David Dominguez

Yesterday afternoon, I hung a framed print in the living room— a task that took two head-throbbing hours. It’s a wedding portrait that we love:Frida and Diego Rivera. I wonder how two people could consistently hurt each other, but still feel love so deeply as their bones turned into dust? Before Frida died, she painted a watermelon still life; before his death, Diego did too. I want to believe that those paintings were composed during parallel moments because of their undying devotion. If I close my eyes, I can see melon wedges left like centerpieces except for the slice Diego put on the table’s corner— one piece of fruit pecked at by a dove that passed through a window. I know that I won’t be building a bookshelf anytime soon and that the chances of me constructing a roll-top desk are as slim as me building an Adirondack chair that sits plumb, but I’m good with the spackle and putty knives in my tool belt. The knots in my back might not be there if I had listened to her suggestions, and I could well have done without two hours of silence over a few holes in the wall. But somehow, life has its ways of working things out. This afternoon, I shut the blinds, turned off the TV, lights, and phone, and massaged my wife’s feet to fight off a migraine— her second one this week despite the prophylactics and pain killers that we store in the breadbox. For once, I’d like to experience what she feels: nausea, blindness, and pain that strike when the cranial vessels dilate, fill with blood, leak, and make the brain swell. Earlier, an MRI triggered the reaction as it mapped her head with electrical current, gradient magnets, and radio waves hammering her floundering eyes. For now, we have our room, the bed frame, and the mattress where she lies as I knead her toes. Come nightfall, I hope that we’ll sit in the patio and watch the breeze stirring the lemon, lime, and orange trees that I planted along the back fence. On certain nights, the moon turns our lawn into green acrylic where we sip Syrah and mint tea until all we know is the sound of our breathing among the whispering leaves.

—For My Students Breakfast, and I’m eating plain yogurt, figs from my garden, and honey. I’m sitting in a lawn chair on the backyard patio— life is good, and the sunlight warming my lap and the pages of a book remind me of Tucson and the subterranean apartment I rented alone and far from home. There was a sofa in front of my one window where at noon the sun burned briefly on the cushions as starlings stirred in the trees with their admonishments. Stepping back there now, I remember feeling hopeless after reading Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.” I recall how I put the book on the coffee table and closed my eyes and saw blood glowing in my arteries. In the leaves, the starlings went on with their disconnected chatter, and I said to myself, “I’ll never write anything like ‘And the bull alone with a high heart! At five o’clock in the afternoon.’” For three months, I didn’t write one word but instead passed the days swimming in the public pool where, from my half-closed eyes, I watched light ride the splashing water or resting on the surface when I floated, face down, sinking with fear: “What do I do now?” I asked. Some nights, I filled my red truck with gas and drove west on the 19 until my headlights flooded the desert, and when the city was less than pinpoints of glitter, and when all I could hear was the whine of silence in my ears, I parked alongside the highway, leaned against my pickup, and stared at stars so sure of themselves as they shone that I believed they couldn’t help but give me something that would make me sit at my desk and write. I felt directionless and wanted to walk out into the landscape, but I feared snakes and scorpions hiding in the buckhorn and staghorn as I recalled my father’s words, “You’ll be lost forever on the far side of the moon”— words that haunted me as I imagined slipping into lunar shadows that no human telescope would spot as I wandered lost and ripped with nostalgia for the nights I read in used bookstores on Campbell—a time when the future seemed so clear I smelled it in dirt that somebody rinsed from the sidewalk as I walked home. Then, one night while sipping black coffee along the side of the 19, I remembered lying on the living room floor as my father and I listened to Brahms’s “Lullaby,” which inspired me to practice “Away in a Manger” on my trumpet: “It’s a lullaby. Play it like that,” my father said as my sixth grade lips struggled to phrase notes that would please a child under the beating stars, and remembering this, I looked up to the oblivious heavens and tied words to images—Cassiopeia, Perseus, Cygnus, Pegasus— and let them sing clearly through my mind.

