we sit in the cab of an aging 3/4 ton ford pick-up. the road in front of us is what any country road should be, filled with ruts, washboards and dust. we make our way east toward the sangre de cristos. it is winter. my brother drives, me in the middle, and on the passenger side sits my abuelito; his name is Amos Serafin Abeyta. at this point in my life i am still afraid of him. he has eyes that see through people. abuelito knows only work. six a.m. and it is time to feed the animals. this is...

my earliest memory of trying to be a poet hovers in time like a frozen lake, my first metaphor for love. subsequent memories are often like horses. wild horses which my abuelito chased as a young man, baby doll dying that winter, thirty years old and we would not sell her to the glue man because she had been the best cow horse we had ever had. yes, the memories are a little about love and a little about death, but mostly they are those things which i cannot sell. my brotherʹs blue hearts painted at the bottom of the...

dear Guillermo,

i feel that i must write. that there is something inside me which, like always, needs to be said, needs to be told. i look back now on the stories of my little town. the town which i cannot leave, my heart somehow held within its adobe walls. i think of the time i tripped running across the street and saw deep grooves cut into the asphalt from all those years of cruising back and forth, by all those people young and old, all of whom i know by name. it is muscles flexed for full effect, smooth...

these words come forty years late. the church bells which signaled the end of the second world war have rested their tired hips. they are silent now except for days when the wind comes off the llano and makes them groan. the war ended in a rush of bells, and my mother, in front of her house, a child, began to dance. she has often told me that she never knew why the bells were ringing. she simply knew they were ringing and began to dance.

forty years later she works tortillas in the kitchen. i imagine her, a child,...

dear Marcos,

We have both made that trip into the valle, the long straight road from Pueblo to Walsenburg, where you think you will travel into the heart of the Spanish Peaks. They rise like two breasts left there to suckle the universe, their milk flowing in two directions. One goes back to our mother, through the desert of Sonora, through the railhead at Celaya, back in time to her womb of water on Tezcoco. She is standing knee deep. Her bare brown feet have gathered mud between the toes. She is from two worlds, like you.

Marcos, you are...