Manifest West: Different Roads

My poem: “County Road 80” about a New Mexico Sephardic Jew appears in Manifest West: Different Roads (Pub: University Press of Colorado) an anthology that reflects both “the myth and the truth about what we call the ‘West.” The editors of Different Roads remind us that our “strength lies in differences, not in similarities,” what Stanley Baldwin refers to as “the many-sidedness of truth.————

COUNTY ROAD 80———–

Between Cordova and Truchas,
el hombre
looks skyward, wizened,
blinded by the sun’s flux,
in honor of that birth-marked
wiry muscled
clan clawing desiccated soil
from an Iberian enclave,
where Aramaic
voices echoed in ancient temples,
Sephardic fathers’ fathers
escaped
clinging
to moth-eaten lanyards
put out to sea, westerly,
to navigate the flotsam
of leftover queens, conquistadors,
of fame, gold, salvation,
that collapsed
una civilización,
a demise not dignified by glorious battle
or solemn mass, but wasted,
waiting to dispose those in monk’s clothes,
those who plundered and stole, tomes, trinkets,
el número cero,
never to gain the language.
El hombre lives,
crypt-like,
Shabbat candle-waiting stars, salted meat,
middle-rooms swept, linen cloth and spices
winding the dead,
their names buried in graves across
l’arroyo,
on County Road 80
between
Cordova and Truchas
invincible, he remains—
mi abuelo.