Al’s Long Arms

A shirt off the rack was too short.
Western snaps on the cuffs failed to meet
above his wrists and, for a while, he rolled
them back a few folds, exposing
thick forearms with their shrapnel-strike scars
where shell fragments skated his skin.

Wheat-colored and gold, this shirt
of pearl-inlaid snaps on flap pockets
occupied a hanger with its weight
(not much, as he’d ripped out the sleeves
that first summer), for three months after
Al’s death.  Frayed edges around the armholes,
metallic gold threads too stubborn to let go,
tickled my shoulder whenever I entered
our walk-in.

I’m far from there in place and years.  Yet,
around five a.m. when October’s sky is pricked
with starlight, the moon a cold shade of butter
and settling into the northwest horizon,
his shirt appears, trails frayed remains
across my bare back, tricks me from sleep.

Sheets wafted by a night’s stirring,
the shirt’s not materially here.

Such long arms, mumbled when waking
and remembered when walking estuarian shores,
shoes sucked inside receding tide’s
hungry mud and marsh.  Another widow might
understand, not all holes heal.
[After Jorge Evans 'Overtime' as read in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry]

Sometimes

Sometimes I can hear Oklahoma in the marine layer.
Wrapped in a drift of horizon too thick to approach.

Sometimes a vapor of saddle harness couples
with tractor grease and corn shucks torn,

brown eggs in old straw and slanted blue cellar doors.
And I turn toward what I can’t see and see it.  See it

in the fleece of asphalt ocean, white-capped fields.
And a clapping of floured hands calling chickens

calling chickens, clapclapclap.  Handfuls of calling.
An old woman’s aproned dreams.  Sometimes.

 

A Vine on the Verandah

Mr. Miller’s tomato plant continues to draw your attention because of its persistence.  Chameleon green skins ripening through oranges to reds like late skies.  Fruit clusters.  Transparent nets cast over stem branchings make you think tiny spiders claim what matures as their own.  Tireless work ethics, those arachnids.  Spinning and planning night and day.  The strength of their webs isn’t much.  Not as sticky as some.  You wonder when you might see a victim caught there.  You know there must be catches from time to time.  Spiders must dine.  Privately, under a leaf, you suppose.

Another life form you’ve noted is short as an eyelash.  White, like a stray cinder floated free from a fire.  Hardly more than a wisp of smoke yet there, lounging upon the veins.  Not one, but in number.  A half dozen, more, to each leaf’s theatrical stage.  Before the safe for vegetables pesticide spray.  Now, one.  Maybe two, when you look.

When you look, like today, staring past the five-fruited clusters in phases of growth, green foliage just unfurling, other blossoms yielding small beginnings no larger than English peas, past interior curled edges of tobacco-brown leaves, you find personalities.

The tomato most ready to harvest is a holdout.  She’s stopped growing.  Her stem collar—five-pointed and going brittle—won’t release.  Her complexion could not go any redder.  She’s allowed your hand.  You’ve cupped her.  Her skin lets droplets of morning dew roll away, moisten your palm.  It’s not intentional—this transference of what night’s nature left.  Why she doesn’t let go becomes a puzzle.  Perhaps growth does continue, on the inside, and she knows it’s too early yet for plucking.  Her seeds are maturing.  Her meat finding sweetness.  You can’t know for certain and release her from turning this way and that.  You don’t break her collar.

She’s a runt.  Really.  Not much larger than a Satsuma plum, and certainly smaller than a tennis ball, but whole, and wholly contrary.  Put your Sunset Western Gardening book back on the shelf—you can’t use plant knowledge garnered from people who know for this one.  Like the whole vine in all its growth and uninvited occupations by white fly and spider, its insistence on productivity, be patient, and listen when she speaks.  You’ll have me, she says.  You or the worm or the fly or the spider.  I’m yours, absolutely, in time. For the moment, just let me be red.  Can you do that?  Let me hang, uninterrupted, on this vine?

