Wise and wondrous words: Late poet Ann Alejandro on the land of South Texas

Ann Toombs Alejandro was born on Sept. 30, 1955 and died on June 7, 2019 at age 64.

For much of her life, the Texas poet lived on a ranch outside of Uvalde.

Rarely published in her lifetime, Alejandro, who struggled with a chronic illness, maintained a bountiful correspondence with her literary friends.

Two of those friends, Naomi Shihab Nye and Marion Winik, promised to gather a selection of her letter-writing into a book after her death.

In 2024, Texas A&M University Press, in tandem with the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, published the impeccable: "I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas."

Nobody expects it to turn into a bestseller, yet some of the most wise and gorgeous language about Texas, its land and its people can be found in this slender volume.

Who forged 'I Know About a Thousands Things'?

In case you didn't already know, co-editor Nye is among the state's and nation's most distinguished poets. She served as the Young People's Poet Laureate of the United States and poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine and the Texas Observer. She has received lifetime achievement awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, National Book Critics Circle and the Arab-American National Museum. She received the 2024 Texas Writer Award from the Texas Book Festival, and is currently the visiting writer at Texas State University in San Marcos.

For her part, Winik first came to attention to Texas readers through her personal essays published in the Austin Chronicle. She has written several books that include "The Big Book of the Dead," "First Comes Love" and "Above Us Only Sky." She reviews books for the Washington Post, People and Oprah Daily. Winik hosts "The Weekly Reader" podcast on National Public Radio and served as a commentator on "All Things Considered" for 15 years.

To the purpose of this book, Alejandro's "lengthy missives continued to delight her correspondents, blending observation, storytelling, humor, praise and accounts of her deep attachment to the land and animals that surrounded her in the rural southwest."

I asked permission of Winik and Nye, as well as the publishers, to excerpt some of Alejandro's phenomenal writing from her chapter titled "Land."

Editorial preface to the chapter, 'Land'

"For Ann, the land was everything, and some her strongest work was nature writing," Nye and Winik write. "The connection with the earth she formed as very small child was the heart of her faith, which really was a kind of Christian pantheism. She could never understand why everyone couldn't see and feel what she did — what was wrong with these city folk?

"As much as she was attracted to museums and high culture, the land had a gravity, a physical pull, that always drew her toward the horizon," they continue. "This is something that Ann shared with her fellow Uvaldeans, an intense pride in their scrubby terrain; Matthew McConaughey’s memoir 'Greenlights' expresses it fervently as well.

"Hearty people formed by this hard land."

Savor every word. And if you have not already done so this spring, get back to the Texas land.

Alejandro's impressions of the land

In March the bluebonnets will be glorious so you must must must come, but in snake boots because they emerge furious and snapping in teeming hordes from dens on exactly March 6. We can roast marshmallows and listen to the multitudinous bands of coyotes and we will have no armor, we will await the purpose of the day and though we nearly miss it, the purpose of all days is: Watch, Listen, Learn.

***

I will be so glad if you get to come this spring. In addition to the donkeys, you will be greeted by more than 50 exotic chickens with Tina Turner hairdos, a fresh crop of kittens, two darling big old yearling calves, the parakeet, finches, gerbils, dogs and now a growing group of fat triangle-shaped field mice whom we catch and put in a gerbil cage.

***

from "Getting There from Here":

I want to tell you about these roads

that bisected my life with bridges over rivers

I had known. Latitude and longitude converge

upon the point where I lived until the roads

became my limbs and the rivers my veins.

This one, southwesterly, returned me to my river

eyeball to eyeball with the fat coyote — I saw

the Mexican eagles, and in the flood

the javelinas and turkeys scrambling

for higher ground. It is a myth about how creatures

won't look you in the eye. They will. Still

I wanted to get on with it, cross the border

where the palomas tristes mourned outside of surgery

and fat unshorn sheep grazed in a vacant lot.

Still there were bluebonnets

and in the grey, cold days sandhill cranes

dropping to furrowed rows where seeds waited.

I lie on a rock by the river

listening to the water run on, and I wonder how long

it takes to get to the bridge from where I cannot

see. I watch two lazy buzzards ride their current

against the green and the bluffs and I know

they have not come for me. Night comes

and here around me is earth water wind and fire

I breathe deeply to make me strong.

They tell me to walk an hour a day

And because I live in the center

of the roads that flare out like

spokes and because I traverse them

all to ride the wheel, I know the

way you go to get well gives you as much

as what they give you when you get there.

***

Fly-fishing is a religion I recognize, and believe in, and approve of — the supernatural world just caressing you, enveloping you, treating you so tenderly when it snows, when the brave crocuses come up, when the house finches come to the feeder, when the flocks of sandhill cranes fly over you with their trill, when something is so beautiful, so perfect, so holy you can hardly stand it.

***

Two months late, and after two weeks of inability to get going, I planted 52 flats of seeds today. Major triumph. This is like my savings fund, which does not exist. I plant so I will be able to go out in the yard and get myself saved, knowing the flowers and veggies and strange, wonderful vines will save me. I sowed in the spring so in the summer I would be recalled to life. It will be proof to me: yes, you wanted to live.

