I Miss the Wild Geese

Returning to Farmington as a "Local Author"

A slice of the San Juan River corridor, Bollack Ranch conservation area, the bluffs, and distant Harris Mesa as seen from the back yard of my Farmington, New Mexico, home when I lived there while teaching English for many years at San Juan College.

Farmington, New Mexico

At its best, Farmington, NM, is a city of parks, a river walk, an arts community, and small college with caring faculty. It’s also known as the setting for Gary Snyder’s 1974 poem, I Went into the Maverick Bar and a history of racism and civil rights violations. The local economy, strong in tourism and retail, is driven and sustained by controversial extractive industries (coal, oil, & natural gas; and, to a lesser degree, mining & quarrying).

For nine years, I worked for San Juan College, first, teaching in the English Department and then managing a project for School of Energy before moving back to Albuquerque in 2011. During that time, I wrote poetry and was a featured reader at local open mic events. One of the last events before I left town was a poetry reading with two colleagues, Denise Hinson and Kimberly Williams. We called it the “Last Chance and Nothing Left to Lose” Poetry Reading. Several poems from that year are collected in my first book of poetry, When East Was North (2012).

Given that history, I’ve been invited to participate in the Four Corners Author Fair to be hosted by the Farmington Public Library on November 11, 2023. The poem below, “Casita Amarilla” (Little Yellow House), first appeared in When East Was North. I’ve revised and reprised it here because no poem is ever finished and all poems like to find new homes.

Casita Amarilla

Listen to Andi read the poem (unedited in a single take)

Casita Amarilla

After buying my house
     in Farmington, New Mexico,
I write a letter to a friend in North Carolina
to share the news. He lives in a white,
two-story, forever home and reads mail
delivered by a postal carrier
     who crosses emerald green lawns
     on lily-lined walkways,
     who smiles at toddlers on tricycles
          and Labradors on leashes.

My little yellow house, I begin,
     sits at the southern edge of town
     terraced above a flat expanse of river-valley
     ranch land.

From the apricot tree,
gem of the overgrown backyard,
I look across alfalfa fields, below,
and past the distant cottonwoods 
gracing the banks of the San Juan
to the bluffs—              
a series of sandstone mesas and
     canyons of rock art, fossil remains,
     ruins of ancient stone and adobe dwellings,
     and crumbling hogans.  

In sunlit afternoons between spring
and autumn equinoxes, a phallic shadow

rises on the cliff face, companion to a rock spire
we've named Kokopelli. 

Crenelated Harris Mesa serrates the far horizon—   
silohuette at sunrise, golden glow at sunset.
Canada geese traverse the valley in loud Vs
     frightening wild turkeys into gobbling frenzy.
The neighborhood red tail hawk
     bursts forth from atop the closest cottonwood,
            screaming after her prey or soaring, silent,
     on a thermal.  

I sit in the dark, squint at the Pleiades, and inhale
arid stillness. Coyotes sing to the waning moon.
This is my house, my life. 
With love.  

I envy your description, he replies.
Here, neighbors brag about yards and pools,
public schools, square footage, and stainless
steel appliances. 

But in the west, the landscape is your home—the house,
     simply an excuse.   
   

---

“Place. A view onto something. A physical view: the physical equivalent
of having a future.”

~Sarah Fay, You Find a Place, from Cured

P.S. I dedicate this post to poets and writers on Maui, and elsewhere, who have recently lost their homes in natural and man-made disasters.