AFTERWORD
In the wake of my mother’s
death, in that sheer-white numbness, Pop and I found among her things a
homemade book on curanderismo. Its contents pair physical, mental, and
spiritual ailments with a particular herb, plant, or root native to northern
New Mexico. The instructions on how to prepare and administer each treatment (remedio)
run from precise to vague. The paper stock is not of this century, nor of the
last; its margins are filled with notes in Spanish and English, some in pencil,
some in pen. And while the writing style of the notes varies greatly, here and
there Mother’s longhand stands out. Soon after this discovery, another came my
way in the form of a line that continues to play to this day: To love deeply
is to grieve deeply. Along the ground of this line a sinkhole appeared, and
down I went, emerging years later with something close to the book you how hold
in your hands, kind reader.
I
don’t usually begin at the end, but there is something important in the “Afterword”
of
New Mexico poet Tommy Archuleta’s full-length debut,
Susto: Poems (Fort
Collins CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2023), that seems important for
how one might begin to approach this collection.
Susto is a book of grief,
and how one might survive a loss so deeply felt. Composed across a sequence of
meditative accumulations, originally prompted by the death of his mother in
2013, Archuleta offers an array of first person lyric fragments interspersed
among his mother’s own words as a kind of daily meditation, one that echoes the
“I remember” form by Georges Perec. He writes of dreams and the landscape of
New Mexico, his mother’s language and the history of the region, blending all
into a singular, ongoing purpose. “Tell me again about / the saint they named
me after,” he writes, “About how she floated / when she prayed // and how you
can’t be / alive and a saint at the same time // You just can’t // You have to
be dead first [.]”
Susto fractions and fractals and even
pursues
grief; composed across moments, and through stages, with poems clustered into
five sections of lyrics and the occasional prose poem. “Love as seed or love as
plow,” he writes, mid-through the collection, “End as end / or end as opening
// Either way
why go / on fearing /
the dark part // god part doorway / Go ahead // Ask me [.]”
What calm
in the way the gravedigger
unbuttons his coat
and the frozen
ground below him
How it longs to be opened
You learn not to wave
at the soldier
coatless always
wandering the roads and
fields
He’s home now
for good
says his mother
Yes home now
for good
say the wolves
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