, the desert climate of the Four Corners area has preserved many of their dwellings. From their windows the vistas are wide and deep; the isolation of most sites guarantees the solitary visitor a silence like eternity.

Yet there are many voices here. Smoke-stained ceilings and cooking pits remember the grain, the hearth fires, and the songs. A threshold set by ancient hands stirs memories in the marrow of those who cross it. The stones do indeed tell stories to those who are privileged to visit and imagine.

Val Brinkerhoff, BYU associate professor of photography, has spent the last five years visiting Anasazi ruins and imagining them as only a photographer can. Intrigued by the Anasazi’s architectural decisions and motivated by a desire to preserve their dwellings, in 1993 Brinkerhoff began taking documentary photographs of the cliffside towns. He was none too soon: many sites have been irreparably vandalized by careless tourists. In solo expeditions made interesting by encounters with tarantulas, bats, badgers, and a B-16 bomber (not to mention heat, heavy equipment, and a few precarious climbs), he has now photographed scores of the more than 5,000 known ruins in the Four Corners area where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet. His project combines the latest in photographic and print technology with the most ancient of subjects.

Like Brinkerhoff, Susan Elizabeth Howe has spent countless hours enjoying the natural and human wonders of the Southwest–and turning them into art. A BYU associate professor of English, Howe is a Utah native and a nationally published poet. The poems selected here include meditations drawn from sandstone and juniper, stars and sunrises. For Howe, the ancient stones speak volumes: she has felt the pulse beneath painted handprints.

Few things more powerfully illustrate the essential sameness of humans than the mark of a hand. In all human cultures, the hand harvests food to sustain life and creates art to sustain the soul. With their hands the Anasazi cooked, warred, loved, and prayed in their stone towns. With your hands you now hold a sampling of some of Brinkerhoff’s most eloquent prints and Howe’s most stunning poetry. We hope the combination helps you feel kinship with the Anasazi and reverence for their places of peace.


Anasazi ruinsArch Angel
Stone spirit

a thousand feet tall,
she watches in this high desert
over great arches of sandstone.
With two companions, presides
in sacred valleys the Anasazi knew.
I had come before,
an earlier pilgrimage,
but missed my angel
because she was hidden by signs
naming her one of “Three Gossips”
and striking me blind.
But I learned the truth
and returned, though authorities
at the visitors’ lodge
discouraged me with questions
of erosion and the cryptobiotic
crust. “She is not eager
to help you,” they said,
“having her own struggles.
And then there are matters
of worthiness.” I came ahead,
climbing out of the morass
on hairpin curves,
arriving before her
just after sunrise.

She turns her face from me
but blazes forth,
an archangel studying dawn
for all the power
of light. She shows
me her wings,

their great curves
rising out of her back,
as though her grandeur
proceeded from her self..
I hadn’t considered her pain–
her feet are trapped
in the bluff; she eats salt
to match my bitterness;
the sting of sand
always burns her eyes.
Layers crumble, year
by year, from her lips
She speaks to me, and
this is her voice:The world is harsh,
not of your making,
beautiful and dry.
Do not pretend
it can’t kill you.
I will wrestle my angel, free
climb her skirts, toehold
by toehold, angling my ascent
across her stomach, around
to the great wings.
If I reach her ear
before I am thrown down,
“Break from these stones,” I’ll say.
“Give me my name and teach me
the physics of sunrise

Anasazi ruinsMoonhouse-window-Final 

Summer Days, A Painting by Georgia O’Keeffe
The skull of an elk is the center–parched, cleanedAnasazi ruins
Of flesh, brown and white whorls
Where eyes and nostrils used to be.
Three-pronged antlers curl out of the head
Like our best thoughts, pointing out
Where things are and what we do
And do not know. The skull floats in the vacant
Sky, a mirage as deep as life, antlers
Earth-brown, darker along the curves.
The skull broods over the living
Flowers, the rest of the mirage, bright desert
Blossoms of yellow, red, mauve. Sturdy and
Delicate, they pull us in like a heart
Beat, like love. Pull us as far as we can go.
Behind skull and flowers, the horizon
Marks the limits. Hot sandstone mountains
Range under a sea of clouds as here and there the sky
Pools. We want to see forever into
Summer, but boundaries hold.
Brought back to the center, we belong
To the mirage: Above a brief flowering
Heart, behind our own faces, wait
Eyeless sockets and the silent, imminent skull.Anasazi ruins

 Why I Am A Witch 

Anasazi ruinsBecause each October the maple in the field
Takes fire and I stand to watch it burn.
Because sun strikes the far slope
Until the aspens rise, smoky gold.
Because of the edge of the crag.
Because stars hide themselves in the sharp blue,
Waiting. Because I can name things and know
They will change. Because the light
Won’t always be there and because
Nothing should hurt that much.


 Lessons of ErosionAnasazi ruins 

To hike to the spires, you climb
Over two hundred million years,
Language and breath your sacrifice.
This is no temple. Everything growing
On red stone you cross, broken
And deep, twists against light.
Splayed and shredded juniper trunks
Show you to adapt, so you match
Your stride to the scars
That split rock, the path rain
Took down the stone face
Into the wash. There is no water,
Just its memory: a gouge
In the escarpment, dry bed below.Ripples over sand become stone,
Stone ripples broken like shards.
More ruin waits for weather–
Cloudburst, blizzard, ice.
As you walk in this high, hot air,
Sun sears color into cliffs, and
Breath comes dry from your mouth.
Silken and lush in your body, a drum
Full and tight, water throbbing
Inside, you are learning
The long version of silence.
Few things are less personal
Than how the land needs you,
Saliva, blood, bile.

Things in the Night SkyAnasazi ruins

First the deepening of elements we long for
Like myth, forgiving experience into patterns
We can scatter, random as stars.
The call of a bird lifts its own coolness,
Music like weep and few. Bats awaken, fly.
The vast, hollow dome evening is becoming
Reminds us we live on a planet and can endure
Absence, where we’re moving,
Though not without incidents
Of light. Intent, we study darkness
To learn metaphors for light.

We have always imposed ourselves
Upon the sky. We say darkness grows
Or gathers,
 as if it were a crop,
Name planets for ourselves, our gods.
And through the night, draw lines
That aren’t there, connect stars
Into semblances we can survive–Lion, Hunter, Swan.
But stars, immense, burn and burn
And luminous galaxies spiral
Beyond our planet’s small noise.
Their gravity would call us out.
We are surrounded by ancient light
We can’t see, come millions of years
Through space we can’t recite.

As for what will help us, perhaps
To lie flat against the earth, look up
Till we can see things in the night sky.
Gravity is all that keeps us from falling
Out there, beyond where it is possible
To consider who we are.

  


Poetry printed by permission of Susan Elizabeth Howe. Copyright 1997.