 

[after David Huddle, Museum Piece, In Short, Judith Kitchen & Mary Paumier Jones, Editors]

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Rumors of Giants, San Francisco de Sierra, Baja California Sur

The storage box under my bed is dedicated to gifts from well-intentioned friends who believe a writer must have many journals—bejeweled and gilded, lined and unlined, spiraled and perfect-bound.  Because I’m unfocused and forgetful, I have starts and stops in several: a few lines noted in Mountain View, Arkansas, 2004; a sketch of a cave and where the river enters the ocean at Montaña de Oro on the California coast, 2008; efforts to describe an eerie hum of abandoned cables on a defunct ride at Coney Island, Brooklyn, 2006.  Recently, on a road so narrow the van driver honked when approaching each hairpin turn, I found myself enumerating the vultures floating in circles above the arroyos.  The van belonged to the tour company; the driver’s name was Antonio—driving this same route three times a week, a girlfriend in Ensenada a half day’s journey north, a baby on the way who would be named Enrique after Antonio’s father.  It was February, 2011.  Our destination was caves and the paintings other people had left—a three-hour journey from Guerrero Negro.  Stopped to stretch legs, take a short break, I saw the jawbone of a dead goat or deer, molars intact, among the loose rocks on the down slope.

It wasn’t something I coveted.  I have a similar jawbone, one of a fawn I believe, on my kitchen sill in Northern California.  There is something about bones, found bones, bones whitened by weather and displacement which draws my interest.  I can’t say exactly why, but perhaps a little bit like a tune, one I think I’m making up as I begin, then realize it’s a skewed version of something known for a very long time.  With molars too large for a coyote, and jaw bone too slender for a cow, the remains seemed to say the animal had lived to maturity, had ranged these steep inclines for a time, perhaps even thrived.  Back in the van, I made a note in my journal, “Chiva = goat.  Zopilote = buzzard.  Tony says puma live in the caves at the bottom.  Did the puma drag the jawbone up here?”

Near the end of the curves and climbs up the mountain, we pass a collection of buildings with “hotel” printed on a sign.  There are small cabins.  There are corrugated-tin sided buildings.  There are goats and some of the goats have bells.  When I stand out from the little building where we sign our names and leave our ages, when I stand close to the edge of a relatively flat mesa where these people live, approximately two hundred people scattered here and there as a village, people with many times that number in goats who roam in small herds of a dozen or more, when I stand very still and listen beyond the wind whistling in my ears, I can hear distant clanks of more goat bells, the chivas trotting along their narrow paths, eating, Antonio has told us, even the fenders off old rusting cars.

Here one of the locals joins us.  We pay fifty pesos for the right to use our cameras once we get to the caves, and the caves are not so much caves as they are abbreviated caverns.  The local tells us there have been bones found in the area, and the femurs are of such a size and of such an age that the people who left paintings on the high wall were giants, a people much taller than any known—and perhaps all of this is true.  The local says this is true; he says the bones are thousands of years old.

Thousands of years . . . Is the prong-horned antelope or sheep depicted in orange on the wall a distant relative of the jawbone I saw on the slope?  Is the puma, painted in black and crossing the painted legs of the human figure on the wall an early inhabitant of the caves at the bottom of the arroyo where Antonio gazed down with binoculars for such a long time, hoping to sight the cave’s current occupant?  Are the people pictured, one half of their bodies painted orange, the other half painted black, the head painted orange but the countenance painted black—are they, were they this aware of the dark side of human nature, the two sides of all natures, the good and the bad, thousands of years ago?

Of years . . . My journal is back on the van; photos are fast, easy to record the stories depicted on the rock walls: point and click, point and click.  Simple.  Yet I can’t help but wonder how much of what is there the camera will miss.   Will the viewer of a digital photo have the sense that that dark splotch on the wall we studied was an indentation? may well have been a place where the hearth was kept? where someone stirred ashes in the morning, perhaps before light, to set blaze to a new piece of dead cactus, its woody remains as cellular in its outer construction as a beehive?  will they picture a man? a woman? making warmth out of next to nothing?  will they see him or her as the same general size as the locals who inhabit the scattered village of these mountains?  Or imagine them of great heights, tall enough to apply the paints, the hand-ground dyes of rust-oranges and blacks needed to fill in the sketches made to stone?  Will a viewer see the ghosts move across time, quiet in their steps if other members of family are yet sleeping, watch as they tuck a child’s arm under a hide blanket?  Will the smoke of past fires sting a distant viewer’s eyes?

