On the Española Road

by Rebecca Spears

we covered the tenantless distance
in your red Ford truck. Mile creased
into mile. Juniper and piñon
crumpled into a breach here and there
in the mountains’ brown and pink—
green sill of Taos Valley long gone.

Along the Rio Chama, silvery stands
of cottonwood crowded past Abiquiu
into astonishment, land that
revealed itself like a palmist:
striated slopes covered in raw silk
cinnabar viridian cobalt ochre
and unveiled above them the crux
of it: a blue vacancy we
couldn’t touch. 

If only we’d painted it, copied
the angles, confused curves and surfaces
onto canvas after canvas.

Rebecca Spears, a poet and instructor, has an MFA from Bennington College.  Her writing appears in If These Walls Could Speak: The Blanton Museum Poetry Project, Calyx, Minnesota Review, Natural Bridge, Borderlands, Texas Review, Frostwriting, and other publications. She has received scholarships from the Taos Writers Workshop and Vermont Studio Center.