At five o’clock in the morning, I walked to work and passed the green ponds of Horizon Park where the last bluegill, caught on the low, slight bank, panted hard in the dark mud, crushed glass, sour bottle caps, whiskey, and the iron weight of heat and smog. This haze stared through eyes gray as the broken window panes on the cheap side of town, and when this haze held you and whispered in your ears its quiet tragedies, it stole your breath quick as time. This is where men gathered to sell peanuts, buckets of oranges, and roses, and they sat on the benches and watched the trucks drive by and disappear. What I want to say is simple: a man must do more than sell roses where the bums go and beg— he must keep something holy. He must breath the winds that rustle the orchards of the valley where the white almond blooms replenish with their soft scent. He must learn from the Appaloosa when she walks in from the fields and bows her head to a trough of water that reflects nothing but her eyes and the stars. Shoulder, fat, bone, and loose sheet metal banged out a day-long cacophony. Twenty-eight pounds of spice had to be mixed before the grinder was done. Mustard powder, paprika, salt, and chili powder boiled in my nose, in my eyes, and in the red throb of my hard nicked-up knuckles. By late morning the meat defrosted, and the boxes began their ooze. Pig parts became easy to recognize. Eighty pounds of guts, kidneys, and stomach fell across my chest each time a box ripped apart. We dared not stop the music of our work: the clack of a clean pine pallet, pink meat and white fat ground to a pulp, sweetened, stuffed, and crimped, the chorizo boxed, the boxes labeled, stacked, and wrapped. At lunch, I watched Guillermo hunker over the table and dig into his stew—carrots, potatoes, celery, oxtail, and gravy, made from chili peppers and fat, smoldering in a ceramic bowl. Guillermo took out a white cotton napkin and spread it evenly across his lap, picked up a piece of sourdough ripped from a loaf and soaked the bread in the stew for a long time . . . his own tired body taking back what the work took, and he ate. He sucked on chili peppers the color of blood and took another bite of the bread. He sucked out the beef from the eyes of the bones and gnawed on the soft marrow, and he drank hot coffee sweetened con canela. “Eloisa,” he said, “can cook,” and he touched the brown lace crocheted into the edge of his cotton napkin, rubbed his gut, wiped the table, and walked out to complete his work.

My red pickup choked on burnt oil as I drove down Highway 99. In wind-tattered garbage bags I had packed my whole life: two pairs of jeans, a few T-shirts, an a pair of work boots. My truck needed work, and through the blue smoke rising from under the hood, I saw almond orchards, plums, and raisins spread out on paper trays, and acres of Mendota cotton my mother picked as a child. My mother crawled through the furrows and plucked cotton balls that filled the burlap sack she dragged, shoulder-slung, through dried-up bolls, husks, weevils, dirt clods, and dust that filled the air with thirst. But when she grew tired, she slept on her mother’s burlap, stuffed thick as a mattress, and Grandma dragged her over the land where time was told by the setting sun. . . . History cried out to me from the earth, in the scream of starling flight, and pounded at the hulls of seeds to be set free. History licked the asphalt with rubber, sighed in the windows of abandoned barns, slumped in the wind-blasted palms, groaned in the heat, and whispered its soft curses. I wanted my own history—not the earth’s, nor the history of blood, nor of memory, and not the job founded for me at Galdini Sausage. I sought my own—a new bruise to throb hard as the asphalt that pounded the chassis of my truck.

At the farmer’s market in Rosarito, Mexico, a man touched my arm. He sat on a stool at a wooden table, and in the center, a blue pitcher of water beaded under the sun. Hunkered over his lap, he worked with a gouge on a block of walnut, and he blew at the dust, and the dust swirled in the breeze. Done stripping the sapwood vulnerable to rot, the man held the heart of the wood, a purple wood hard against the chisel’s cutting edge. He looked up from his work, and his gray eyes told me I must listen. “This wood must be strong or the heart cracks before the real work is done. See this?” he asked softly, and he lifted a mallet carved from a branch of apple, “Strong wood,” he said. “It wanted to be more than a tree.” He rubbed fresh walnut dust between his palms. We drank glasses of ice water, talked about life in general, and he used the pitcher, billowed and wet like the sail of a boat, to cool his neck. Later, through the soft meat of an avocado, I felt the pit longing to be free.