Bowerbirds do it. Paper wasps. The beaver’s mound accessible from under water. Such a soft spot we hold for nest builders, from weavings to cups and knot-hole drillers. My two grandsons built two forts of fallen limbs leaned up against beech tree trunks. I can stand up in the bigger one to admire the couch dragged into one corner, a broken log. In the hands of the ultra-rich, the opposable thumb demands grandiose. Outrageous and expensive. Palaces. A home with its own power plant. Walled compounds. Cliff-top villas. Gilded mansions. Subject to the whims of time, rot, fire, and penury. Shelley on the narcissist’s build: “Nothing besides remains.” Prince Prospero’s ballroom could not withstand the contagion of the red death. Vanity and striving after the wind. What happened to the angel who saved three men who refused to bow down to King Nebuchadnezzar’s gold statue. She chastised the sneer of cold command known as retribution. The artifice of blue-tinged pools. As for the Arch, what words carved there would memorialize war, lies, inflation, tears of the hungry, sick and veterans betrayed. Good people disappeared. Such lone and level sands stretch far away.
Sunday, May 17, 2026
CONSTRUCTIONS
Thursday, October 09, 2025
CHACO CANYON / SCULPTURE OF SILENCE
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| More than 300,000 acres surrounding Chaco Canyon that are currently off-limits to drilling could be opened up. Environment New Mexico received a letter from the Bureau of Land Management confirming that the Public Lands Order protecting the area is “under review.” Nearly 90% of the surrounding area is already open to drilling. Chaco Canyon should be protected. —Environment New Mexico, September 25, 2025 |
Northern New Mexico
The name
Chaco Canyon
may mean nothing
to you.
It means nothing
to me,
until I escape
New York’s
clamor and scream,
to live
in the calmer
precincts
of Old West’s
Indian Country.
We’re taught
to think
ancients
of Indigenous
culture
were mainly
hunters
and gatherers.
Chaco proves
they were
builders,
sculptors,
on a monumental
scale—
imagine
so-called “great
houses”
with eight-
hundred rooms—
unparalleled,
before,
and long after,
Columbus.
I’ve explored,
many Indian
remnants.
The walls
mostly adobe,
or coarse
stone block.
Chaco’s edifices,
stories high,
overwhelm me.
Many erected
with slivers
of sandstone,
some thin
as knife blades,
I see in them,
not architecture,
as such,
but fine weaving
or embroidery,
of the most
commanding,
exquisite
artistry.
I lose myself
in Chaco’s
deep valley
of silence,
its serenity,
so void of sound,
wandering
its remains,
transmutes
into moments
of transcendence,
unlike few
I’ve ever
known.
Every now
and then,
an oil derrick,
its mechanistic,
prayer,
endless,
to venality,
as I see it,
shatters
Chaco’s
centuries
of unyielding
spirituality.
The stench,
toxicity
to soil
and water,
signals
an irreverence
for a Native
American site,
that deserves
the rare awe
and esteem
we reserve,
in my heart,
at least,
for Egypt’s
Pyramids,
reflecting
the grandeur
of human
dream,
and reach.
Dick Altman writes in the thin, magical air of Old West’s high desert plains, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in the American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, and others here and abroad. His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored some 280 poems, published on four continents.