A House in Santa Fe
I should have left him when he said that poetry was lies. I didn't. We tried to buy a house I couldn't afford. Small, L-shaped, off Agua Fria. Our neighbors were a retired musician and his pixie wife. They were nice, which helped, as we shared a wall and a driveway and had to ask each other all the time to move one car or the other when theirs blocked ours or the other way around. There were steps down into the kitchen from our main room, then up again into two small adjacent rooms. I loved those steps. He wrote a handful of poems with just my name as title. In his spare time, he translated poetry from ancient Greek. He planted a desert rose in the tiny front yard and built a flower bed with a foot high adobe wall onto which he carved Johann Loves Beate. We got seeds from the grocery store, and some of them took. At times he fixed our leaking roof with tar. It usually held for a while. Five years later we left Santa Fe and the house. I still couldn't afford it. Some years after that, he left me too. After all, we're all just passing through. He changed the titles of the poems he had written but kept the poems. One year, just passing through again, I returned to look at the house. I parked far away in an empty school parking lot and walked. The tiny yard was filled with flowers, both real and artificial, and sculptured rainbow-colored butterflies and a few ravens. Some prayer flags moved in the breeze. It felt like a woman's creation. She had removed our names and an "s" from the flower bed wall. Only the Love remained.
Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, grew up in Nürnberg, Germany, and lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she has served as poet laureate. Her poetry and short prose are widely published in literary magazines. Recent book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers, and a short story collection, Dona Nobis Pacem and a third, Circus Dancer.
See more of Beate's work in 12.4 and 12.1 and 12.1