The High Roads

The arroyo looks dry but there’s water inside the bright-lipped
cholla and yellow cactus, the belly of a fleeing rabbit, and the

snake’s bright stripes of pale on black crossing the junction
of the Camino Real and the Armijo route where I once cradled

a child’s twisted ankle and carried him back along the brush
to the parked school bus. That summer the police came to the school

and village looking for whomever might have cut the silver leg
from the statue of Oñate in Alcalde. I scooped ice from the bottom

of a cooler and held it to the child’s skin where it melted too fast
to soothe. A map identifies the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro

as one of four of the new world’s Caminos Reales. Road of kings.
King of the road. You take the high road and I’ll take the low road.

Right of way. Might makes right. The rules of the road. Droit de seigneur.
Droit et avant. (Be right—then forward.) To be upstanding. To depart

on the right foot (Oñate ordered the severing of the foot at the ankle
of all male survivors over the age of twelve). A wake of clouds gathers

across a bony row of yardangs. Pale lavender trumpeter flower
blooms from a shattered fragment of bumper. On the silver road,

I am carrying silver. My son turns thirteen in October. Droplets patter
behind my steps, awakening the environment almost instantaneously.

Turquoise, obsidian, salt, and feather in the blush of light that warms
the bellies of the clouds across the wide but intricate skyline.

Ladling stew into bowls, I drip three deep red stains across
the bridge of my left shoe. The white column of bone I spoon

from the broth mirrors a spine of ancient volcanic ash in the desert.
At dawn, cactus flowers open in a glamorous wake.

Dancers enter. A youth shifts away from an adobe wall shedding
adolescent reticence and begins to move his feet in time.

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Laura Da’