DO YOU REMEMBER THE LIGHT?
Do you remember the light that lay
like slabs of yellow diamond
upon the sandstone bluffs last evening?
It is the same light
that ambered the willows and sage
beside the river thirty years ago,
when father and I reeled in our fly lines
and stepped from the water.
It buttered the cathedral in Oaxaca
that late afternoon we sat in folding chairs
and listened to a trio of old men playing fat guitars.
My father is gone and the men
in the zocalo that afternoon
have moved into other rooms of their lives,
but the light endures.
I saw it this morning, a bright cloak
draped upon a sheep herder
in the painting of beech trees by Durand.
It’s as if the light forced him
to use it as leavening in his work,
as last night it held us
briefly bound.
-Tim Amsden
THIS YEAR’S PROMISE
Pale Trumpets everywhere, thin bugles
so delicate they seem
made of light blue angel skin
suspended on thin leafless stalks.
It’s their turn, after years of bee flowers and sunflowers,
Indian blankets purple asters and primrose,
the summer of drought when almost nothing
brightly colored this high New Mexico place.
A vast tiny orchestra nodding together,
they serenade the blank blue sky. With butterflies
whose wings are easily torn and broken they say
“we delicate survive”. Among the scaly-backed lizard
and carapaced beetle, there is room
for the pale and thin-skinned.
-Tim Amsden
Amaterra member Tim Amsden grew up in Wichita, collected a few degrees, and worked 25 years for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He and his wife, Lucia, now live outside of Ramah, New Mexico, where they both indulge their compulsions to write. Tim’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pudding Magazine, Potpourri, Out of Line, Driftwood, Permafrost, Illia’s Honey, Slant, Heartlodge, New Mexico Magazine, Facets, a Pima Press poetry anthology titled Aging, and a Pudding House Anthology on consumption. He has won a variety of awards, including second place in the 2002 Southwest Writers Conference poetry contest.