Santa Fe Remembers

I have watched you come up out of the south, by the salt

deserts,

From Compostela and Culiacan,

In the iron columns of Vasquez de Coronado

Seeking the Seven Lost Cities of Cibola, and the gold un-

dreamed of by man.

I have seen you march in the shadow of the Spanish crucifix

With Fray Marcos de Nizza, and at San Xavier del Bac:

I have watched you die like locusts on the sun-baked playas

South of the Sierra Blancas, with your gold on your back.

When the last grizzled galleon cleared Acapulco

With her yard-arms raking the dawn, and her hold full of

gold,

I knew that she was fated never to put into Cadiz, :

And I said prayers for her repose, and my mission bells

tolled.

Your poets have written of me as being like a saint in armor,

And like a ragged king on a wilderness throne,

And like a grey old spider spinning forever

At the heart of a vast and phantom web of its own.

But I have lived longer than the poets, or their verses,

And something in me, indestructible as time,

Will never be whittled to fit the frame of a sonnet,

Will never be caught in the careful stave of a rime.

I have been the spoil of Andalusian grandees,

In chain-mail and spiked burgonet;

And I have played host to the chiefs of half of the Plains

Tribes,

And I have worn a Mexican coronet.

I have counted the covered-wagons by the tens of hundreds,

And I have held their treasure in the palm of my hand;

I have signed my name by the seals of invincible monarchs,

And ruined kings have ceded my coveted land.

I have sat too long at the crossroads of the centuries

Not to know what burns in the hearts of the children of

man:

Not to know that the faiths and the dreams and the quests

of the latest

Are the same as when the slow march of the aeons began.

When the last swart, gold-bitten Coronado has vanished,

And there are no more Lost Cities to seek,

I pray that I may be left alone with the ages,

Where the flesh of the strong goes down to the dust of the

weak:

And none come up out of the south, by the salt deserts,

And Compostela and Culiacan

Are less than the dust that has given them back to the

'wasteland,

And I, at long last, am beyond the poor memory of man.