The Joshua Tree Read online

  Thick thick sheep’s cream with bread and boiled spring thistles with oil, in a shepherd’s hut high on the summer pasture. The morning milking, the shouting, the procession through the stone-walled pen, the squirt squirt in the pails, the dogs bringing in another herd.

  The sun’s hardly warm yet as you set off again.

  The pasturage thins and disappears among the rocks. Then the snow, so cool to hold in your mouth, so steep and thank God for the stick. On up to the sky, to the black teeth against the sky.

  Where the other side is sheer, a cliff, and you weep because you know you cannot go further and the cliff sucks at you and the wind rushes up from behind and would push you over the edge and the clouds gather and you curl inward, despair. O far far Valley Hope!

  O Earth

  Monster

  (I love you

  I love you

  Pa)

  And he leaves you, shivering under his jacket too, to find a way, he says. Shivering, deep in your stomach, the cliff a monster, waiting for you, you wedged between his teeth. Teetering in the wind, swaying, the whole rock ridge. Nothing, no one. And even then the earth is smitten with a blow. Prolonged, a convulsion from within, shuddering, heaving you to and fro, to shake you off, and all the creatures clinging so perilously to its stone skin. Three times, and the cracking roar and the rumble of rocks dropping and the sound like sand as you can see the snow sliding in ugly wrinkles where you had walked across so long ago. The bitter taste of vomit stinging in your nose . . . Stinking still where it caught and dried in the fold of your belt where it doubles over to hold the buckle, vomit down your shirt when Goldie broke her leg and Pa shot her right there in the head, and you’ll never never never wear it again. You hate him so . . . You feel the bones of your fingers where they cling to the rock, rock in its agony.

  Colin, Colin, have they shaken you loose, have they destroyed you, you, so beautiful and noble and gentle and strong and true, they, the demon forces, the dark side of the sun? Come, come to your Lily, let us be sacrificed together to the black gods. No, no! only come and hold your Lily and let her cry out in her terror.

  An age of ages and he is here, dropped down beside you in a pause in the fierce tearing wind.

  “It is over,” he says, “three times and you can be sure it’s over and there’s no more need to be afraid for I’ve found an easy way and first I’ll take your pack and I’ll be back for you in just a bit and I love you so and am so proud that you are here.”

  And you, you would laugh or scream with rage or turn white with pity for man, but the wind blows all that away and he is gone. And would he be like that if the earth had quite split open to its heart between us?

  Jupiter’s

  fire-ether

  chance

  destiny

  Back along the shoulder of the mountain, where the clouds are churning and heavy as if they would crush and overwhelm the poor earth. Blinding white lightning splits open the sky. You can only watch, numb. The white sheets of rain erase the valley. And, quite in an instant, every muscle is rigid, every hair creeps over your frozen skin, you’ve shot up to a kneeling position, your hands outstretched, and a horrible flash cuts into the ridge beside you. The blue smell of ozone, the smell of your terror.

  providence

  Your breath has turned to stone in your lungs, your eyes see nothing, your thought for Colin stretches thin and taut out across the earth and would seem to disappear.

  He is beside you again, you can feel his hard body press to you, his breath on your dead face, his distant words saying nothing. Pressing, releasing, pressing on your breast, the sharp pain of a gasp, the sting of blood in your face.

  Half carried along those dreadful teeth, the rock dropping straight off now on both sides, mercifully into streaks of clouds. To a chute of stones and tufts of grass and pale sad yellow flowers. In despair and fear, down and down, in great strides, each boot sliding in reckless clatters. Skidding on the long streaks of snow where to break through would surely be to snap a leg.

  Moon’s

  death

  the

  deluge

  The rain and the hail breaking on you, in an instant wet through. The water running down under your belt, into your boots, and any move finds new spots of the ice cold. Rain in your eyes so you can hardly see your feet where they reach for footing. Hail to turn black to white, a final white before the night closes in and your trail is the hand of fate.

  Quite suddenly you’re in the midst of crying huddling sheep. The smell of their droppings, of their pungent shorn skin. A pace or two to the side, in a flash of distant lightning, you see the shepherd squatting under the tent of his conical goatskin cape. Three words for you, warm but that’s enough, to show you the path to his valley village. Yet still it’s fate, for the dark closes in thick and the rain weighs heavy and the wind would have the way.

  Torrents that rip across the path and rush about your shins and fill your boots with ice when they had almost become friends in their sloshing warmth. You have to stop and you call to Colin just ahead, shriek to him in the deafness of the storm. He shields you some from the crush of the wind and rain. To move in your clothes, the agony of the cold and the wet and the storm violating your flesh, clutching you between your legs.

  Sun’s

  passion

  Great

  Mother

  The madness, the exhilaration, throwing yourself down that mountainside, embracing finally, open to the furies, bursting in your womb. Your cry of love, from another world, and even in the storm it echoed from the cliffs above, the full force of your soul, you cry to the ancient gods. Ahead Colin turns to you and in the dark, only inches away, you can see his face reflect your wild delight.

  is

  slain

  That is the knowing, my Lily.

