Anna Sears

El Sanctuario de Chimayó

Never before or since so palpable
silence a hum too low to hear, visceral vibration
invisibility pressing on the skin
dense with meaning
dry air ripples like water . . .

Stuff continues. Men sell roasted pine nuts
people cross the stream bridge
between ancient cottonwoods
walk past gravestones
into cool, adobe dark
genuflect, count beads, light candles . . .

then slip through a low door beside the altar
past discarded canes and crutches
to gather the red earth of miracles
used here by cliff dwellers and people of the pueblos 
since long before Christ.

Nina Beberova’s Biography of 
the Baroness Budberg

In her open-air cage at Ghost Ranch 
near the path of the penitentes
a mountain lion paces 
turns and paces back, turns . . . 

Her face in the photograph with Maxim Gorky is beau-tiful as a cat, also “sober, serious, clever, and astute.” How in 1918 did she, a titled White Russian, contrive the release of her lover, a British agent, from Bolshevik custody?

The caged lioness
gnaws the meat they fling her
as she scents her mate . . .

Why did Maria Ignatievna, Baroness Budberg, write over 40 letters to her beloved British agent while living as the wife of Soviet writer Maxim Gorky? She ran Gorky’s complex households in Heringsdorf and Sorrento where he wrote socialist realism and saved letters that warned him of the realities of Soviet socialism.

The mountain lion is of her world –
round red hills, the azure bowl,
smell of thunder, cracked earth –
never fully in it . . .

In 1936, Maria Ignatievna traveled to Moscow in a pri-vate railway car provided by Stalin to part with the dying Gorky and leave a suitcase full of letters from the disil-lusioned. Few of the dissidents she revealed survived.

In my dream, Maria makes a pilgrimage
to el Sanctuario de Chimayóóó
lashing herself on the path of the penitentes
with whips made of cactus
vaya con Dios, Maria.

Baroness Lioness, cat’s paw of one power, creature of an-other, gnawed the meat they flung her. Behind the bars of her escape, she paced survival’s cage. In 1937, told Beberova, “I will never have any memoirs. All I have are memories.” 

After Moscow,
she carried vodka in her purse
and ate and ate and ate. 

“O Friends, No More These 
Sounds Continue”

Breath that once was hers
in, out
diaphragm rising, falling
at times her mouth open

Unremitting headaches
chasms open at her feet
now transformed at last
to scissors cutting peace

Her body 
a tattered slip
flung on the bed

In the empty room
thunder of kettledrum
warning of basso’s
ode to joy

Anna Sears is poetry editor of Caveat Lector and author of the novel Exile.