Places of Peace

  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.

Arch 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

Summer Days, A Painting by Georgia O’Keeffe

The skull of an elk is the center–parched, cleaned 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.

---

Why I Am A Witch  Because 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 Erosion  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 Sky 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.