Mother Church No. 3

Kin Kletso/Yellow House Chaco Canyon, San Juan County, New Mexico Anasazi Ruins, AD 1125-1130 for Henri, at 2 You step down into the Flat World Then ask me to say it, to explain How our name can mean both ancestor And enemy. Your body begins in four directions. Here, one calendar takes eighteen years. I am three. One day is an eyelash. Your body is a segment of prehistoric road, A buried stairwell with only the top stair obvious. We are alluvial, obsidian. Sometimes the ground swells With disappointment; sometimes we know our mountains Will be renamed after foreign saints. We sing nine-hundred-year-old hymns That instruct us in how to sit still For forty-nine years Through a fifty-year drought. We climb down through the hole anyway, And agree to the arrangement.