Stories in the Stones: Unearthing the Voices of Trails
Inspired to write a poetry collection entitled Trailing the Azimuth, I have spent the last eight months remembering and re-exploring various trails that I have traversed in my life, both literal and figurative. Some of these paths are in my own native Tennessee, and others are in more distant landscapes. Among the patchwork of places in the United States that resonate with me still, the unforgettable adventures in the Southwest are grafted upon my heart and mind. Though I love the otherworldly terrain of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, it is the southwestern corner of Colorado that is especially vivid in my memory. In 2016 I had the opportunity to explore the history of the Ancestral Pueblo Indians in the Mesa Verde region when I was selected as a fellow for a National Endowment for the Humanities project hosted by the Crow Canyon Archaeology Center in Cortez, Colorado. Delving into the lifeways of the Ancestral Pueblo, I began to understand more fully how critical it is that we, as 21st-century humans, realize we live in a continuum that connects the present to the past and the future. We must take the time to excavate the memories of ancestors and conduct our own “archaeological” discoveries among the possessions and the traditions that we have inherited. We must also consider what it is that we are leaving behind. What legacies will others unearth about us one day in the future? Will they be bright ones, filled with meaning and depth? Or will they be shallow and destructive, darkening the paths of those who discover them among the ruins? With these thoughts in mind, upon completing my work in Colorado, I returned to Tennessee and began to turn over the “stones” of memories that lay in the foundations of my own family history and heritage, much of which is attached to the looming mountainous landscape that glows with a blue-green light on the horizon. The hills where my ancestors walked seemed to speak to me in a way they never had before, but also I found voices among objects in the landscape—like cabins and farm equipment, quilts and butter churns, church bowery bells and fallen barns.
According to Estevan Rael-Galvez, “A piece of land is like a book, leaving something behind for us to read.” The Ancestral Pueblo people of Mesa Verde left behind what anthropologists term material culture. To Benjamin Weatherill, the ruins of the cliff dwellers were “symbols of the past.” Though these stone buildings can only signify conceivable stories, they encourage us to carefully imagine and consider our human connection. Both anthropologists and modern Pueblo people believe that the landscape is a rich repository of historical and cultural information to speak to us across time. Thus, the ancient cliff dwellers, their stone ruins, and their landscapes communicate in a quiet but living language that can be studied for meaning as one might study symbols in a poem. The abandoned dwellings stand as stories; they simultaneously exist as levels on structures and as layered narratives that connect to our own chronicles. Reuben Ellis in Stories and Stones says, “Like a good story, the construction of stone walls too is a matter of field and line, relation and connection—courses of blocks, linear and temporal in their authorship, form, and reception, one stone following another horizontally, one course going up on top of another, just as a writer builds to create layers of meaning.”
These layers of meaning are central to the work of Simon Ortiz, a renowned poet from Acoma Pueblo, who affirms the continuity between contemporary Pueblo Indians and their ancestors as he emphasizes the integrity of the oral tradition and the profound kinship to place and heritage necessary for any healthy human experience. In his essay “The Language We Know,” Ortiz writes about the strong influence of his father, a skilled stoneworker like many other older Pueblo men who worked with sandstone and mud mortar to build homes and pueblos: “It takes time, persistence, patience, and the belief that the walls that come to stand will do so for a long, long time, perhaps even forever. I like to think that by helping to mix mud and carry stone for my father and other elders I managed to bring that influence into to my consciousness as a writer.” Similarly, in Ortiz’s poem “A Story of How a Wall Stands,” the voice of the ancestor is represented by the persona of the father, who tells a story to remind and inspire his son to carry on the traditions by contributing to the work of his ancestors; the voice of the elder encourages youth to appreciate connection to ancient structures and folkways. “This Occurs to Me” presents the voice of one who has absorbed the memory articulated by the father, the elder, the ancestor. When one considers the connected symbolism in Ortiz’s poems, it is easy to realize that they incorporate what Andrew J. Darling and Barnaby V. Lewis term “songscapes,” or landscapes remembered through song. By connecting poetry to the landscape, writers—and their readers by extension—become participants in “song archaeology” as we retrace steps delineated in a lyrical journey to find the places that the poem mentions.
From such a desire to capture landscapes in song, I have written my debut poetry collection, Trailing the Azimuth, which will be published in the coming months by the Resource Publications imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Some of the poems are responses to the landscape of Tennessee while others recognize the deep heritage and memory that can be discovered in places like Nicaragua and Turkey, where each diverse culture has its own folkways and preservations of traditions connected to the land. Below I share an audio reading of one of the poems in the collection, inspired by my time at Mesa Verde.
