To Hold The World In

A Poetic Reflection on a Trip to Baja

Go somewhere
sacred and press your eyelids
shut, and you’ll hear
the silence, just beneath
the familiar songs of birds
that you’ve only just met,
below the wind
rubbing dull all the edges
of the world.

You’ll hear its low hum
rumbling just beneath
everything else—
so visceral and deep
that it seems its a sound 
your ear itself
might be making,
just the faint constant
vibration of a living
ancient Earth.

I lift my hand to offer
the sky my shape, to feel it slip between
my fingers, to give and take
its warmth and water.

The bright yellow blossoms
of the desert marigold dot
the decomposing
granite to remind us that
they too are the sun.

The buzzing wings of insects
beat like oars on the wind.
They speak of cactus flowers
and fruit, of mud and mule fat—
a billion years of longing,
a billion years
of belonging.

You could pull a tick
from your neck, watch the skin
stretch and recoil as you rip
it away, but your blood
would still be its blood
and its blood your own,
the cells themselves
ran back and forth
between your two bodies.

Any separation
is a delusion, and nothing
can be separated from everything
else. A country is a pretend
place, a border an imagined
boundary.

There is only the land.
 
We are the land,
and we belong to the land,
to one another and nothing
else.

And every land
has its own language, the land
absorbed and spat back into song, and
beneath the high sun of a spring day
in Baja, on that land, a woman
lies on a bed in the corner
of her room, holding the language
of the land she sprouted from,
holding fast to truths meant
to be violently forgotten. She holds
the only words that understand
this land, the only words this land
understands.

And her daughters offer
their hands to the Earth
and give the Earth
the shape of their two
cupped hands,
for the Earth to fill
with mesquite beans
and pinyon pine nuts.
They pick the pine needles
and weave the world
into patterns
like seasons and songs. They give
themselves to the land,
and the land gives
itself back in return.

So let us drive south together, in love and
defiance, to cross the wall and the men 
with their guns, the imagined line they both 
defend. Let us stretch
between and build a bridge
to ourselves. Let us follow
the coastline and kit foxes. Let us eat
the nopal and the spiced 
salt. Let us laugh together, let us
hear each others stories, let us touch
the plants, let us remember
what it means to be life, to be
connected to everything else.

Let us go to the women 
weaving baskets, weaving themselves 
into the land—
to the women who,
like the clay pots they form,
hold the ancient wisdom
of this place.

Let us go to them
and listen, fill our ears
with their truths:
they show us the only way
forward, and the only
way back.