Tommy Archuleta, Susto: Poems

 

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