Here is a preview of this morning's hottest ticket in town: The Church of Beethoven featuring Reich, J.S. Bach, and the poetry of V.B. Price. In good times and bad, Price has written about Albuquerque and New Mexico with courage, insight, and integrity. It is no surprise that Chaco Canyon calls to him again and again; his repect for our part of the world runs that deep.

V.B. Price, 69, is the series editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series at UNM Press. He's been writing an publishing poetry since the early l960s. His latest book of poems is Broken and Reset: Selected Poems 1966 to 2006.

"Both making poems and making a living have allowed me to pursue my real occupation of trying to repair my ignorance. I'm a working class writer and partial autodidact who was saved from a life of sordid tedium, and maybe even madness and crime, by believing I could evolve from my feral childhood and civilize myself by learning how to read, write, and think."


CHACO NIGHTS


The stars were his;
he’d breathed them in.

The Milky Way inside
was all around him,

a respiration of the night.
He had seen the Otherside

without idea, more beautiful
behind its veils of meaning,

invisibly far but known
like the stone in his pocket.

Who had let him in?
Why now at the stub of his life?

He’d been shown
how to climb the crevasse

to the top
where nothing

is what it is
because the is

is infinite. Yes,
he had felt

the great door opening,
night pouring into his lungs,

star streams in the dark
through the bay of his mind,


the night river full
of every sun

of every dawn rise
in the universe.

He knew he wasn’t
dying yet.

Many friends were gone,
many wiping their shoes

on the welcome mat of the end.
His turn would come around.

Cancer? Heart attack? Who knows?
Latvians, in a little town

on the border, hanged their Cleansed
from lamp posts, twenty of them,

(it was a small town),
before the Nazis invaded

and stole all their stuff.
Cancer, who knows?

Auto wreck, some terrible
slippage?

Who can second guess
the last of the strange

revelations?
Of course,

Pain and Fear are tricksters
They guide us to desert them;

hang on to their tails for the ride,
but don’t crawl

into their skins.
They’re already in them.


They will
serenely deign to destroy you.

Something else must come to us
from the night,

from the quaking ,
the dread supposings.

Something else
must open us wide,

roll us out
onto the cold, far road

to the Otherside, straight
as a thought can make it,

from nowhere to nowhere,
from lives of cowering

in desire, cowering
in the norm, praying it won’t

fall away and leave us
falling through the spaces.

Something else must open us wide
to climb from cowering in caution, up

the spine of the mind
into the night and its skeleton of stars,

climbing up into the currents
of the fecund nothing

forever ending, never over,
the space among the fires,

dark as the far end of it all,
with yes

everywhere we look,
bright as the fog of stars

exhaled into the night
and breathed back in

to the wholly ambiguous peace
in the deepest trust of our bodies.


________________________________________________
© V. B. Price, March 9, 2010


Poetry submissions are welcome. Email theditchrider@gmail.com. The whole Sunday Poem series is available from the front page of the DCF by clicking on The DitchRider in the left-hand sidebar. Poems early in the series are archived under "Previous Post" at the bottom of The DitchRider blog.