Tommy Archuleta, Susto: Poems

 

AFTERWORD

In the wake of my mother’sdeath, in that sheer-white numbness, Pop and I found among her things ahomemade book on curanderismo. Its contents pair physical, mental, andspiritual ailments with a particular herb, plant, or root native to northernNew 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 thelast; 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 andthere Mother’s longhand stands out. Soon after this discovery, another came myway in the form of a line that continues to play to this day: To love deeplyis to grieve deeply. Along the ground of this line a sinkhole appeared, anddown I went, emerging years later with something close to the book you how holdin your hands, kind reader.

Idon’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 (FortCollins CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2023), that seems important forhow 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 ofmeditative accumulations, originally prompted by the death of his mother in2013, Archuleta offers an array of first person lyric fragments interspersedamong 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 ofNew Mexico, his mother’s language and the history of the region, blending allinto a singular, ongoing purpose. “Tell me again about / the saint they namedme after,” he writes, “About how she floated / when she prayed // and how youcan’t be / alive and a saint at the same time // You just can’t // You have tobe dead first [.]” Susto fractions and fractals and even pursuesgrief; composed across moments, and through stages, with poems clustered intofive sections of lyrics and the occasional prose poem. “Love as seed or love asplow,” 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 andfields

He’s home now
for good

says his mother
Yes     home now

for good
say the wolves