Identifying

For Mothers,
Grandmothers, mothers, and daughters; mothers all.

A poem by Tina Trout

Where my grandmother and mother were born in Rinconada, NM. Painting By Kathleen Smith of Taos. http://www.kathleensmithart.com/bio.html

Time escapes
Drawn from this place,
Pulled from my mouth,
A yawn.
A clock ticks,
Wound by a key,
Measuring back what is given.
Perpetually late afternoon.
 
There are boxes of pictures, hundreds.
Each holding us by a string, so
Fanned out like cards, we encircle
Deciphering tensions,
Plucking the chords,
Possessing in memory
And translation.
Conjuring ghosts.
 
Hundreds.
Dirt houses, pitched tin roofs,
Hollyhock, geranium, lilac,
The unhuggable girth of a cottonwood.
An orchard.  A windmill.  The river.
Chili Ristra garlands hang side by side,
Roof to ground, cascading,
Dwarfing house and man.
An impossibly bountiful summer.
 
Stories rupture forth.
“I remember when it was like this…”
I bring it close to my face as if to enter it,
This wellspring.
I study the washed gray that red produces
When rendered in black and white,
As if it has already
Left this world, uncontested,
Triumphant in it’s brilliance.
 
Hundreds.
Here my great grandfather stands beside ‘Carl,’
The surrogate son for lack of another
Who is also my grandmother ‘Carol’
They are smiling or squinting in the sun.
The blue of their eyes does not absorb the light,
But casts it out, the brightest white of the picture.
My great grandfather’s name was James Percy,
It was also Santiago.
Out of respect.
 
Grandmother, mother, I
All daughters and mothers now.
My daughter, hand over hand passes,
Our knees her guiding posts,
Amazed by her own shuffling feet,
Sacking stacks of photos before her
With gleeful shrieks while
A calloused hand guides her gently
To unfamiliar knees.
 
Hundreds.
Here’s one of me
Walking for the first time
On a dirt path leading from the old house,
In tiny moccasined feet.
Tired, perhaps, of the goatheads that
Stick in my palm,
Which I offer up tearfully
To be plucked.
​
I am small and delicate
Wearing a dark dress
To contrast my paleness.
A faint birthmark on my forehead
Between my eyes tells me
God had to push my head down
Into my mothers womb.
I didn’t want to come quite yet.
 
Here is my mother
Walking for the first time
In the exact same place.
She is darker, moonfaced, radiant.

Here’s another in which she beats a drum
Half her size.
Pursed lipped and wide eyed, she reveals no foresight
That she will smooth the bed of my river with her laughter
That she will, for a time, be her mother’s keeper.

The clock confirms the shadow
Of the cottonwood as it stretches,
Magnificently over the courtyard.
My grandmother is drumming the arm of her chair
Softly with her fist,
Trying to recall the identity of a woman
Standing self-possessed on a boulder above
The river.