THE LAND UNFOLDS

Nathan Erwin

Jaime Chavez’s heart is failing.
He had a stroke while meeting with those Chicano ranchers east of Fresno,
then kept on working. Outside of Taos, after planning protest tactics
with the town’s first farmer poet laureate, the pueblo’s war chief, & members
of New Buffalo, they couldn’t wake him. Beside his body, the goats continued
to doze & graze. He was airlifted across the high desert
to Albuquerque City Hospital. Now
Jaime has only five percent of his heart.
He will give up living deep in the Manzano Mountains, sell his last calf, turn
over his milpa, & return to Atrisco /Atlixco, his ancestral home.
He will give up his gig as Lead Organizer for Coalicíon Rurál to return
to the annual Dance of the Matachines, the blessing of the acequias, the water & fields.
The Manzano Mountains are a saint, they say, with their own petroglyphs & prayers.
& Jaime told me, once, that the desert teaches continuance
when the new moon billows. Yesterday, he called from the ICU. I missed
his first two calls & when I answered the third, he said he must return home
(mud, grass, & water built into the mountain) to retrieve his poems.
Boxes & boxes of poems, scribbled on yellowing receipts
or burned across stone. Words switching between Nahuatl, Spanish,
& Wind. The Jemez is unbroken through miles of cottonwoods.
Hundreds of poems beaten by the elements, outside under tarps
or in black garbage bags. Jaime’s poems are victory poems.
Poems that demolish the coal mine at Zuni Salt Lake, that wage war
in Rio Arriba for the Hispaños to graze their stock.
Poems that shoot up the county jail. Poems that call to Eutimio
who went to relight the fires beyond the Rio Puerco,
to talk with his Diné relations.
Jaime doesn’t say he is dying,
but there is an urgency in his voice. The fleshy ripe roots
of a Juniper probing for water. I tell him—
together, we will finish your books, but my daughter will arrive any day.
& just like an organizer of the land,
a peoples’ poet, he says, yes, we continue. Pauses, & with his full heart says,
from out of this world, they unfold into this life.

& as I write this, I hold my baby girl on her first night home, listening as she unfolds
in grunts & squeals toward the breadth of her dreams, that wild garlic field. & somewhere deep
in the Manzano Mountains, I know Jaime is collecting his poems
under his last Worm Moon, page by dew-soaked page.

Nathan Erwin is a poet and land-based organizer raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. Erwin currently organizes with the Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe as they fight for land, food, and seed sovereignty. His writing has recently appeared in North American Review, About Place, Boulevard, Sho Poetry, Terrain.org, Puerto del Sol, Gulf Coast, and Ninth Letter. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about foodways, myths, medicine, and wanting.