Dan Stephensen

First Snow on La Jicarita

I bury my words in dirt

As few as a name

Under shadows

Under snow as soft as ash

Not even a morning old.

*

Review

Everything I write now

Lives for a moment on the page…

…and lost.

All poetic effort used up day-to-day

The attention and embrace

Necessary to hear a poem’s

Wordless voice…

…God in heaven

The most maddening attainment

Is to be worthy of debt.

*

Here I Place Two Crosses

Ghosts in the foothills

Come down with their horses to drink and wash.

Sheep rest quiet in the soft wind

In the glade they live like stones

Settled and of this place.

None has searched for The City of Gold.

So much of history is a search for gold

For mines, settlements, cities made of gold

As if it could ever be a reasonable building material.

Can you imagine the stupidity?

You need to get water to the village

And, surrounded by wood or stone or clay,

You set to work on an aqueduct of gold.

When Coronado brought horses to New Mexico

And onward to the prairie

It was the search for gold and only gold that mattered:

Not grass not good growing soil they weren’t gold

Not Zuni nor Wichita they weren’t gold

And buffalo weren’t made of gold either

And rivers only ran with water.

But a man named Mustafa Azemmouri

Enslaved as Estevanico to Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain,

Had reported finding Quivira, City of Gold:

So much gold good god

It’s fucking everywhere

These people shit gold.

Can you imagine the sheer idiocy it took

To believe that Mustafa wasn’t taking the piss?

Cunning they were, the conquistadors,

Ruthless and desperate sadists

With superior weapons and technology,

But you could count them among the top dumbbells of history.

So off they trotted one after another to get the gold.

And Mustafa’s supervisor on a certain expedition was one Friar Marcos de Niza

Who at a distance

Sheltered among boulders

Terrified of Indians

Set his gaze in the direction of Estevanico’s Quivira

And bore witness to the City of Gold

In one of its various mobile iterations.

In his report to Mendoza (who was also Coronado’s supervisor),

Descubrimiento de las siete ciudades

Description of the Seven Cities,

Friar Marcos wrote speculative fiction of an often imitated kind

As witnessed in invasion speeches

Chemical weapons findings

Presidential debates:

“I only saw

From the mouth of the valley

Seven decent towns

At a distance a dale below, very cool

And with very good soil—

I had reason to believe that gold was abundant there

And that the natives use it in vessels and jewelry

For the ears and shoulders

With which they shave and remove sweat

And these people do not permit others

In the dale to make contact with them

Here I placed two crosses

And took possession of this entire dale and valley.”