Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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colcha

university press of colorado

Contents

acknowledgments............................................................................ixintroduction: tierra.......................................................................1story......................................................................................3antonito...................................................................................5flight for life............................................................................7a letter to Guillermo concerning why i must write..........................................9the ditches of southern colorado...........................................................11el lugar de mi naciemiento.................................................................12cuando se secan las acequias...............................................................13tio Willie.................................................................................15zoot suit jesus............................................................................17bones of my people.........................................................................19regard for the dead........................................................................21tan poquito el amor luego perderlo.........................................................23apishapa my heart shaped sister............................................................24johnny redshirt please call your mother....................................................26colcha.....................................................................................28atlantic...................................................................................34thirteen ways of looking at a tortilla.....................................................36castigando el santo ramon fernandez........................................................39pronoun poem...............................................................................41the title of the poem......................................................................43untitled (verde)...........................................................................45trail to los cuates........................................................................46a letter from my journal to juan...........................................................48the mountains here are named after blood...................................................51a letter to an adopted son.................................................................53santa fe girl..............................................................................54the distance between us....................................................................55instructions on how to write a pinche suicide note.........................................56untitled...................................................................................58discussions with a ghost of his own creation on why he cannot go north.....................60cinco de mayo..............................................................................62coal train.................................................................................64december 20th..............................................................................66i like the way the singer of the song tells jesus..........................................71poem in c minor............................................................................73a river poem for someone i never knew......................................................76for the intentions we hold within the silence of our hearts................................783515 wyandot...............................................................................81mixed metaphor.............................................................................84salems.....................................................................................86winter after itself........................................................................87the gifts the mountain kept................................................................90independence day...........................................................................93

Chapter One

my earliest memory of trying to be a poet hovers in time like a frozen lake, my first metaphor for love. subsequent memories are often like horses. wild horses which my abuelito chased as a young man, baby doll dying that winter, thirty years old and we would not sell her to the glue man because she had been the best cow horse we had ever had. yes, the memories are a little about love and a little about death, but mostly they are those things which i cannot sell. my brother's blue hearts painted at the bottom of the sandstone cliffs which rise above my home. the home itself which was built when i was born. you see, i was born before i was a poet, and therein lies a responsibility. i have never had trouble putting down my feelings, letter upon letter, word upon word. human emotion is the second most true thing on earth; besides family it is the only thing we can always identify. emotion is our memory, that feeling when the person you love holds your hand for the first time, it is homemade jelly, elephant quilts, blue hearts, horses and the responsibility we have to recollect these things. a poem without family or emotion is, to me, nothing more than letters upon letters, the sound of hoofbeats without ever having seen a horse.

my abuelito, the oldest living person in my family, is the best poet i have ever encountered. ask me 'who is the best poet ever?' and i will not hesitate to say that his name is Amos Serafin Abeyta. i have never seen him write down one solitary word, yet his gift is language. i have never seen him read anything that is bound, yet his gift is storytelling. a poet should be a person who can tell you the same story a hundred times over and you will see it and hear it as freshly as the first time you encountered it. i have seen the wild horse that died at the end of my abuelito's rope, blue lake, where he went only once as a young man, his father, Serafin, abandoning him and his family in the 1930s. everything. i have seen everything a hundred times and have never laid eyes on any of them. the images stay with me like the scent of rain, a voice, a story, and nothing is myth.

a story is the oldest living thing on earth. as a poet, i must deal with that. there is no myth if the storyteller is good. in the time it takes to build word upon word everything becomes real. that is what i must deal with, all that is real. my name is aaron a. abeyta. i am a poet who has chosen to share all that is real to me, love, death, emotion and family. i shall put them into stories a hundred times over, one poem at a time.

antonito here at the edge of the llano where the grass begins like a migrant pulse thumping in the wind every april the town becomes somebody's prayer waiting for a candle to be lit there are places to begin although everything revolves back toward us a woman i know lost her son and believes that he has become a star that looks over her i suppose this is enough i would like to tell her that her son is a star some flickering which gets confused for venus when the nights are clear but we both understand death too well how we carry it like my tio Willie who believed he saw his dead son on t.v.

i sat listening to a friend of mine who insisted that there...