Aspen’s Children
By: Dick Altman
Cinco de Mayo, fifth of May in New Mexico,
and I look up past Aspen’s fledgling leaves,
into a Sistine sky of flaming blue, to see
a jet’s contrail splitting your still spare crown,
at no less than half a thousand knots an hour.
I smile to think that nothing in view is more
of the moment, than leaves whose emerald
sheen, to my eye, grows more vibrant
with each passing breeze.
*
Can I halt the wind, my Aspen children ask.
They dance, with little joy, as overhead mortar
gusts crash. Light air at seven thousand feet,
I say, offers no respite—bend, bend, or be broken.
I watch you grow from planting—five feet
to twenty. Watch you beat back May’s late frosts.
July’s second caterpillar wave. Cheer the gold
you mirror in fall. Plead for winter to endow you
strength enough to bear spring, when wind’s
restive mountain lions chase you, without remorse,
as if over drought’s cliff.
*
What would I do without you, my children,
here on high desert’s plain, knowing you
thrive thousands feet higher? Love and water,
the only answer, in volumes unrelenting,
from the time I first hurl a digging bar,
as I am tall, into cement-like clay, to build
you a home to last well beyond my time.
For you to shield from sun’s bore, generations
to come. Serenade, with your leaves’ rippling
music, night’s world of dream. Losing even one
of you—and I have lost many, despite unflagging
loyalty and ardor—what didn’t I do that the fates
claim your life, instead of mine?
Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and
imagination often blur. He is pubished in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, Landing Zone, Cathexis, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, Beyond Words, New Verse News, Wing-less Dreamer, Blueline, Sky Island Journal and others here and abroad. A Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 150 published poems. His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.