The Joshua Tree Read online

  Yes, it was so easy, Lily, everything ended forever. And maybe even then you smiled as the dark closed in, for even then, at that very end, each moment was absolute, the only absolute which you could ever conceive.

  The next moment was of the cold driven down and down into your core and then slowly melting out to disappear in the sand. The warmth shivering on your thighs, the sun rich red to your inner eye. The sweet desert air flowing through you. A motionless stretching of every fiber of your body.

  Now, now, now! Hold on to it, Lily, let it be in you, let it grow in you till the last instant when it must burst and create a new moment. The world to be seen and so to accept you. Open your eyes, but there’s no choice. A stone world living. A stone that holds all history. Lichens, reds and yellow-greens and blue-grays, whorled and convoluted, mites laboring through the towering jungle (the north side, Lily, that’s what Pa would say).

  eternal plan

  Built into a crevice to catch the morning sun, the honeycomb of the lonely desert bee, of sand and resin. Ants pull at her dead body, twisting and shoving. A punctured hole in the cover of a cell, a crack, gnawing, the new bee emerges, rubs her nose, stretches her limp wings in the sun till they glow iridescent and are strong.

  A world of tiny flowers, towering flowers, swaying in the early wind. The blue butterfly, tired from the morning honey hunt, ready to rest now that the wind has come. He lights on a round pebble, folds his wings upward, gray-green now of the saltbush or the desert floor, across the wind, hooking his three feet on one side to his pebble, tugging, rolling down flat, anchored and no longer bothered by the wind.

  Nothing to remember, nothing to forget. What is there? As for the butterfly, the moment, indivisible and unending. It’s best that way.

  Body’s Hair

  Standing by the roadside, the wind feeling you all over, the sun lifting you in its embrace, the lark golden honey in your heart. The distances drawing you back to nothing and filling you with all.

  the

  moment

  transcends

  all

  The familiar jerking bounding of the pickup . . . familiar; is that memory, of what? nothing, nothing, nothing . . . upholstery shows the cotton matting, wounded, tool kits at your feet rattling, shiny with use, sun-tans, heavy greasy hands. White hair all standing straight like cholla spines, the deep creases and the blackheads at the back of his neck. San Francisco, yes, that’s where you’re going too. Maintenance tour, some kind of special machinery, his beat. No need for meaning, reasons. Accepted, going on from there, from the sun.

  All is detail, for him and for you. Like coffee at the Shoshone Cafe where everything’s in the silver bubbles that rise in the glass globe, globs of steam in the greasy air. Like swerving from a rabbit without thought for your neck ’cause that’s just your nature and there’s nothing for it. Like piss time and no fuss . . . Perry, the American malaise, camouflaging, posturing, snickers . . . Like the universe turning on the North Star over the Funeral Mountains, the heavy black Death Valley air, salt-stale, the steel and dust smells of your blankets bed in the back of the pickup under the looping cries of the owl. Like no difference from taking and giving.

  Oil drums: the truck-driver stops; the farmer’s yard for the bimonthly overnight with venison sausage for breakfast; hitchhiker if he’ll ride in back.

  One

  “Take it, get some duds, Penney’s, I can spare it, you’ll be showing through soon, someone will need it from you sometime and you know’s well’s I what you’ll do.”

  is

  All

  Over Tioga, Tuolumne, Yosemite Valley. Where the thousands and the thousands busy on their cracking nerves to be “unnaturally natural in unnature,” as Henry says. Henry and Lily, your oily rusty-blue pickup so proud among the campers and fly-proof tents and bar-be-qued Smokey Bear misery. They stare and stare.

  “Maintenance man, Stevie, not everyone can have fun.”

  Mother Lode. Pan Your Own – $2.50 An Hour. Mark Twain Slept Here. Real Facsimiles.

  Henry and Lily for Salisbury steak and a plate of pie shared and black coffee.

  Yellow poppies for a hundred miles. The Central Valley. Thunderclouds and the cows bawling to be milked and the lark tumbling in the thick air.

  No thinking back, no distance, all distance.

  Saint Francis

  “’Bye, Henry.” Like kissing a sunny tree trunk. Good. Rattling into the distance, the clean oily smell.

  Lily with her Penney’s paper shopping bag, her head all chopped so her ears stick out, and her neck too flat in back. Sandals and a denim skirt and twenty mules climbing over her sweat-shirted breasts. Not much.

  That’s you, Lily, this is you. And everything around you is you, wherever you may be. Which is here. The Panhandle, trodden grass; eucalyptus trees lonely between the lines of one-way traffic. Drift with the other few, west, to the Golden Gate Park. Gathering and gathering.

  These strange ones with their sad soft faces. This silent world. Feel it, let it slip around you slowly, time, Lily, time. Later you’ll see, now you’ll simply be, a thing at a time. Try, let there be nothing wrong.

  Time

  that

  ends

  Figures, sitting on the grass, sit among them for you must be of them. Jungle drums, skirls of a clarinet, pink palms under the black hands throbbing, pulsing against the genteel park greenery. A trumpet on a complicated lonely trip, winding in the interior convolutions of closed eyes. To the side, a monotonous tambourine shivering by a blue-white face, jaw slacked, tongue bloated growth, uncontrollable, eyes the vacant pink.