The local man walks back to his village and we climb back into the tour van, begin honking our way back down the narrow dirt road.  Behind us, the figures continue to lift their arms, one orange, one black, above their black-faced heads.  They are celebrating, Antonio has said.  It is not necessary that I know exactly what they celebrate, yet I like to imagine.  I like to imagine they celebrate a good thing, some event which has eased their life or enhanced their joy—enough food to sleep without hunger, enough water to wake without thirst.  I like to imagine they celebrate their orange sides, orange natures.  I like to think the dark sides stay dormant, in hibernation throughout their lives, that they merely recognize its presence and perhaps celebrate its long, long sleep with raised arms, open hands.

I’ve closed the journal with the notes about chivas and giants.  Closed it before the sun went down and the street lights came on along the calle running parallel to the Pacific coast through the town of Rosarito Beach in Baja California Norte on this last day of  February 2011.  Tomorrow, I may try to find written evidence of the long femur rumored to have been found in the San Francisco de Sierra mountains, but not tonight.  Tonight there are giants stirring an ember to flame in my kitchen, shoulders bent and necks lowered so they don’t bump their heads, arms lifted, celebrating all the gifts one journal keeper can imagine.  We are laughing.  We are adding fuel to the flames.

 

 

[after Bruce Berger, “Fernando and Marisela,” from In Short, ed. Judith Kitchener and Mary Paumier Jones]

Along the Aisle at the Ensenada Fish Market

They are dead and gutted,
scales knife-scored with X’s
from gill flaps to tail fins
by nimble cutters
who wear ecru aprons
swiped by hands to leave
entrails’ imprints.
As if the fabric was cave wall,
as if the cutter were hunter.

I imagine schools carried
by currents into nets hauled
by pangas driven by hungry men,
their flash, crimson and silver
as wounded coins salvaged
from the chest of the sea,
their wide-hinged mouths
popping round and silent
in the pummeling air
until ice became bed and pillow
of these many-aligned left eyes
still glistening.

 

 

[after ALP’s Jeff Worley ‘On Finding a Turtle (etc.)’]

 

 

Your face in sweet moments of early dawn

Your face in sweet moments of early dawn
Invites me inside where you dream,
Blue smoked eyes yet closed. Outlines, a seam
Sewn behind vision, a construction, so warm
And plainly, ah plainly, it’s me.

And I am a whole woman, and liquid light.
And you:  a sea,  lagoon, safe harbor, and buoy.
And we are as one while I stand apart, toy
With the promise of your chin, the slight
Shadows of whiskered grace, even though I

Will not wake you, not partake—but cleave
To bliss found in profound peace.
Let the sun run westward from east.
Let me watch and watch again your breath.

San Ignacio’s Little Dog

We’ve stopped in San Ignacio.  Now, the GMC Envoy is parked, nosed into an unmarked slot abutting the town’s square.  We disembark, close the four doors with loud whumps of air and metal meeting the quiet of palms.  They are not even clicking, these high palm fronds—the wind is yet sleeping, still unawake.  Underfoot there is flagstone and the road through San Ignacio is flagstone and I am remembering this, remembering the early afternoon light of a February day.  Whether the sun cast rose-colored shadows on the stones or it is merely my recollections which color the stones—is impossible to say.

Light, remembered light, is not quantifiable.  Reflections of friendship tint what may have actually been.  The dance of sun through the clear amber of a sweat-beaded glass of cerveza may have been closer to honey-gold than rubied amber.  The three tacos de pescado on each of our plates may have disappeared less hastily than recollection recalls, the date bread Mike purchased and brought back to share at our table, less moist, less rich with flavors of gingerbread, or was it zucchini? in the real moment of tasting.   And Mike’s smile, his face generous with the joy of his find, may have been his everyday smile.  But it didn’t seem so then, and seems even less likely in retrospect, from here, these several hundred miles north and days after.

The town square: not grass but concrete.  And not square but rectangular.  Empty park benches with wrought-iron arms for other days, evenings, nights where vendors might vend.  Mariachis might play.  Dancers might dance.  Couples might sway.  Children run behind blue-jeaned legs, rippling skirts, the sandals of abuelas, the wheeled strollers of brown-eyed toddlers.

This, all imagined for other times, hours when we are not there.  When every face is familiar to every other face, the new and the old, the unchanging familia continually changing, the rosebud lips of the infant hiding the mouth with its buds of teeth yet to grow, the gaps where the baby teeth have said adios, the new smiles coming in, the white dazzle of grins against creaseless brown skins, the creases of laugh lines around eyes, of squinting too long into garden rows or the blaze in the eyes of a woman, a man, the dimming of what can be seen, the sharpening of what can be heard, the calloused intuitions, the lines drawn—happy and not.

