The Joshua Tree Page 2

  my

  Shaman’s

  Rope

  tied

  to the

  Your flight, the flight of the Joshua tree. Racing through the clouds, through the driven sand, through time. Joshua tree, stretched in your strange angles out over the piñon pine, over old Will propped on his mattress, hurtling through time. Roots of the desert reaching deep into the sky. Your single green flower white against the sailing moon, you run in the wind. How many voices has your silence? The giant lily, the praying tree, praying over us, for us, for the promised land. I join you too, you carry me on, you lift me clear of that sucking and cloying and jingling and numbing. And it is the strength of your limbs, of your will, that bears me, not some arcanum to be distilled from your corpse, juices drawn from your wounds, elixirs from your flowers.

  Sky

  Their sad delusions. The trapped ones, trapped in their freedoms, caught by the easy trip, the new convention, the “Grass, man, grass.” Weeds for the spirit, weeds of the spirit. The collective and the external; substitutes for the true exploration, the true voyage inward . . . Our journey, O Colin, out of space and time. The Pacific to the Mediterranean, but really an inner sea. Weave your web of poetry, my Colin, I’ll be the woof. Together we love, to the sheep bells and the wind in the plane trees and the brook rushing down the village street, hanging so high above the sea.

  “Peyote from the mescal, belladonna from the lily, desert Indians, the Shoshones, with their visions, their grasp of the soul. Don’t you see, Lily? The giant lily may be their secret. Ask while you’re there, look around, bring us some, Lily, be our girl of the flower again.”

  Interlude – between mountains of Calabria, deserts of Mohave. Empty day – fog blowing through the rhododendrons, Golden Gate Park, Drive Slow – vacant eyes, vacant friends.

  Vacant asking.

  Will humphed and was angry, he was right. And he almost discarded me there and then.

  “A corruption of man’s nature, Lily girl, like fornicating when the female’s out of season, no other animal would do that. Yuh, heading for the end.”

  Pa would talk like that too. Not about the fornication, he’d have been embarrassed, wouldn’t have believed it either, but about the corruption, the decline, the regression, the progress to extinction, yes. Often in these last years. Before no, though. Then he perhaps didn’t think much, and perhaps it wasn’t so clear, and life was more of a desperate season-to-season business, I guess, though he didn’t let us see that side then.

  wings

  on the

  Turtle;

  soar, the

  heavy

  Earth

  Yesterday, my boots crunching in the sand, so happy watching the hummingbird in the mesquite, tripped bang on an enormous turtle (how clumsy, humiliating! no one to see), I’d just stripped off everything, tied to my pack. My skin, oh! my miraculous skin, shouting to the wind, my hat . . . “That’s a hat that never was new,” they said of Colin’s; five months he’d hiked, alone . . . tugging at my jaw, and who would have thought there would have been any of man’s structures here, beehives where no man had been since the wild hay dried up and the black sage took over . . . Do they choke my Valley Hope? So far to the north, where California climbs into Oregon . . . and the Indians left ollas hidden in caves, arrowheads after a rain, drawings of their sagas under overhangs, metate grinding-stones in the sand or hollowed (how many generations stretched back?) in a granite ledge convenient to the site? But there it was, so familiar, oh Pa! the bleached gray wooden box (only with different initials, J & M) on its rock above the buckwheat.

  O

  Divine

  Eye,

  may

  you

  Valley Hope. Rows of white beehives stacked neatly in our Model A truck (its round eye of a gas gauge, floating like a compass; they still write Ford that way), rows of white beehives. It meant he would go now, he would leave me, his Lily of Valley Hope, Ma is crying too. Initials carved deep, JT, Joe Tocca, Giuseppe Toccacielo. Your little Liliana, your flower, how could you leave me behind to fade? For days, for weeks, forever, and my tummy turns cold and hard, I shiver, my nerves are aspen leaves. Hate, I hate you, you are bad, I will die right now and that will show you.

  live

  the

  Shadow,

  Oh! I love you so, Pa.