  Take it, Lily, sit there, your paper bag between your knees.

  Black goatee on the black face, licorice-black clarinet, red felt squaw hat, beads and bangles, a mail-armor triangular chastity belt hanging low around his waist, curled-toe Persian slippers. Black jacket, black leotards, and a burning red codpiece, huge, with yellow LOVE.

  unhoneyed

  End

  Can you look, Lily, past the music – oddly ’thirties “Honey Won’t You Hold Me?” – past the gagging tongue and the grinding codpiece? Past, through the musky-sweet smoke? Can you get beyond it? The ravaged beggar showing something to whoever will look into his secret trembling palm, leering spit. The honey-blond boy with the sinking mustache, naked to the waist, pale pale and ragged blue jeans, bare feet caked with dirt, the pink pink eyes looking only inward – LSD, man, can’t you see? tripped out, man so high – wandering in an eternal dance, muscleless, head sagging far back. Squat fat stump-legged girl with a black baby in a stroller sucking wine from a Coke bottle. Beautiful miniature Black, the hearing aid, the waxed black mustache, beret, beads, buttons, keys, bells, flowers, purses, slogans, doves of peace, slung around him like seaweed. Woven belts, sombreros, serapes, net body-stocking with great orange beads, beards and tangled manes.

  Gentle, so peaceful; why your terror?

  that

  is

  Banging beer cans, the endless rapping of disconnected words, Indian elephant bells, hollow cheeks under the Digger hats, temple bells from their elbows, feather boas, furs, antlers, headbands. And everywhere the flowers.

  nothing

  He was a voice behind you, just a voice, so soft it was part of the baby’s laughter at first.

  “You’d be a lily if you’d want, so I’ll call you Lily. Now you’d not want, though. Tight, Jesus so tight. Let it out, Lily, you can, everyone can, even without the dope. Think of how you feel after a long shit that keeps coming and coming – don’t be offended, no one should be offended here – think of that, of how you sink down, shivering, loose. Look around at me, your fear is like a porcupine.”

  Great dark eyes that would swallow you, the neat half-beard, tight black curls on his bony white forehead. Look away. Look deeper, maybe you’ll know.

  liturgy

  the sign

  of the

  “I’m high now, you can see it in my eyes except you look like yo
u’ve never been here before. Don’t be afraid. Kiss me if you will, you will see. Let the trees come to life, let them hear you. Think how it is to have leaves all over your hands and to be in the wind and to hear the cloud laughing with the Giant Purple. Let the others, straights, hate, be tight, be distinguished, play the game, cruelties, irreverent thoughts. Smile, Lily, there’s no reason not to smile. A stranger God, not the Devil. You are not alone and never have been. Listen and it’s you that you’ll hear. Listen and you’ll hear the wind in your leaves. Cool it, all that tightness, let it drain out right here on the grass. Can you believe that you could dance like those over there? They’re in the universal pulse, you’re out of it and that’s why you’re suffering.”

  cross

  Focus, here’s a person, a man, quiet, his voice doesn’t press on you. Focus. Let the scene settle, it’s too much, yes, that must be it, too much to take in. So sad, his eyes, so kind. His lips are outlined by his beard, full, pleading maybe, trembling a little to be sure he’s right, trembling because the rest is too still, stretched on the dirty grass, propped on his elbows, swaying is he, ever so slightly?

  Come in, Lily, come up, come back into yourself.

  He can smile, and you too can smile. And even you can laugh a little, at yourself, because you’ve dropped from your tension, just as he had said, and everything’s purer and much more yours.

  And it must have been almost funny to see that dropping down.

  Rose Tree

  mandala

  Still, it’s much too much and you’d like so to go. And he must have sensed it too for he’s taken your hand and you’re walking off. Where the rhododendrons give shade from the oppressive sun and the distance helps. To lie on the bare earth, to say nothing, to think nothing, to feel the motion of the universe, unscheduled, unconcerned.

  Feel the multitudes who have been before you, supported by this same soil under these same broad leaves, each with his love and his soul, whatever else might be his suffering. You, Lily, who know the earth and the leaves as uniquely yours, yours together with the creatures of nature, yours where no human has trod nor maybe ever will. Can you accept this difference? For you this is the human multitude, for others it is solitude. Join, accept and join.

  Do your thing, they say, whatever it is and whatever the others think. But don’t they also say do it like we do and pretty much with us or it’ll not be right? So what the others think matters after all.

  one

  Join, but only when joining is freeing. Accept, but only when accepting is being no one but you.

  fruit

  It isn’t going to work, can you see that? You’ll go along for a time – so empty, so unprepared to judge, oh let there be no more pain: is that remembering, is that removing from the moment?

  another

  tree

  Go along. Take his hand, and your paper bag. The strange streets and faces, the painted windows, wavering designs, clusters in the gutter, music that beats in your stomach, your womb, fuzz prowling in their cars with their red lights civil-rights silent. The pad, decayed gentility, the cellar grass-matted for Linda’s acid hip ballet, porches and turrets and gingerbread, grand stairs with the treads worn splintery, up and up into the gable rooms where the sun is heavy in the musk-sweet smoke, clean, empty, full of the few bits and pieces each one has, the mattresses blotched and blanket rolls, the john all painted in psychedelic fish and rusty and really overused and no one knows much about plumbing. The girl who pulls her dress over her head and “Don’t you wear underwear?”