 

*

 

Full moon over a receding morning tide.  Five hundred plus more-or-less miles between here and there.   I can see a horizon that goes on forever.  Pink beginnings, yellowing blues, denim-jean frayed cuffs of clouds.  Five hundred plus miles and agave, yucca, candelaria—arid flora spiking the desert sky.

I am home and remembering that other place:  the empty courtyard where we tried to dance, the baño sign above an open door across the calle, the little dog—el perrito—and the old man who accepted mi cinco pesos for the use of his bathroom.  I picture him, his thinning gray hair, his half-a-head shorter than me height, and his little dog, a stiff-haired, beige little dog, a schnauzer-scottie mix the color of perfectly oven-baked buttermilk biscuits, who would not take a step until the five peso coin had met his master’s hand.  Only then, the sure lope through an opposite door, a right turn (derecho) down a solid walk, a left turn (izquierdo) along a brick and concrete path where, in the immediate distance an overhead sign could be seen, could be read clearly with black painted letters across the white-painted piece of plyboard:  baños.  Abruptly, as if el perrito could read the sign, he turned and raced back to his owner.

Later, a friend, disbelieving my story about the baño guide dog, crosses the calle.  The dog does not move from his stance at the feet of his master until the five peso coin meets the old man’s palm; then he takes off at a near run—derecho, izquierdo, a short pause under the baño sign, and back to his master.  What does all of this matter?  Imagination tells me it does; they are partners; the food of one depends upon the coins of the other; and the coins of the other depend upon the astuteness of the guide.

How many hundreds of years ago did such partnerships begin?  The full-rounding payback between two and four-legged friends?  Or between no-legged and two-legged friends?  Ah, but I have slipped into recollections of the previous days with the whales.  This is not good, not when I meant to move forward.

How does one move forward when entering a very old church?  A church with lit candles on the altar, with believers occupying the pews, with litanies wafting out through the bougainvillea and past the ripe oranges in the citrus trees of the side yards?  The days open and close.  Light and dark are miracles of bright becoming followed by unraveling tattered silk scarves littered with diamonds and moons fickle with their phases.  Good and evil.  Haloes and horns.  My mother was an angel long before death took her away from ironing and dishes.  Prayers go up, or they did.  I like to think Jesus was wise enough to pray for a gift like my mama in his heaven.  What is an angel, if not her?  What is a heaven if she doesn’t fill it?  And what use are churches if she is not among those seated on their hard, wooden pews, obeying their chiseled rules?

 

*

 

I am lost.  The writing skids to a standstill.  Memory has skipped like a stylus on an old 33 rpm vinyl disc.  I meant to record Baja, the village of San Ignacio, el perrito and a partnership.  Then the church wandered into the words, made a big deal of itself and its oranges.  I am listening for birds.  I hear my soles scuff a rough wood floor, the tools in the back of a white pick-up truck going hell-bent-for-leather bang the truck’s bed.  The whush of a bicycle coasting past.  No birds.  Not a twitter imagined or remembered.  And then, too, there were the silent fronds of the date palms high overhead.  Not a click.  Not a shuffle of sound.

San Ignacio.  An afternoon like a video with no sound except the voice of the old man telling me to follow el perrito and the sound of the dogs nails clicking against the sidewalks behind the little store front.  And the slip of sweat beads as they scudded down the beer glass.  The white truck never belonged there, not in San Ignacio, not with its velocity and loose wrenches banging about with pliers and hammers and such.  Was there a rattle of unbagged nails skittering that truck bed too?  Perhaps.  I can’t recall, at least not with certainty. And perhaps it is ok to say good night to then.  I have maybe said enough to remind me again of what was.

