In So Many Words

For a long time now, we've been showcasing the best of Arizona with words and photographs. It's something we do in every issue, but it's been a while since we featured any poetry. This month, by popular demand, the metrical writing is back. And we even managed to dig up a few photos to go with it.

Desert Water

In the desert, water is the animal hunters track first. To visit the river quickly, cut an onion.

Water falls down wet and gets up green. Water is the blood of the land.

In water, the stars and the animals see themselves side by side. Water is how we are all related.

Nobody owns water -drink some, and try to keep it. Water rules kings.

Raindrops on the hard dirt make the ghosts rise. Water hums its song into stone.

Water is the desert's medicine. Water is the solid ground of dreams.

Water speaks, but you must listen with your mouth. Water is our common language.

Alberto Ríos, a native of Nogales, Arizona, is the author of 10 books of poetry, as well as three collections of short stories. He is a regents' professor of English at Arizona State University, where he holds the Katharine C. Tumer Endowed Chair in English. He was recently named Arizona's first poet laureate.

Music Mountains

Cemamagi, Tumamoc Babad Do'ag, Santa Catalina Mountains Cuk Do'ag, Black Mountains, Tucson Mountains Cew Do'ag, Rincon Mountains Giho Do'ag, Kihotoa, Burden Basket Mountain Waw Giwulig Do'ag, Baboquivari Mountain It has been said before, these mountains will not listen if we simply speak words to them. They will only hear us if we come with melody, rhythm, pitch, and harmony. To these circling mountains we must speak with voices in songs, rhythmic speeches, orations, and prayers. We must be prepared with repetition, a singular, undisturbed beat. That is the way of mountains. This is what they want to hear.

We must come to them with music so they are generous with the summer rains that appear to start their journey from their peaks. We must come to them with song so they will be generous with the winter snow that settles there. We must come to them with a strong recognizable beat, a beat that reaches the core of the mountain a core still molten and moving to its own sounds and simultaneously reaches a core long frozen into submission with only a memory of the heat of its birth. For the mountains of Tucson the sound of spoken word is not enough. They will not hear us. We must be prepared with harmony, a strong rhythm, a beat.

Ofelia Zepeda Ofelia Zepeda, a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation, is a regents' professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and the founder of the American Indian Language Development Institute. She has published three books of poetry.

Trickster

He was there before the rising action rose to meet this acre cornered by thirst, before birds swallowed bathwater and exploded in midsentence, before the nameless began sipping the blood of ravens from the sun's knotted atlas.

He was there, sleeping with one eye clamped tighter than the other, he looked, when he shouldn't have.

He said, "You are worth the wait." in the waiting room of the resurrection of another Reservation and continued to dig for water, her hands, a road map. in a bucket of white shells outside the North gate.

He threw a blanket over the denouement slithering onto shore and saw Indians, leaning into the beginning, slip out of turtle shells, and slide down bottle necks, aiming for the first pocket of air in the final paragraph.

He saw anthropologists hook a land bridge with their curved spines, and raised the hunters a full minute above its tollbooth, saying, "Fire ahead, fire."

When they pointed, he leapt into the blue dark on that side of the fence; it was that simple: sap drying in the tear ducts of the cut worm, his ignition switched on blue horses grazing northward in the pre-dawn.

Sherwin Bitsui Sherwin Bitsui is a Navajo poet from White Cone, Arizona, and he's the recipient of the 2000-2001 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, as well as the Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship. His work has appeared in two published anthologies.