  Was it that night, the warmth of a shepherd’s chickpea soup, his wine, his beautiful slow smile, the gentle scratch of his blankets, the smell of your clothes drying at the hearth, the soft talk of the women in the other room as they prepared their threads for the weaving tomorrow, was it that night, lying in the dark on a mound of sheepskins, the embers slipping away, the body slipping away, the sound of the rain softening into the breath of dreams?

  Your wedding day. As is always done, you rise early and go alone into the forest. You are dressed in skins of the Easter lamb. Deep in the wood, where there are no paths and you are led by a sure instinct, you come upon a small sunny dell. At the far side is a grotto and at its mouth a pool. You go to the edge of the pool and there you unclothe yourself, carefully laying the lambskin robe on a boulder of smoothest purest marble. Your nakedness glows forth.

  O

  fertile

  Frog

  You are to bathe, the wedding bath, in the pool. As you step to its edge two great green frogs float up to the surface, lie there watching you. You do not hesitate. Your arms high, then entwining, the tips of your fingers touch lightly to your golden hair, your hands slowly down, to your eyes, your cheeks, your lips, your fingernails caressing the throbbing sides of your throat, your shoulders, your breasts and their hard nipples, your belly, passing so lightly through the curls of hair, your thighs, and, as you bend, your inner knees, and calves, until you grasp your feet, your knees spread wide by your elbows. The frogs have not stirred, not blinked, seeing your secrets.

  on

  the

  Moon

  You step into the water. The frogs make way for you, as do the many many smaller frogs which you now see with pleasure, swimming about you in the water bubbling warm from the depths.

  Sheep bells, like brook water playing in the stones and hollows, flow by below and stretch out into the distance. Later, the sun is bright on the white wall and there’s murmuring outside. Yet still the frogs are with you . . . Yes, yes, it was that night . . . frogs that once would have made you shriek, frogs your friends, your ancient guardians in the waters of the earth, your joining with the sources of the soul.

>   Your preparation, your anointment? The furious attacking elements, fire and air and earth and water, the multiple opposites. The sun shining on that wall, the peace in every cell of your body.

  mountain’s

  water

  For weeks you stayed there with the shepherds; their village, clinging to the edge of a great chasm splitting through the mountains, high above the sea. Stone houses with their slate roofs, the church, the little bars, two, rivals across the square, the goats and the sheep and the donkeys crying out and the chickens. The fountain with its dozen jets splashing out, where the women would put their wools to be combed by the water to thick soft textures, where they would come and go so straight and noble with their jugs or their washing balanced on their heads.

  treasured

  in the

  Earth

  Colin, at a little table against that sunny wall, writing. Not the story of travel he’d been sent to write, but the poetry of his inner voices, the passion found in his soul. How you would sit there, Lily, hour upon hour, sending him all your strength, your heart tiptoeing to the rustle of his pen, hoping hoping hoping when he was still for so long! That little room was flooded with our passion.

  Thin days too, days when there were dissonances scratching in your heart. The wishing away of the empty moment, impatient for the future. The empty space below you, that swaying cliff hanging high behind the village, he so unprepared to go beyond the moment. He withholding, the distant look of pain, the fist he would pound on his table, determination, only to again fade to doubt. Clinging clinging to the moment as a refuge. And you reaching in despair to the future, or then reaching back.

  Oh Valley Hope, oh Pa! Why not now? Such love, such joy, and here the slow disconsolate blending of hollow moments. Such protection from the pain, from the truth of another’s trouble, and here his torment storming on his brow.

  Why did you ever tell Colin of Fort Badly, of Pa’s girl and he left us he left us he left us? Like a black cloud and lightning while he was writing there in the morning sun, he turned to ask for toast and a sliver of garlic and the bowl of sheep’s milk, turned and you could see the torment and the paper blank, perhaps he said, “You look so like that picture of your father.”

  And it had begun.

  It was, “But I am my father.”

  He’s perfect, the ideal: He’s quite imperfect, and he’d leave you for Fort Badly, and he drove you to San Valentino hell, and parents are to be left first before we can return to them, the weaning.

  And never never never, Colin, with your horrid theories, and can you ever know a family? and you so abstract.

  wind

  Love was so uneasy that night, through the tears and the clinging together again, the lamp and the darkness. Our soft breathing, the plane trees through the open window, silvered by the moon, restless in the night wind.

  in the

  soft

  poplars

  Lily, you’re standing outside your home in Valley Hope, the afternoon sun slanting through the poplars where you would fly again. From the barnyard comes a figure, the height and the stride and the features of your father, but wearing a long brown skirt that brushes the earth, a blood-red shirt, a black scarf around the head in the manner of the peasant women. He, or is it she or they? comes forward. Your sisters have been with you, Colin too, but now they leave you to confront this strange figure alone. A sense of doom, of unswerving fate, of shadows.

