Page 79 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

releasing place, water

never held in the hand place.

Oh river. This is your sweet mouth.

Dry sand waiting to be run through.

Notes:

My series of “correspondences” is a communication with aspects of the natural world,

including my body, my garden, and the mountains and wilderness closest to me. Text

and messages found in the scrawl of branches, the letters of leaf and trail write us back

into an ecologic language of place. I spend a lot of time listening for this language—

naming and identifying plants and animals as a naturalist would, but also listening for

what can never be named— to create a sense of kinship. At some point, though, my

attention to the outer world turns me back to rhythms of loss and renewal within myself.

Water and the way its presence and absence shape the landscape, forming a geography

of its movement and containment, is an ever present part of life in the high desert. More

and more, I am seeing how these features shape my inner life, as well.

Kyce Bello edited The Return of the River: Writers,

Scholars, and Citizens Speak on Behalf of the Santa Fe

River (Sunstone Press, 2011), an anthology of literary

ecoactivism which received two New Mexico book

awards. Of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Anglo descent, she

is an MFA candidate at the Institute of American Indian

Arts. Her poems have recently been published or are

forthcoming in Written River Journal of Ecopoetics,

Taproot, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She lives under a very old apple tree in Santa

Fe, with her husband and two daughters, and writes occasionally about their days at Old

Recipe for a New World.