Claire Keyes

At Great White Sands, New Mexico

Approaching from the Southwest, we glimpse soft, motherly forms,
a landscape without land, undulating white dunes stretching for miles,

tempting us to imagine a Hollywood sci-fi extravaganza, the sands blown sky-high.
It’s not unearthly, just white as bone, as the Taj Mahal’s marble walls,

as Ahab’s whale. I imagine a primordial abyss with shallow seas under a blistering sun
and gypsum white as the creamy ceilings of sarcophagi.  We may never plant colonies on Mars,  

but we can wander here in a white silence, our voices too used to quick asides, too adrift
from that which appears to have no beginning, no end.  Then we learn about the 10,000 footprints

found here dating to the end of the Ice Age, one set clearly of a woman walking
with a young child, sometimes carrying her.  As if to mimic her, I slip off my shoes

to feel a closer connection to this place, the perceived softness seeming to offer comfort.
But not today, no miracle out of New Mexico.  What I bring here,

I’ll take back home, a little wiser about a place Oppenheimer chose
to develop a bomb sure to make future wars unthinkable.

Claire Keyes is the author of two collections of poetry: The Question of Rapture (Mayapple Press) and What Diamonds Can Do (WordTech). Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. A second chapbook, One Port, was published by Derby Wharf Books. She is Professor emerita at Salem State University and her poems and reviews have been published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Turtle Island, Loch Raven Review, One Art, and Tipton Poetry Journal. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.