***

I planted half the garden today. It means I will live at least until fall. It is the life I invest now so in summer which will be so awful with no rain, I will remember who I was, that I had hope, that I loved life, wanted to love, wanted to see myself in months ahead for the times when I will have vanished which is most of the time now.

***

I weave and with my hands I try to make small beautiful things, and I love the ancient rhythms of back and forth and forward and back. I love the cotton that somebody grew and the wool that came off some sheep’s back.

***

My yard thinks it's in heaven. I have gorgeous banana and big green lovely bell peppers, and the fall tomatoes are growing up nicely and the spring tomatoes are setting again!

Lordy, it almost makes you wish it would never freeze. I have me a winter garden growing here from the remnants of the spring garden that survived that awful summer and now has this zest for life I find miraculous.

I have been thanking God so much. How he made up to us all in one month the anguish of two nearly unbearable springs and summers. How every thunderclap said, "See, I did not forget you," to everything, every goat and lamb and cow and deer and bird and horned toad and tree and bush and crop, and all of us who live here and endured those two years. It is just the nature of this nature. You have to store up what will not come again maybe for years and be strong enough to survive on what you stored — what the earth and the pockets and the dirt and the springs stored for you.  We love rain better than what most people does. We love rain more than people in Louisiana do, I reckon.

***

I think my children will always love the river. Town can never teach you the peril of beauty and the preciousness of its very will to be; it can never shape you to immerse yourself in that kind of redemptive solace. I wish I could teach them to love the ranch, where the chance of bad encounters with humans is so much lessened, but its river is haunted and spooky, and it is desperately hot and harsh, and I did not love it either until I was much older than they are.

***

The sweetest of all smells draws in as evening cools down the earth, the whitebrush like a bridal path smelling of lilies and dust. The hard country that supports an infinite variety of life. Kissing each bluegill or bass on the fly rod, stopping to let the mule and dogs sniff the mystery of the box tortoise, braking for the tiniest horny toads and moving them off the road, the baby pink javelinas who would nurse off any mama or auntie, and their big brothers or cousins snapping at them saying NO this corn is mine! The haunted Leona River and great gift of the Nueces flowing like God’s own glory through a desert where no river had the courage and might to do.

Sneaking out the window as a very small child to hear the wind in the trees and the utter silence, going to say hello to each neighborhood dog, climbing the tallest sycamores to let the wind rock me. Then slipping back in my window content that the night had held me in safety. I loved the world too much. I couldn’t help it. How could I not? This was the place a mighty and tender God had chosen for me. How could I not see his greatness his safety his beauty in all of it?

***

It was not the thinkers and philosophers who wanted to subdue and conquer the West. It was pretty easy for them to see God in nature when they didn’t have to hack trails through it, face angry grizzly mother bears, endure blizzards and droughts, killing something for every meal or starve — they didn’t have to get bitten by rattlesnakes and swarms of flies. The West, the horizon, was an idea for them. The actual tamers and settlers were the people with blisters on their feet who wanted prosperity, something they could call their own — the actual westering movement was not a movement of the wealthy or educated. It was poor people who saw opportunity and took great risks to have what might be had.

Also it is important to remember that the “wilderness” was not virgin as they all called it. It was not without mythos, it had its sacred places, landmarks in the oral traditions and folklore and religion of countless Indian tribes and Spanish-mestizo descendants. The English-speakers renamed valleys and rock formations and canyons and mountains and rivers that already had names. I am amazed at how Whitman and Emerson could be so ecstatic and optimistic when Winfield Scott was marching the Cherokees off on the Trail of Tears. At least Whitman got his hands dirty, grieved, worked through the tragedies. Emerson was large in thought but insular in experience. It was a neat world, there, Concord.

Poe looked inside and saw chaos at the heart of the human psyche. He was 50 years ahead of his time, should have been roommates with Henry James. I resent it that the explorers and writers and settlers and painters felt so unburdened by a past in the land which awed and drew them. It had a past. It just wasn’t their past. It had a story, a religion, a history, a mythology. It just wasn’t theirs.

***

"Uvalde to Brackettville in September"

The land forgot it was the end of summer

and looked like April, spread before me

a banquet of the spring that didn’t end.

A hard land for hearty people

has few mercies and no memory

But I store its treasures up

to sustain me … thick grass …

guajillos uncurling … blooming cenizos …

I am of hearty people formed by this hard land

that’s soft and nourishing now …

a band of unhardened survivors …

Some land, I know, is always home.

It claims you. And the people

who see it in your bones —

the way you carry yourself

the way you stoop and smile and almost cry.

the way your eyes scan the sky and know what it means —

they take you in. They dust you off.

They spread out the banquet.

It’s America, right. What can happen.

Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at Michael.Barnes@hearst.com. Sign up for the free weekly digital newsletter, Think, Texas, at statesman.com/newsletters.