PROMISE: CHIMAYÓ, NEW MEXICO 2011

BY SONYA WOHLETZ

Six thousand feet familiar; the old land grants—sundered
snow lines. Wherein the altar

rises like a fang above the arroyo.
Mourning shrubs staggering in every direction,

withered veins of pink scree;
the strangled herbs of a long-ago wilderness

that promised the same cure that now
can only serve a cunning and calculated death—

for the drought-stiffened hills,
for the blood chalice leaching, as in an act of betrayal—

ice snaking its delicate throat while the
bone/sprung heart seeps its syrups to the cottonwoods.

And there, divided between the horned moon
and the deciduous cycle of trails,

that shrine waits for her, for us,
for those that labored the acequias,

for those shot down at the approach of Good Friday.
Hundreds of miles of penitents

stringing along the Camino Real
after the image of a dead man,

hanged on the green tree of life,
an ivory tumor above the well

of promises. I curled myself
into its depths, while the peregrine winds

rolled through the ponderosa, the piñón.
And thought it meant

to revive me, though I suffered from
a misuse of suffering that no miracle

could calm. I could only feed;
feed the elements captured in those dense idols.

And I recall the friend that brought some
miracle dirt to my mother when she

could no longer remember the place
where the marriage was celebrated,

where it sustained itself in banquet,
as a union of forms, as promissory anguish,

now writ in the yeso & minerals
upon the bultos of those bad centuries.

I contemplate their
blessed and barren ground, inflicted

inside my yearned-for humility, a plastic bag
near the feet of the plastered virgen,

who presided our home impassively.
Or, perhaps she did doctor us—

scale by slimed scale. Each year of the failed family.
And did her Christ then

slide his death into your skin as you
sank your breath

into the blue night, speaking—no, proclaiming—
(for what I can’t quite name)

in dream, as though recalling the command—
Thief, enter through us.

PROMESA 2: CHIMAYÓ, NEW MEXICO

BY SONYA WOHLETZ

The tree of life rises above the pocito,
wherein the earth—tunneled with strange injury.
I pin a heart to your holy name
and feed my blood, my bandage,
to the green roots of the mountain.
A miracle appendaged—
vision in the cure of wilderness,
its profound herb, grown solitary.

Sonya Wohletz is a writer and poet living in the Pacific Northwest. Her first book of poetry, Bir Sıra Sonra/One Row After, was published by First Matter Press in 2022. Her second book is forthcoming with South Broadway Press.