Alice Corbin Henderson knew what it meant to encounter a landscape that refused to sit still. Born in 1881, she was already an established poet and an associate editor of *Poetry* magazine when tuberculosis pushed her to relocate from Chicago to the dry, high air of Santa Fe in 1916. The move did more than ease her lungs; it utterly reshaped her poetic vision. In the stark mesas, shifting light, and piñon-dotted slopes of New Mexico, Henderson found not a passive backdrop but a living presence—something mischievous and mercurial. Her short poem “Foot-hills” crystallises that experience in five lines that still startle with their wit and precision.
The poem’s central idea is a childlike, almost impish recognition that the land is alive, evasive, and demands a clever form of capture. Henderson transforms the familiar sight of rolling foothills into a creature: “New Mexico hills / Are spotted like lizards.” That single word, “spotted,” does double duty. It paints the dappled light and shadow playing over the slopes, and it simultaneously gives the hills a reptilian skin. Immediately, the landscape stops being geology and becomes biology—watchful, quick, mistrustful. The hills “sinuously glide and dissemble,” a phrase so fluid that the reader can feel the horizon shifting, the contours melting into each other. “Dissemble” is the knockout word here. Hills, by their nature, are huge, immobile, honest in their bulk. Yet Henderson accuses them of deception, of hiding something essential behind a slippery, writhing surface. They are tricksters, not mountains.
That sense of trickery is precisely what the second half of the poem answers with a practical, almost homespun solution: “If you take a forked stick / You may catch one and hold it.” The image is drawn straight from a child’s method of catching lizards—pinning them gently behind the neck without harm. Henderson proposes that the way to pin down these slippery hills is with a forked stick, that simplest of tools, which stands for a particular kind of observation: patient, playful, and direct. There is no grand scientific approach, no Romantic awe, just a twig with a Y-shape. The forked stick becomes a metaphor for the artist’s eye or the poet’s line, something that can momentarily fix a living thing without killing its mystery. To “hold it” is not to possess it forever, but to have a brief, authentic encounter before the hills wriggle free again into their sinuous dissembling.
Henderson’s construction is deceptively artless. The poem is free verse, with no regular metre or end rhyme, yet it has a quiet sonic craftsmanship. Listen to the hissing sibilance of “spotted like lizards” and “sinuously glide and dissemble”—those esses and soft vowels mimic the whisper of wind over dry grass and the slide of a lizard through sand. The line break after “lizards” creates a tiny pause, a held breath, before the sinuous movement begins in the next line. The poem moves like its subject, gliding without punctuation’s hard stops until the full stop at the very end, which feels like a pinning down. The words are plain but chosen with a naturalist’s care: “glide,” “dissemble,” “catch,” “hold.” Nothing is decorative. Every syllable earns its place.
What makes “Foot-hills” so significant, beyond its charm, is the way it embodies a distinctively Southwestern sensibility. Henderson was part of a wave of writers and artists who came to New Mexico in the early twentieth century and discovered not a quaint regional curiosity but a profound philosophical relationship between land and person. The poem refuses the European sublime of towering peaks; instead, it gives us foothills—the humble, approachable edges of mountains—and treats them not as symbols of eternity but as skittish companions. That shift is revolutionary in miniature. The hills are not a metaphor for something else; they are intensely themselves, yet they are also lizards. The comparison is so complete that it need not be explained. In a mere five lines, Henderson schools us in a way of seeing that is local, rooted, and tinged with humour. She suggests that the truth of a place might only be held with the lightest, most ingenious touch. The forked stick is not a weapon; it is an instrument of curiosity. And in that curiosity, the hills—and the poem—remain forever alive, forever just about to glide away.