Mother Church #3

KIN KLETSO/YELLOW HOUSE

CHACO CANYON, SAN JUAN COUNTY, NEW MEXICO

ANASAZI RUINS, AD 1125-1130

For Henri, at 2

You step down into the Flat World

Then ask me to say it, to explain

How our name can mean both ancestor

And enemy. Your body begins in four directions.

Here, one calendar takes eighteen years.

I am three. One day is an eyelash.

Your body is a segment of prehistoric road,

A buried stairwell with only the top stair obvious.

We are alluvial, obsidian.

Sometimes the ground swells

With disappointment; sometimes we know our mountains

Will be renamed after foreign saints.

We sing nine-hundred-year-old hymns

That instruct us in how to sit still

For forty-nine years

Through a fifty-year drought.

We climb down through the hole anyway,

And agree to the arrangement.