Kyle Laws’ collections include This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017); So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015); Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014); My Visions Are As Real As Your Movies, Joan of Arc Says to Rudolph Valentino (Dancing Girl Press, 2013); and George Sand’s Haiti (co-winner of Poetry West’s 2012 award). Faces of Fishing Creek is forthcoming in 2018 from Middle Creek Publishing.  With six nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., and Canada.  She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.

Cliff Ruins

The canyon of the Rio Grande
on the way from Taos to Ojo
Caliente is burnished gold,
early autumn river a thread
with no needle.

We visit Dennis Hopper earth ships
—tires buried in berms—plan
where the gray water will flow,
almost miss D.H. Lawrence’s
banned paintings at La Fonda.

To share four springs under a cliff
of ruins, shards of black and white
pots zigzag like roads that brought
me here in an April rain in 1979,
circling as crow a carrion kill.

I call and call as we pummel
through the desert inhabited by
wild horses and a viridian sage
instead of the purple of Zane Grey.
No one answers.

Able to float in the iron spring
without even an arch of back,
we agreed the entrance to Hades
should serve more than white
wine margaritas and beer.

[image: Sunset in the Gorge | William Horton Photography]