  You said it was no life for me, Valley Hope, and you were damned if you’d buy me a husband when the time came the way the others tried. With honey and the hunters now, and city uncles, you’d send me off, to the south, an education, a profession. San Valentino, Los Angeles.

  You drag me onto the bus and the world turns ice-blue bleak behind their hateful glass. San Valentino State – agriculture in steel mills, education in the super-everythings, regulated lust and greed and numbness in the country clubs. And the desert out beyond. Seven hundred miles you sent me, you turned the world upside down. I called you and called you, I cried for seven years. Never, never, shall I tell you what they did to me for your PhD that I never got. How I’ve lied to you! but that was what you wanted of me. How many lifetimes have I lain alone in my flaming grief? How often did I, in despair, crush the flowers and paint my face, your face, jiggle and consume and waste and turn hollow with the others? But I couldn’t, oh how could I? forget forever my smile and how I love you. Then, one after another, they would reach out for me, and, untouching, turn away in their grief or bitterness or anger or humiliation or hate or even perhaps in love.

  Do you know why I left, why you had to let me go, why I cut my beautiful hair, that death could have had me, what led me to San Francisco?

  may

  you

  live

  the

  Saint Francis with your birds and soft animals, your flowers, your bees and honey. Broken hearts, their rat race still, their rules, their noses stuck high. But there were other worlds and other hearts, there were quests. And I found my love, my eternal flowering tree where the lily can grow full, my Colin.

  Light.

  Ah! Joshua tree, Will (a lizard crawls on your swollen knee), Liliana who reaches for heaven, we have so much to say. Here, take my hand, I kiss your bark, your beard, the weathered aeons.

  Me, Will Spear: little Jerry Dan once – windmills on the Volga, bottles dancing bright on the Elbe

  I look –

  dark

  signs

  jungle

  Your face is dim, girl. Your lips, I shiver and bristle. Sure, if you like. Go ahead. I’ll come along. No, no, I’m all right, just get these sticks under me. Get around pretty good. Keep working, day’s work, never missed. Don’t know this nowadays, something for nothing. Chilling up anyhow, now, with the sun sunk. Just split this oak, kindling. Came from up there near where you must’ seen that bighorn. Used to be lots, big ones, oaks and mesquite and piñons. Bring them in on the wagon.

  Set a fire. Joshua, petrified, best there is, burns all day.

  fire

  outside

  the cave

  sabertooth

  Can of corn, coffee, still working on that watermelon you and Colin brought, out back. Saltines.

  Old black Majestic, The Great. Fifty years ago we hauled you in. Got sanded in the draw. Screwed on your lion’s feet and the oven door with its flowers and leaves and newfangled thermometer.

  The Missis, Helen, my Mana—“it’s Mama, Robin boy.” Her sourdough cooling on the shelf. Shoulder roast, potatoes dug with a mining pick when my shovel broke, gravy and cabbage and applesauce. Well water. Them fellows with the still, they’ll kill old Jamie yet, weak and cheating and alone, they’ll kill him with that liquor.

  Just sit here now. I’ll get the albums and the lamp.

  uncrowning

  me

  By damn! must open that damper, night air sets like death in the knees. Still comes in, wind pushes it up through the floor. Weather, heat, time, drawn the cracks open; tight when I laid it, sixty years. Termites, mice, our house a piece of cheese .
. . Twenty-five-pound cheese chunk, up from Banning in the wagon, spring and fall, in the cooler with the burlap wicks, outside the window over the sink. “But it’ll make it dark in here, Willy, can’t you?”

  Where’d I put that other album? So dim and dusty in here, cold, closed off from the kitchen. But the pink sunset lies on my writing table, my pens, my poetry. Pink like a birthday card I made for my Mana in ’forty-five up at San Quentin, out of silk.

