The Transylvanian Horseman is so adept at making history come alive.

His description of his nomad ancestors and the history of the part of England he and his wife-to-be now call home, makes me think of the rich history of my own homeland.

I can't tell you how many times I--a woman who can claim to be Scottish and Cherokee--have ridden my white Andalusian horse Caprichosa down the Pojoaque creek, through villages that at one time were the home of the Pueblo Indians, thinking about what the first sight of a conquistador astride his Iberian war horse must have looked like to the locals. After all, hundreds of years later, I'm riding the same path, still hoping that somehow our paths will cross. (Although would he just pull out a sword and wollop me? Mother of two in faded blue jeans found impaled on creek bank by Spanish sword of priceless antiquity? Is there a Black Irish connection? News at 7.)

I've read that the Pueblo Indians at first thought that horse and man were one creature.

That must have been terrifying.

I watch the History Channel, if there's nothing good on Sci Fi. I love my books, prefer them any day. But a white Andalusian horse is my four-legged conduit into a history I can almost smell and taste. It's so close. Just beneath the shimmering off of the hot sand.

I often find myself astride Caprichosa, whose ancestors were great warhorses and from whom she gets all that bravery, thinking about the myriad of invasions over the course of human history. The Spanish over the Pueblo Indian, for example. Especially when the horse is all blown up to what seems like twice her size, with her neck arched, rippling, lifting her hooves in round soft arcs. And there's always another group clambering to be on top.

Occasionally, I try to pull one out of Finney's great time travel book Time and Again, and think if I could only get myself into the right mindset, I could ride that white Andalusian horse right across time, but that's just the romantic in me. (You'd think at my age I'd have given this up by now.) Sometimes magic dissipates into a sense of a flawed and imperfect world as the mare trots through the creek, splashing water. I'm not hoping for any utopias. I'm not looking for cities of gold, although if you ride high enough up into the barrancas, you can see the neon lights of a casino by that name.

Whatever governments or politicians may claim about being able to implement a perfect world, maybe even a Brave New World, I have recently found myself afraid, it's a wild and wooly and beautiful and messed up place we live in. As tangled up as the cottonwoods and the Chinese Elms in the bosque. A pirate's garden. Like a whole mess of Kudzu vines, although that's a different geography from mine.

I don't think anyone has described or captured this feeling about the mingling of the past and present for me as well as Southwestern poet Jimmy Santiago Baca (check out his books here)--

“Invasions”
by Jimmy Santiago Baca

6:00 a.m.
I awake and leave to fish
the Jemez.
Coronado rode
through this light, dark
green brush,
horse foaming saliva,
tongue red and dry
as the red cliffs.
Back then the air
was bright and crisp
with Esteban's death
at the hands of Zuni warriors.
Buffalo God, as he was called,
was dead, dead, dead,
beat the drums
and rattled gourds.
The skin of the Moor
was black
as a buffalo's nose,
hair kinky
as buffalo shag-mane.
No seven cities
of Cibola gold were found.
Horses waded the Jemez,
white frothing currents
banking horse bellies,
beading foot armor,
dripping from sword scabbards.
I wade in
up to my thighs
in jeans,
throw hooked
salmon egg bait
out in shadowy shallows
beneath overhanging cottonwood, and
realize
I am the end result
of Conquistadores,
Black Moors,
American Indians,
and Europeans,
bloods rainbowing
and scintillating in me
like the trout's flurrying
flank scales
shimmering in a fight
as I reel in.
With trout
on my stringer
I walk downstream
toward my truck.
“How'd you do?” I ask
an old man walking past,
“Caught four—biting pretty good
down near that elm.”
I walk south
like Jemez and Pecos Pueblos
during 1690 uprisings,
when Spanish came north
to avenge their dead.
Indians fled
canyon rock shelters,
settling in present day
open plains.
Trout flails like a saber
dangling from scabbard stringer
tied to my belt,
chop-whacking long-haired weeds.
Peace here now. Bones
dissolved, weapons rusted.
I stop, check my sneaker prints
in moist sandy bank.
Good deep marks.
I clamber up an incline,
crouch in bushes
as my ancestors did,
peer at vacation houses
built on rock shelves,
sun decks and travel trailers—
the new invasion.