After The Whales

I discovered the gentle language of whales in 2011.  It was mid February when I stepped aboard the panga that would carry us out upon Scammon’s Lagoon.  We were ten in number, including the pilot, and I sat near the middle of a bench seat toward the back.  Two kids in their late fifties sat on the bench behind me; from behind them, the pilot guided the boat.  Next to me, close enough to hold my hand, sat a gentle friend.  Ahead of us were three young women, half my age, cyclists from New York, seated side by side on the bench seat nearest the prow.  They wore black-knit watch caps pulled low to cover their ears and yellow raincoats stamped with the Malarrimo Whale Tours logo.  They had taken a train from New York to San Diego, a bus from San Diego to San Quintin, and ridden their bikes over 200 miles from San Quintin to the lagoon.  They were brave, I thought to myself.  If they spoke, what words they shared were lost to the wind and the outboard engine’s noise.  Sometimes they turned, one or the other, and I would see the profile of a smile or simple contentment.

The lagoon carried us as if gentle hands; the shores were, for a time, white with salt—it is the industry of Guerrero Negro, the salt.  We passed a huge tugboat pulling a barge like an island with a long, white mountain of salt on its way to somewhere.

Then there were no shores, only the stretched inland waters.

Occasionally, spouts were sighted.  Barnacle-encrusted fins began to appear as nearer whales slid out of sight, and others, more distant, offered disappearing flukes as their signatures of passing presence.

Our clever pilot sometimes slowed, idled the panga’s engine, brought our attentions to a particular area by calling out a clock’s setting of hands.  Mama y baby at one o’clock, he may have said, and, eager to see what he’d seen, we turned.  We turned as one, although we were nine in number.  We turned as the hairs on a head will all turn when the wind catches them clean and strong.  There, the mama’s back rose to slide in a long visible arc above the water, barnacles the color of yellow calendula daisies spotting her back, and there, her baby’s sleeker, gray-mottled body slid up and over hers, disappearing again to glide beneath her, run near her, weave through her currents, within, I believe, the circle of her sound, her quiet vibrations of breath, of life.

After a time, another mother whale and her young, or perhaps the same pair (who could know when so much of life moved just beneath the surface?) lingered.  She seemed to be introducing us, without prejudice, to her child.  Here, she motioned, by way of her stillness, are the people of air.  Here, mija, are our cousins.  They are gentle, too.  And as curious as we are.  If they touch us, it will be with kindness. And we touched them and they kissed us with spray, with great breaths of spray.  Then they passed beneath our small boat, the many yards of length and grace passed under the panga’s shadow, close enough that we could count the discolorations where barnacles had been and the colorations and textures of what still was.

Too soon, our pilot angled the prow of the panga toward our starting place.  It did not matter.  I was sliding with mother and child through the saltier waters of Scammon’s Lagoon, a diver with flukes, an inquisitive cousin, a youngster secured against danger by the hand of a friend, tethered to reality—yet floating, gliding just out of sight, inside imagination’s world, set free in a wet universe beyond the reach of landlocked vision.

I understood from the tour guide’s information about the flow of milk from the mother whale, how she is without teats, and releases a nutritional current her baby feeds upon—a path of milk through the water, the young swimming its mama’s milk trail, taking it in.  I understood about how dolphin often played in and out of the mother’s milk, distracting the young to feed from the same path.  And I understood something further: a universal cosmos of sharing.  It went beyond the body, this understanding.  It went beyond who or what I was in the small boat with the kids seated behind me, the young women seated out in front.

They, those young women, were bound for La Paz, The Peace—if my translation guess was accurate—a city on the Baja peninsula hundreds of kilometers distant.  I knew, not suddenly, but as if I had always known, they would make their destination.  I knew this as surely as these coastal whales, these lovely parasite-encrusted behemoth cousins of mine, had known they would make it to Scammon’s Lagoon.  We were all travelers, all inquisitive students, all parents, and siblings—in one form or another.

When the last of us had stepped from the panga to the dock, when Scammon’s Lagoon was far behind us on the peninsula, I was still a part of what had been.  As the miles peeled away behind us like a long asphalt wake, the babies and their mothers were yet with me, their vibrations close, their songs, although never heard, still understood.  Their flukes had long since glided from sight, yet their backs reappeared, sluicing the calm or choppy waters as if they ran through the pulsed chambers of this heart.

I am telling this story now as if you are my young, sliding close to my body, within the vibrations of heart sounds.  After the whales, there seems no other way, because this story is taught by their story, by what they taught me: to trust what is foreign, the kindness of shallows, of salted shadows, and what can’t always be seen.  I hear them now, the songs I never heard, the joy, or perhaps wisdom, of simply being another cousin of the universe.

 

Protected: 24 January, 2011 : How it is now

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