  And never would I see your face

  In God’s sweet world again.

  ghost fingers

  playing

  Breathe, old Will, breathe deep, or the heart will strangle. Distance, Will, from way back, from way up ahead. The upright piano is covered with her bed throw, guitar’s dried out. They’re propped along the top, smiling out. She’s sitting by the window, her arm on the sill, the winter sun coming in on her white hair.

  Now she looks down upon me here

  Through her window in the sky

  black

  figures

  line

  on the

  snow

  Distance, Will, let it stretch out.

  Do you think the Volga flows into the Elbe, Jerry boy? Do you think these Protestant towers hear the chants from the scruffy beards? The black hulls come sliding in, the cranes as high as the stars swing back and forth. Look out across the river, covered with dancing bottles, shining ice. German shouts up from the street, cursing the dogs pulling his cart piled high with bottles. But it’s not your German. Catherine the Great, Elizabeth Petrovna, Hunsinger (the Huns, the monstrous raping Huns), Danziger who married your mother, Hewlett she was (her soft round face, so grossly fat, ten children do that natural to some women). All your people, shipped from Prussia to the Volga across the marshes and the thousand miles of wheat, but they kept their language if not their religion. It was going home after all those centuries, though they laughed at the way you spoke. The world was so small back home, you were such a little boy, but here you start school and you walk alone. Look out for the dog-carts! But you are born not to fear anything, your mother told you. And you saved pennies and bought such delights at the food bars.

  comfort

  wrapping,

  a

  Mother

  Or was that when you’d moved on to Cornwall and the hot tarts? Jerry Dan, born on September seventh, eighteen seventy-seven, Kov on the Volga, so you’re eight years old and the best school is to go down in the mines with your father, a thousand feet down and out under the sea . . . They sold me a piece of a mine, the dividends come on ever since . . . Don’t worry, Helen Jane, there’s always the mine money and the warden thinks we’ll get a pardon . . . here where England’s tied to the Ruhr, and the fossils make you so small and nothing. Tropical England, before it became an island. America, tied too through Siberia. Still, it’s the other side of the world, it’s the new world. Always they’re talking, arguing, writing, reading the maps, and Father was learning to be a miller too and he’d come home powdered every night.

  the ancient

  And I hear you ask, Jerry, “But when will we go home?”

  Tales

  Hare

  Cow

  Home to the windmills dusted with flour, the voice of the great river, the smell of haying, the work horses, you squat for hours on their flat backs hanging to their harness. Here, ponies for the mines and they won’t let you ride them hardly ever. But there’s Dangler who’s much older and can do everything and takes you rabbit-hunting with slingshots and wouldn’t kill them except to eat, wouldn’t be right. Roast them, right there in our cave on a green willow stick over an elder fire, and you suck at the bones and be hungry even if you aren’t. Dangler, who’d cuff you, who shoved his slingshot at you on the gangplank. “I’m too old for it,” and the cattle bawled back.

  moon

  beasts

  dark

  lunar

  Prize Herefords for America. And you. You were all jammed into one room, slept in three shifts, and learned to vomit to leeward. He wouldn’t pay for steam. You cried into your stomach, Russian tears, German tears, even English tears. It was no good. Kov was there before, trains came and went, connected, and your language hadn’t changed. But now: The waves were yellow or black or flaming and the distance sank and sank. The Atlantic gurgled by through the bilges, rushed in the scuppers, washed and washed.

  way

  fairy Tales

  cold Volga

  Here, girl, photos, I’ve got them all. Jumbled though, can’t keep them straight. Don’t see so good, and then they’ll slip a few out now and then, get them copied for The Wild West and Frontiersman and palm them back wherever, or maybe not at all, some’s missing. Jumbled. Poke the fire, comes in cold with the dark, though the wind drops. Wick needs trimming, get to it tomorrow. Used to have a power plant, outside there, beyond the ore samples. Didn’t seem worth the trouble and devil’s noise after the Missis went. Shoo any visitors away before sunset, except you. You stay right here, keep old Will company. Can’t eat a whole can of corn alone.

