Sage adages of the skyfather

Laughing Feather
For JoAnn on her birthday

There was the sudden squall in Seligman, a plague of flies as we tried to eat lunch from a cooler heavy with summer ice, the gnarled gust out of nowhere that blew us into that small mineral shop where a toothless smile gladly showed us charred meteorites that had traveled distances farther than we’d come to see them strewn on dusty sills as he added yet another butt to a stub-laden cistern made to sift gold from fool’s earth, but instead mined precious minutes from the failing lode of his lungs. There was that first night at Sunset Crater when August drizzle fell like cinder, laval and ashen between far-off flashes that torched the tent with brief streaks of flint as we huddled together for the first time.

There were the ruins at Wupatki, the anvil heat branding silence into red flagstone where high portals once beckoned wind to brush across black Sinaqua hair that went ungathered as moonless corn swelling in monsoon. There was the road of broken rain as we passed chapter houses and trinket stands whose burmashave signs pleaded for us to turn around, that Nice Indians Behind You would stoically sell rubber tomahawks, suction-cup arrows, and lapis Kokopellis in the name of the venerable Chief Snakehorse.



There was modern poverty on the Navajo rez, coiled hissing threaded through the ribs of the Cow Springs Trading Post bleached skeletal by graffiti and neglect; the same madwoman driver I encountered two years before on the road near Elephant Feet. There was our deliberate passing amid the measured shuffle of noble lineage at the supermarket in Kayenta, where the high-boned faces were all oval and sunwashed as olives in Assisi.

There was the honed Agathla chiseling cobalt in a marbled sky; Three Sisters and the thunderswift mesas of Monument Valley where darkness quarried onyx before our headlamps carved the way out as we shaped legends of Bear Woman and Coyote Boy, the sage adages of the ineffable Skyfather as told to an accidental guide who first whispered your true spirit name of Laughing Feather. There was Mesa Verde whose fluted palaces echoed from sheer cliffsides; the ricochet of forked fire in Pagosa Springs shattering saberhorn above our leaking tent, the ground trembling as terrible buffalo passed low overhead. In the Acoma, there were kiva ladders set at starry angles that could never carry out all the dead yet alive within the pale walls of the blood-borne chapel in Sky City.



And there was more, too much more to spill all here: a lone cloud hovering above a shadow-saddled mountain; the buckshot road sign with a one-armed Apache mounted on a rusty palomino; dust-deviled furytails circling cankered saguaro; a shivering porcupine treed in a glazed knot of sundown copper; crown-point elk grazing along the road to Chama. Where go the voices we have spoken with, the sagas invented and forgotten, ferried off by a wing of brevity too burdensome for birds and their kind? There is only the moment and the moment endures in spite of what history would have us believe. There is all this then, this and us in the midst of all this; travelers returning and travelers continuing, wanderers led by rings slipped through the nose of a fancy; moving as if time were nothing more than a luxurious plumage, the golden bellow of a laughing feather.

Joseph Gallo
January 19, 2007