  “Just at first.” Turn quickly, Lily, find something to see. Nakedness you’ll not have seen, not even your own.

  sad

  for those

  Aimless little children, the pink eyes, the bare bottoms. Shaggy hair, plaited hair, tangled hair, glossy, dirty, bushman or savage-shaved naked. Sworls painted in primary colors on the window glass, the melted letters of their love.

  O Lily

  your

  love

  What holds you, Lily? You would say you have no debts, that your promises are canceled. Then what is it that holds you? Why would you not smoke their grass, try their pills, open yourself to their love where it lies so quiet, gently stirring on the mattresses?

  that can

  Because . . . you hardly know. Because joy is internal. The rest is substitute. You are waiting.

  split

  the earth

  They’ll let you stay, they’ll be kind to you, though sad too and maybe pitying – yet sadness is their way. And in the morning they’ll show you the dance workshop, where maybe, because you used to dance so much you said, you could get a job: “We’re pretty broke and our Diggers are losing heart so we’re looking for jobs.”

  With the morning the fog has blown in on San Francisco: clouds pouring over your mountaintop, shredded by the sage. You walk between the feeble frame houses, all flaking and gaping with their single-pane windows, and the endless stream of monstrous spewing cars. Black faces and Pizzas and Cocktails with the neon martini glass and it’s you, Lily, that makes the street so hostile.

  The address, just another row house. Up the steep stairs, white with the black dance posters: witch postures and a mouth stretched open in ecstasy and naked figures back to, reaching up from the dead. No one. Clothes strewn in one room, sandwiches, paper cups, the musky smell. A throbbing back behind the walls. Push open a door. Huge man sitting on a platform, a tom-tom between his thighs. People walking in a circle to the beat.

  O run

  “There are two ways to walk. Either you walk on the floor or you walk in the floor. Good, very good.”

  O leap

  in the

  sun

  A hairy man in nothing but a jockstrap walking like a giant, a girl slinking in her leotards, the mincing one in a turtleneck, little children skipping and who’d expect them to walk? And she like a genial circus master, in the center of the ring, scrawny, ageless, a bangle and modest Indian beads. She talks to you like anyone else, “Let’s try for a while and see how it goes.”

  Is it weeks? Time is so unsteady. Still an outsider, but accepted. Will it always be that way? Tonight you are a part of the workshop troupe. It’s all so strange at first, even for you who’ve done it before, the unrehearsedness, the audience joining in, mixed in with the troupe and then you’re all divided in two. One group into the other big room while your half prepares Disorder.

  magic union

  space

  to

  Cartons, ladders, ropes, sheets of plastic, rolls of paper, old wardrobes, kitchen chairs, hand spotlights on their snarling extension cords, hula hoops. Arranging and rearranging, peaks and valleys of disorder. Gradually the audience members of the group joining in, tentatively often, skeptically, cynically, and some committed. Begin your Dance of Disorder, Yang-yin to orgiastics to indifference to violence. The lights, yellows and reds and oranges, spotting, flashing, unrelieving. Cruel altars, love dances with closed eyes, epileptic seizures, harmony in the disarray.

  time

  The other half let in, watching, not understanding; understanding, joining in disorder. Sweat and dust, groans, high discordant hums, crackling paper, shuffling, the tom-tom beating, fire engines sirening through the ghetto, grime and other people’s smells.

  Watch him, on with your mime of rejection, watch him with his beard and his eyes shining through as he stands to the side under a web of ropes, studying the strangeness that he paid two fifty to be in, unknowing, withheld for now. His eyes and his hands beginning to move. His mouth for a moment twisted wryly, derision, then settling on its course. Slowly his hands rise, stretch out. Do they appeal to, do they draw from, this great room of disarray? But for his eyes, drawn in on himself, he seemed to seek to disappear.

  He opens, he fills. Slowly he unbuttons his shirt, takes it off. His body grows, takes on strength and life, his mouth opens in a silent shout. Is it triumph?

  Strength from disorder.

  Watch him,
Lily, how brave he is, how he challenges his bonds! Does he turn toward you, does he see you, can he understand your rejection of order?

  The groups change place. They are to make Order. Your group to the other room. There to divide into pairs of strangers, interview each other for five minutes, and then one by one to describe to the group what you have learned about the other.

  Little Lily, sitting apart, on the platform. Watch the others pair, talk quietly. Two homosexuals, so pleased. The stringy blonde with the brown teeth, you hardly know her, finds an awkward sweating outsider, takes him by the hand. Adonis, his eyes so pink, and a fiftyish love-eager woman; he draws her down to sit facing him straddling on his lap and their interview is a wordless rocking embrace. He will say, “This is a beautiful person.” He always does, and she, whoever she be, the same.