  Dragon

  that

  swallows

  the

  Hero

  George Dan – Danziger too foreign – that’s him, my father. It’s my face, and the bald dome. Set on the photographer’s chair, his belly bulges down on his crotch, pushes his thighs apart, pushes his fat hands out to his knees – what’s left of his lap. I’m hard and slim, though twisted now: old Will. Miller George, there was more room then on that lap for a thrashing. Nebraska (“flat” that meant to the Omahas, Flat River, Platte River) near where the Frenchman and Republican rivers join. The mill sluice where we boys’d float sticks down to their end in splashing paddles. The mill that bought him land and cattle, and sometimes we’d work on the buffalo ranch at Palisades until Buffalo Jones ran them all up to Yellowstone at government expense in ’ninety. No, I never liked it, buffalo meat. Stinking Creek Ranch, stank ’cause the buffaloes wallowed there. Between the North Platte and the Frenchman.

  my

  Dragon

  slain, the

  There’s Mother standing behind him, beside him, her hand on his shoulder heavy. Her gray skirt set firm on the floor, rising up over her enormous hips, up over her stomach, until finally finding a waist under her bagging breasts, almost up to her armpits. And the gray shirt buttoned up to her chin. And her hair pulled tight to keep out of the cooking. Childbearing does it, some women . . . A cow colicked – blew one with my knife once, in the Big Horns, and she lived; horse wouldn’t have though, different kind of stomach . . . Always had her hands in something, fat red hands with their smell of the soap she made, hands that nagged at me and wiped at me and kept closing doors and turning down lamps and hushing things and scrubbing and scrubbing, purity, purity. Did I ever know her? Those hands couldn’t keep me. The others, some of the others, yes. Eleven of us, they’re all gone now. Just old Will, Jerry Dan, who took off after the buffaloes and the cows and salvation, found his gold and another name.

  Treasure

  That’s Jamie Pope. Doesn’t look like much, does he, girl? Wasn’t either. You seen his grave that I put up where we found him.

  JAMES POPE

  DIED HERE

  FOUND AND

  BURIED BY WILL

  SPEAR, JOE

  WILEY, GRANT

  REAGAN. MAR

  23 1925

  IN LIFE AND DEATH

  I LIE ALONE

  That’s it. Maybe I’ll find my poetry to him later too. Wasn’t often, I’ll tell you, that he wore a stiff collar like that, and a jacket with button pockets. Not when we found him, not now either, his mustache half loose from his rotting face. Forty days.

  me

  Will Spear

  Desert

  Forty days. The wind like a coyote through the yuccas and the Joshuas. Will Spear. They’ll name this place for you when you get the road made and the Buicks and the Packards and the Hudsons and the Fords come dusty by. Spear’s
Outlook—over the Smoke Tree Desert and the Santa Claras and Serrano Palms where they’ve come from. She said they would.

  King

  The coyote wind. Your legs freezing in those overalls, your toes pinched to ice in those roping boots, your ears still cold where you have your hat tied down with that scarf. That’s quite a rig you worked out there, that brush rake on the back of your wagon, Joe at the mules, you and Grant working the rig. Kind of fresno scraper . . . When my knees are working again, I could still do it, though’s work, plenty. Might, too; need a road to get back into the high country, show it to the city folk, find the wild honey too. Ninety, but I still could . . . Young fellow then, you were, not fifty. Raking brush up along each track of the wagon, make the ruts, make the road, to Spear’s Outlook. By damn! but that’s a wind. Do you feel your rifle back there, the one with the silver and turquoise the Walapais did for you, hung on the wagon post? Never can tell, lots of folks want what you got with your wells and tanks and good land, good with the wild hay, and twelve hundred head of cows and the mules and horses and the high grade in sacks by old McQuillen’s adobe barn (may he rest well at Serrano Palms) ready for the five-stamp mill.