Writings and Books

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  My Town: A Memoir of Albuquerque, New Mexico in Poems, Prose and Photographs

  Nothing was What it Pretended
  Words I’d never heard took up residence in my mouth. Montaño, even if city signage refused to put the tilda over the n, names like De Vargas, Cabeza de Vaca or Juan Tabó, shepherds and assassins enshrined on street corners unquestioned and mispronounced.
  Indian words like Acoma, Navajo—now Diné— or place names like Canyon de Chelly the conquerors left us with when they couldn’t speak what they couldn’t hear.
  Names imposed: Oñate, Coronado, Santa Fe. Another’s holy (...)
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  First Laugh: Essays 2000-2009

  Pumping Gas
  Again I am somewhere else. Or everywhere at once. But as always, every word has its color. Sometimes, when I lose one now, the color rises behind my eyes but the word still plays hide and seek. Taunts me from the sidelines. Or a vast rainbow looms, and I must find my way through hues and the language they mask. Sometimes I sit for long minutes sifting through color on my way to word. Word may try to resist, but synapse eventually takes me home. I am seventy-three. My father (...)
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  Their Backs to the Sea

  Easter Island, Rapa Nui, or simply the land your ancestors felt no need to name, place that receives me now eager and awkward: my eyes hauling picture-book images, mouth filled with questions juggling answers as I breathe.
  I will think of you as an island without color on a map, your first people dizzied in harmony, clothed by the land itself: no reason to signify that which receives and gives, asks nothing in (...)
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  To Change the World: My Years in Cuba

  Excerpt from Prologue
  Fidel Castro came to New York City in the summer of 1960, fresh from his guerrilla triumph. I was a young writer and soon-to-be single mother, enormously pregnant with Gregory—my son who, forty-six years later, would suggest we write about Cuba together—but I longed to see the hero up close, applaud his stance, express my personal appreciation. Carefully, lovingly, I prepared a platter of Spanish paella; not such a tropical staple perhaps, but my signature dish at the (...)
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  Stones Witness

  Memory of Samothrace
  1.
  The little girl, wearing a navy blue coat with white Peter Pan collar, holds her grandfather’s hand as they pass through the main entrance to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Once inside the building, she will be allowed to disengage and move off towards the many attractions that ignite her passion. As long as she remains in view, he says. The little girl is six or seven; she is me six decades ago. The grandfather, who has been dead now more than forty years, (...)
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  Into Another Time: Grand Canyon Reflections

  The Lens Frames this Image
  The lens frames this image then lets it go as I slowly sweep walls that move in the opposite direction faster than my camera can do its work.
  Panning space but also time: centuries of buildup, millennia of sedimentation, uplift, intrusion, deposit, erosion, faulting and the shudder of tectonic plates.
  I want to hold the shadow of an instant gone two hundred million years ago, its movement playing across my line of vision.
  I would register this shift of earth, (...)
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  Dentro de otro tiempo: reflejos del Gran Canon

  LO QUE OIGO
  Basketmaker, Anasazi, Cohonina, Sinagua y Paiute, voces que susurran a través de los deltas, pálidas sílabas, torcidas y estiradas con el peso del maíz y los frijoles, cargados por caminos escarpados hasta los graneros que se llenan por otro invierno y otro. Hasta que no hay más inviernos y la gente también se ha ido, dejándonos con preguntas torpes y corazón estremecido.
  Nos colocamos en estos sonidos antiguos: sombras profundas trepando de color a color, el clima galopando y el (...)
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  Narrative of Power: Essays for an Endangered Century

  Let America be America Again, Round 2
  Let America be America again . . . —Langston Hughes
  But was it ever? Perhaps for those who roamed with buffalo and spirit song before Vespucci came bearing a name so foreign to their lives. Perhaps for the families pushing their wagons west planting crude crosses as they rutted heartland and rivers, the challenge of mountains. Conquest (...)
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  When I Look Into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror and Resistance

  Chapter 1 The Prism: Women’s Human Rights
  Language evokes, describes, communicates. But language can also be used to obscure and mislead. It can be used to kill. Today’s political discourse, cynically manipulated, often does just that. Nowhere is this more evident than when speaking of violence. How do we define violence, who do we see as perpetrating it, which acts of violence do we condemn and which do we justify?
  We call the Islamic fundamentalists who attacked the United States on (...)
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  Where They Left You for Dead / Halfway Home

  Androgynous and very beautiful,
  they list your qualities among those others: patron saint of healers and of fish, master (and mistress?) of rivers. Doctor, hunter, fisherman, fisher woman or both, god or goddess of the gatherers, one who lives in water and on land.
  We prepare your meal: red snapper with watercress, squash, sweet potato, Mandarin oranges, sweet wine and almond oil. We dress for dinner in your blues, yellows, whites. Adorn ourselves with shells and beads that (...)

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