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By chris Date: 2007 Apr 09 Comment on this Work [[2007.04.09.00.48.20949]] |
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in the desecrated cemetery with no name looking for the orphaned Navajo great-grandmother, working our way further into the burial ground, past burned mattresses, thickets of low-growing prickly pear, tumbleweeds made black by the sun and piled so high they've become like earthworks ghostly soldiers could hide behind. Just beneath this carpet of cactus and Chinese take-out menus ("For good fortune try our Sunday brunch"), bodies lie. The desiccated desert earth does not hold the dead very well. In front of what headstones there are, the ground in places has given way and I imagine I can see the outline of caskets, bones, amid the honeycombed caverns known now only by prairie dogs and snakes we'll never see today. Finding nothing, we leave, saying our Adios! Adios! Vaya con Dios! to just the wind, leaving you, Padilla y Morales y Sedillo y Gomez y Sanchez and the tiny tin markers without your names and you, Rosa, with your hand-painted, faded wooden cross I found ten feet from your husband's in the far corner of the cemetery. Around you now are freeways and car lots and chain-link fences intended by someone to keep everything outside out and everything inside in and around you still rise mountains from the same river you no doubt once knew like it was blood kin. |