Arroyo Lessons
Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota).Future Ancestral Technologies // Muscle, Bone & Sinew, 2021. Drone video still from Shadow Holding Shape to Experience the Energy of the Sun.
By Adrienne Rugg
Iwrite letters to my father, the riverbed, when I need answers that mother can’t give. Father empty stream, father arroyo, who houses the rattlesnake beneath his wind-smoothed stones. Father imminent danger, the flash flood, the whipping monsoon mud froth, father aftermath in ribbons of ruined earth.
The arroyo spreads his tiger moth wings and paints his back in dark, tide-pulled streaks of metallic silt. He sings out from the limestone valley where dead sea minerals are alive in the ground. His answer to me is not a poem or passage, no missive nor manual, but a magnet, to gather up his iron-rich words.
I beg for explanation, instructions to survive these eons of lost time, but with no inheritance, no dowry but this dusty steel globe, desert land repulsing against me. I sift the black sand through each new set of shiny, manufactured fingers, pooling silt and shavings and dust until I can no longer see the fractaling sheen of my magnet’s surface.
I scramble up the hill, every time to a home no longer mine, fall back to the cactus plastered valley, and I beg for the wild’s embrace, but the arroyo is dry and does not answer. I beg for a poem I can read, but the floods are rushing and the arroyo silently drowns beneath.
The black sand sticks until the Earth loses its axis and the compass spins ever round and everything held close begins to repel. There the loose earth grinds into the grout of my cold tiled floor and spells out his last retort.
Child, when you are wrong, I remember you are real. Your mask is all the meager parts of history, all those that ignore the imperfections and the music of loss and livelihood. You cannot write a future without mistakes, and you cannot mistake an apology to mean you are right.
I would raise you if this was all wilderness. Tamed animal child. Tanned pelt child. If you could learn slowly, you could forget, you could learn again, from me, from the riverbed. You work so hard to chronicle all you’ve ever learned. It will never change with your eroding, rain-swept memory. You need impermanence. How do you think I’ve lasted so long?
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Adrienne Rugg teaches poetry and multi-genre writing at New Mexico School for the Arts. They graduated in 2024 from Western Washington University with a BA in creative writing. Rugg often pairs their poetry and fiction with multi-media arts. Their award-winning poetry has been published in the Santa Fe New Mexican, Dreams of Montezuma, and Convergence II.