Bones Incandescent The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church
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Bones Incandescent The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church Edited with Essays by Shelley Armitage
Texas Tech University Press
Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. © Copyright 2001 Texas Tech University Press All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit, prior written permission of the publisher except for brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes. This book was set in Adobe Garamond. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997). ∞ Printed in the United States of America Design by Bryce Burton Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Church, Peggy Pond, 1903-1986 Bones incandescent : the Pajarito journals of Peggy Pond Church / edited with essays by Shelley Armitage. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-89672-438-7 (alk. paper) 1. Church, Peggy Pond, 1903---Diaries. 2. Poets, American—20th century—Diaries. 3. Pajarito Plateau (N.M.) I. Armitage, Shelley, 1947- II. Title. PS3505.H946 Z464 2001 818'.5203--dc21 2001000941 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Texas Tech University Press Box 41037 Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037 USA 1-800-832-4042
[email protected] www.ttup.ttu.edu
For Kathleen and Hugh Church, for sharing, and my mother, Dorothy Armitage, always
Noon in the desert is a vast blaze overhead and a hard glow below. You’re shut in by vast distances of light. You walk in the focus of the sun’s rays. You are clothed in sun; sun glows in your blood, until even your bones feel incandescent. Nancy Newhall The Desert is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art
I’m an instinctive trail-follower. There’s nothing I’ve loved better to do since I was “going-on-eleven” and went to live on the Pajarito Plateau. It was full of Indian trails and game trails and horseback trails and the kind of trails your imagination gets you into when you pick up pottery shards and arrowheads, to find your way around by blazes on trees, or if there aren’t any, just by the lay of the land. If you got lost, you depended more on a feeling in your bones, a sort of inner compass, than on anything in your mind to get you out again. . . . I write to keep from getting lost. Peggy Pond Church “Trails Over the Pajarito”
Contents Preface Two Plateaus
ix
Acknowledgments
xxii
Introduction Landscape of a Life: Place of the Bird People
xxiii
Church Chronology
xxxix
One The Seeds of Wonder
1
Journals, 1930s–1950s
21
Time Buried in Oneself
55
Journals, 1960s
68
Two
Three The Pattern of Ancient Crossing
103
Journals, 1970s
115
Pajarito Cycles: The Cycles of Selves
157
Journals, 1980s
169
Four
Bones Incandescent
viii
Afterword
195
Notes
217
For Further Reading
223
List of Church Poems Included in Text
225
Index
227
Preface Two Plateaus
When I first met Peggy Pond Church in 1980 in her home on Camino Rancheros in Santa Fe, I knew her only by reputation. Although she was the author of the best-selling memoir, The House at Otowi Bridge: The Story of Edith Warner and Los Alamos (1959), she chiefly was recognized, especially in Southwest letters, as a poet. “The First Lady of