  He stops before you, face to face. A look of sad joy on his dark face, he says, “I am to die, it must be, it is right. You are to do it. Take this knife and you shall drive it into my heart.”

  You turn away, you would run, you are turned to rock by fear. Yet his strength turns you to him again, his strength puts the knife into your hand, his strength joins with yours and you strike him in the breast.

  There is blood on you, there is blood flowing on the bare earth where he lies dead.

  blood

  of my

  Father

  seed

  of my

  Father

  You turn, you walk so surely, to the field here to the south of your house where the sun is always warmer and the soil is so rich. As the others watch you silently from the porch, you take a cloth sack lying full and heavy against the roots of the apple tree where you climbed with the birds as a girl. Its loop of cloth over your shoulders, heavy against your belly and thighs, you set out over the fresh-plowed field. Your hands reach deep into the sack, into the warm seed, clover seed. Your arm sweeps the arc of the sower. Your eye is on the earth, though you can hear the swallows slicing the air, the bees hunting for new flowers, in the sun.

  The cycles, Lily, the dying, the enriching, the seeding, the fruit. Your life from his death.

  You weep through the remaining night, silent, far from Colin under the goat-hair blanket. By morning you know. The village mailman brings a can of honey, Touch o’ Heaven.

  Colin had understood before you told him. From the weeping, the honey, then your turning to him. He had wanted this so, to see you released, ready to flower.

  Yet he who had held you steady, led you through the elements, given you strength to dream, he was lost in pain.

  He talked of his father. Strong, sharp as sun on ice, sure. Sure that life could be measured, that it had limits and aims and successes and failures. The evil of unimportance. Writing from the self an indulgence, petty, harmful.

  Go to him, my Colin. Embrace him, love him, and how can he not love you? He must, he must, that’s what family means, and if you cannot be accepted by him then I cannot, and without that, without joining your family, I cannot join you.

  He would not go: he would not leave you. Where could you go? To Valley Hope without him, or stay in San Francisco where life is convention? And he would not understand how his need was yours, how he too must dream.

  my Prince

  my Frog

  You woke one night to his bitter sobs, you took him to you, his cheek on your breast, his hand clutching so to your shoulder:

  Hero

  to

  face

  “Lily, Lily! My father, he was racing, the stiff-legged race of an old man who would be young. His head was on backwards, looking at the past, at his successes, at the people he’d passed. I came to him in his castle and you were there and his head was to the front now, so tired and weak. I took him to me, I shook him with all my force to make him understand. I embraced him and wept and he finally began to weep too and told me he could not lose me . . .

  his

  Dragon

  “I shall go to him. And you, let me first take you to the desert, to stay with Will, I’ve told you about him, where the air is pure and life is not death. You’ll see. And I shall come to you, soon.”

  He slept again in your arms . . . Perry, Perry, with your face turned empty to the sky.

  You left that village in the full of a summer day. Embracings, tears, a touch of festive thrill. On the balcony over the bar, the grandmother and the little boy, he digs up his short-pants leg and pees gleefully into the black figures and the dust below. Frowns and roars of delighted anger.

  You left, his poems now finished. So beautiful, when you’d read each day’s work he’d handed you, your breath and your heart would stop.

  You were carrying so much with you, your loads were so light.

  You left, swinging down that mule track, hour after hour. And to the town, another bus, and on. An ocean, a continent, San Francisco, an empty day, and on.

  To the desert, your eternal dream of the desert beyond, of the endless expansion, the opening, the secrets revealed. Look out on the purples, racing past Banning and the San Gorgonio, the sage and the mountain shadows, the salt white of the sand far below, the silvers and reds and browns of the nearer hills, the sweet faint scent of the desert drying, blooming in the early spring sun. Rushing through the desert air, on.

  my Virgil

  the

  Past the blights, the ordeals, the mo
nsters lying in wait to capture you. The Buy a Bit of Beauty, Scenic Acreage Freeway Frontage, Your Retirement Dream, the plastic pizza and cheeseburger slowly turning on their steel pole high over the highway, topped with Frosty Heaven. The Official Pollution Control Stations and the Registered Rest Rooms (Women Love Us), the endless procession of gasoline. Old folks dying lonely in their mobile homes, wandering wandering, with their supermarket carts, looking for some packaged mirage. Hi Desert, Hi! Welcome! The trailers and the campers pushing out the margins, nibbling at what’s left.

  circles

  Past where the smog rolls down, where Perry lies, face turning to the sand, where Lily would breathe no more. On to the promise beyond.

  STOP, where Shell and Chevron stare idiotically idle at each other across the road, their patriotic plastic banners ripping in the wind, gas and green stamps and Win! Win! Win!