To the Puye Cliff Dwelling

Shortly before Santa Fe you decide
God is like a giant fossilized elephant
exposed on the shore of the Black Sea;
the vastness and position of its trunk cavity
convincing ancient Greek sailors they beheld
the skull not of an elephant, but of a Cyclops
with its single, all-seeing eye;
that they had navigated their way to the graveyard
of demi-gods.

All because they knew nothing of paleontology
or carbon-dating, you say.

This is as the pueblo rooftops
begin to spread across the high desert morning,
chill into the blue dawning feet
of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
I am distracted by architecture,
the stepped brown adobe, the parched stucco
climbing out of the sand.
You are deconstructing Santa Fe building codes,
offended by ordinance-enforced adherence
to impractical tradition.

Mid-town, you are wondering aloud
about Adam's belly-button;
how anyone could think man just sort of popped up
in a garden six thousand years ago.
Then there's the whole Moses parting the Red Sea
thing; and by the museum at the northern edge of the city
you are questioning whether David was the invention
of second-century B.C. scholars—
King Arthur to the Jews.
You are so obsessed with floods and arks
you don't even notice as highway 503
narrows to one lane and winds through Cundiyo,
wooden houses and cobblestone carved
like some European village
into the backside of a nameless mountain.

Nor do you notice how the desert
bakes us like bricks of adobe by the time
we arrive at the Puye Cliff Dwellings;
how, sculpted into the rockface, each dwelling
is connected by sanded wooden ladders
like memory, their shadows preserving
eight-hundred-year-old ghosts
of Anasazi women painting pottery shards
and tribal chiefs conferring
over berry-stained diagrams of stars and the sun.
Your only concern as we hike to the cliff
is not where did all the water go, but
what's the big deal about Israel, anyhow?
Why not the Anasazi?

At some point, you say, we've got to admit
it's all misunderstandings. God, religion—stories
upon an ever-shifting landscape.
This desert was once the bottom
of some pre-historic sea; these mountains
have risen and eroded so many times, it's pointless
to talk about origin.
Three thousand years from now,
even these ruins will be gone,
and all we have known about them will change
a thousand times over.

Yes, I'll give you this.

But do you really want to talk about stories?
Forget that other desert, David slaying
giants with a sling-shot, fleeing Saul
from Lebanon to Philistia.
What about the time when you were seven
and I was nine, both lost in Big Bend;
how we prayed and found our way to a ranger's
station before dark? Or that night you asked
for a sign, how the roof of your bedroom collapsed
immediately after you stepped outside for a smoke?
Not too mention how, on the edge of suicide
after your boyfriend OD'd, you stepped into a cathedral
and five minutes later found "peace"
knowing he was in a better place.

These stories that you acknowledge
with a silent nod—three-thousand years from now,
no one will remember them. But now,
planted in the cracked soil, admiring the ruins,
you remember.