from Exhibits from the American Water Museum

99.

From an original rock painting in Topock, Arizona, now digitized on a

wall-mounted monitor:

Before this city, the Creator pressed his staff

into the earth, and the earth opened—

it wasn’t a wound, it was joy—joy!—!

Out of this opening leaped earth’s most radical bloom: our people—

we blossoms from the original body: water,

flowering and flowing until it became itself, and we, us:

                                              River. Body.

78.

The first violence against any body of water

is to forget the name its creator first called it.

Worse: forget the bodies who spoke that name.

An American way of forgetting Natives:

Discover them with City. Crumble them by City.

Erase them into Cities named for their bones, until

you are the new Natives of your new Cities.

Let the new faucets run in celebration, in excess.

Who lies beneath streets, universities, art museums?

                                               My people!

I learn to love them from up here, through concrete.

La llorona out on the avenues crying for everyone’s

babies, for all the mothers, including River, grinded

to their knees and dust for the splendid City. Still,

we must sweep the dust, gather our own bodies like

messes of sand and memory. Who will excavate

our clodded bodies from the banks, pick embedded

stones and sticks from the raw scrapes oozing

our backs and thighs? Who will call us back

to the water, wash the dirt from our eyes and hair?

Can anybody uncrush our hands, reshape them

from clay, let us touch one another’s faces again?

Has anyone answered? We’ve been crying out

for 600 years—

                                           Tengo sed.