The tiny river
-if it is a river-
will soon live
under the sand.
By Friday I think.
Saturday at the latest.
Now I know
where the robins go
for the winter!
To get fat eating
a plenitude
of berries.
Yesterday’s wind
died before dawn.
The red-tails cried
to each other in the oaks
as day barely broke.
Mt Kuchumaa harbors
ephemeral pools.
Where I heard
the lone song of a toad.
The robins are back eating lunch
in the tree outside the window.
Singing. And no, they aren't drunk.
outside Woodlake, California
down past the pastures
and walnut orchards
at the end of Avenue 332.
He was a favorite uncle
when I was a kid,
the handsome one with a wolfish grin.
Sometimes years would slip away
between visits.
One of those times, not quite twenty years ago,
I hadn’t seen them since......... I don't know,
he comes in from the rain
hangs his barn coat and big white
cowboy hat outside. Wipes off his boots
but they still smell faintly like cowshit and fur.
We drink black coffee
and talk about picking cotton and grapefruit,
how they tear up your hands,
and white folks don't pick anymore.
He tells about the trip
he took with his Daddy
back in 1944 when he was ten
and they drove to Oklahoma
in dented truck with no driver's side door.
How they slept rolled up in blankets
in the bed of the truck.
While we talk and drink more coffee
a stock car race in Tennessee
is on the television. So we talk
about our favorite teams and drivers.
and my cousin Kurt tells me
about his gentle Brahma cows.
At the burial in Visalia,
day before yesterday,
two soldiers folded the flag
that draped his casket
and a bugler played Taps.
The sun burst through
a gap beneath the blackening
beastly sky. My cousin Kim
had put together an easel
with a favorite portrait,
his hat, his western belt,
his lariat, boots and spurs.
Vaya con Dios, Billy.
Ghost motels and secret weapons; Nevada:
the tumbled ruins of pony express stations
wild mustangs and burros graze the sagebrush,
the ones that haven't been lassoed in the roundups.
The booms and bursting optimism,
gold and silver mines, slot machines and brothels
then the fading away, the greying wood,
the cemeteries, abandoned schools,
double-wide mobile homes, bleached and pale
ringed with necklaces of dead Fords and Chevrolets,
a clump of cottonwoods where someone's dream
rode high then died and left a dusty skeleton.
Mysteries: a gravel road that stretches up a valley
marked by a small sign that names some settlement,
some human place in the emptiness,
twelve or thirty miles beyond the horizon.
Basin and range, basin and range,
rock, juniper, and sage,
is this the Shell Range? or the Snake?
the Ruby Mountains? or just names on the map.
the Nevada Department of Transportation
has dubbed one of the roads
"the Extra Terrestrial Highway".
it fits -the asphalt skirts the notorious Area 51,
home of stealth bombers and secret military test sites.
The A'Le' Inn restaurant next to the mobile home hamlet
named after someone named Rachel, population 48,
has a tow truck parked out front beside the highway.
has a small flying saucer dangling from the hook.
The inn sells coffee mugs and t-shirts, refrigerator magnets
decorated with green-skinned big-eyed space creatures
You can even get an alien burger with fries and a coke.
Every fifty miles or so, there's something that used to be:
the guts of a dead motel spilling out into the sand,
waffle irons and coffee pots, broken mirrors and cash registers
a chair. a lawn mower.
A winter naked tree draped
with a couple thousand pairs of shoes,
the laces tied together and tossed
high into the branches by random travelers.
At a steady eighty miles per hour,
you can see where you're going to be
twenty minutes later:
across another valley to another juniper
and pinyon-dotted mountain range
whose name is somewhere on the map
if you can figure out
which one belongs to which.
Twenty girls in pinafores and chiffon
saddle shoes and Mary Janes,
jumpers, Peter Pan collars, gingham,
pigtails tied with ribbons,
bangs. barrettes.
Six boys in striped or printed shirts,
tucked, belted, one with a bow tie,
one with suspenders, and one,
with faded jeans, scuffed Buster Browns
and a dark tee shirt, me.
Our shadows pool at our feet
our eyes squint against
the glare of noon, lined up
in three rows, on the steps
outside our classroom.
Our teacher looks faintly beatnik in her
black dress and black-framed glasses,
those pointy cat-eyed ones.
pale short-cropped hair,
long beaded necklace.
Does she go to smoky north beach coffee houses?
Sip red wine poured from reed-wrapped jugs
while some goateed guy in a beret
reads poems in counterpoint
with bongos?
I stand with dangling arms
and a trout-mouthed gape,
a puzzled forehead.
is there some trouble
I’ve forgotten? I don't remember
There is no grass to play on
just asphalt marked
for dodgeball and foursquare
where we run and shriek
and give each other cooties.
We trade wax lips and fangs at Halloween,
and suck on orange pan pipe flutes filled
with sugar water and red dye #2,
preen and pose like grownups
with candy cigarettes.
Was I impatient for the bell to clamor?
Itching to roam the hills and look for lizards,
pull off sprigs of wild anise to smell the licorice
or taste the burst of nectar from
the trumpets of monkey flower blossoms.
I don't know,
I see my open mouth
in that creased photograph
half a question frozen on my face
or was it just a breath?
Then a she coyote walked calmly
into our campsite and jumped up on the table.
Silent, regal, but she looked at me expectantly.
I fetched a package of hamburger out of the cooler
that was beginning to smell suspicious.
Put it on the table in front of her.
She took a few bites then carried the rest
to the foot of a juniper and buried it.
A cache for later? Or perhaps an opinion
about the quality of the meat.
In the morning it was gone.
Saw a wren in a rose bush.
Descended from dinosaurs.
Every atom in the bloom,
the thorns, her body, and ours
has been here since the birth
of the universe. They just
-move around.
Cry, cry, cry, keens
the Red-shouldered hawk
as she lands on the cross bar
of the utility pole on the corner
with a small snake dangling
from her talons. She tears
off delicate bites.
The language of hawks
seems to be universal;
we heard the same cries
in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
There were no actual hawks present,
it was a recording triggered by pigeons
landing on a monument honoring
Senator Auguste Scheurer-Kestner,
defender of Captain Dreyfus.
He stood and shouted in the Senate,
“The truth always wins in the end.”
But in the meantime, the very mean time,
the Jew-haters rioted in the streets and
Dreyfus spent five years on Devil’s Island
before his sentence was annulled.
And Auguste Scheurer-Kestner
was dying from throat cancer
but he followed the news of the case,
L’affair Dreyfus, from his sick room
until the day that the pardon
of Captain Dreyfus was signed.
Then he died.
Truth, truth, truth, cried the hawk
and the pigeons flew off the statue.
