The Poet Visits the Dearfield Archives at the Denver Public Library

Summer has pulled, with its hands harsh as a playground bully, 

the silk from my press. I am home, hatless and determined 

to survive Welton street’s sidewalk’s swelter. The Blair-Caldwell 

African American Research Library opens at noon. With sweat 

sealed in by face mask and soaking underwire, I arrive. 

At the desk, Shanti. His shirt purple striped his gaze curious 

at my breathless request for all things Dearfield. Still, it is Shanti 

who spreads storage boxes of newspaper articles in front of me. 

Shanti who brings me books on Black homesteads, who too, has spent 

chunks of his life staring out at Dearfield’s wind-cratered remnants 

wondering if the town’s failure was circumstance or inevitable 

as the sky’s dark blue decent. It is Shanti, hours into my visit, 

who brings me Chrales Rothwell’s photo album, the outside leather red 

as cigarette’s fire-struck seethe. On the first page, Rothwell, 

sun-shy and branding cattle, iron rod in his routine-sure grip. 

What is it to capture in shutter’s succession the saunter of cowboys? 

The strength it takes to brand the blackberry hide of a bull and stand up 

against the tide of its smolder-sore moans. To capture in photobook’s 

plastic folds, passed between two sets of black hands, one with grey 

hair seared to the knuckle, and the other with nail polish white 

as swan gullet flaking off with every flip of a page, a life—crisscrossing 

the Platte, the queen city of the plains, Dearfield, all on the back 

of a weft-brown horse. Before I am finished with the archives, 

the newspaper clippings, the cardboard boxes, the plastic braced chapters 

of Charles Rothwell’s life, Shanti departs. But in the images, captured 

and cradled by my phone’s clay-clogged screen, hold the ghost of his grip 

on the book, red as snow willow. What is it to pass a history 

to someone lion’s maw green and eager to make new text out of history? 

What is it to spend hours flipping through a life, only to collapse 

it between stitch sharp leather and move on to the next box?

Charles Rothwell branding a cow, Dearfield, Colorado, ca. 1910s; Courtesy of University of Northern Colorado Digital Archives