Marsha De La O

Not rain, but fine mist falls from my lemon tree, a balm of droplets in green shadow. Six years now my mother gone to earth. This dew, light as footsteps of the dead. She often walked out here, craned her neck, considered the fruit, hundreds of globes in their leathery hides, figuring on custard and pudding, meringue and hollandaise. But her plans didn't work out. The tree goes on unceasingly—lemons fall and fold into earth and begin again— me, I come here as a salve against heat, come to languish, to let the soft bursts— essence of citrus, summer's distillate— drift into my face and settle. Water and gold brew in the quiet deeps at the far end of the season. Leaves swallow the body of light and the breath of water brims over. My hands cup each other the way hers did.

We had to imagine you even then, Ramon, your star lost, a glimpse to die for, all the kids galloping to Westside Park where your gang was supposed to meet in open warfare those bitter skinny boys from Toonerville, well-armed, Lupe said. And when we got there, nothing, no armies, no chucos with long tails and zip guns, just the grass with its stunned look, as though it never really wanted all that light. City grass doesn't want much of anything, it's not out there trembling with desire, minds its own business, leeching slowly upward from busted pipe. And now nobody knows what you really wanted, Ramon, when the needle spun true north, or why that final rush of light, flat stare of lawn as you staggered by, seared your own throat shut. Tonight, I'm getting to the smallest place I know, dusk coming on slow, the moon half full of shade, so still it almost doesn't want to move, whispers a phrase to particles of blue. Same moon you knew with its white mind watching, same moon you walked beneath and were gone.

Inside the night, this hospital, asylum, this party for those undone by desire, forever unslaked, inside a house inside the night, I'm inside this house with eight beams and moonlight pulling on the past through skylights, this house of white noise, wind and dry heat, lonely house on a ridge line, house of ordinary shame, my sister's house with corrals and outbuildings around it, and beyond that, the dog patrolling, and beyond that, skirts and folds of the mountain rising in rumpled geologic scrolls into the range. At the center beneath the moon's silence that nothing ever changes, muffled in blankets with fear beside me on my little bench of sleep, I can hear their voices, could be three or twenty-three, unhinged saints gabbling to their shadows, or panty-sniffers, drug-trippers in all flavors past vanilla, could be Birnam wood on the move, the shriek of its roots thirsty and air-brushed, or a pack of lunatics crooning norteño songs. What is certain is advent. They're coming down, coming towards the heart beneath the feathers, coming for what can't be protected, on a beam of dread, riding that ray. I'm listening, my eyes snapped-open inside darkness, other people in other rooms who know how to sleep through a night like this night, thrown against the roundness of the world which is desire. The old bitch guards this night on the ranch, half shepherd, half other, this is her watch, she gallops the perimeter, anxious to sound like more than one dog, though she's going arthritic and her paws strike the hard ground. Now they quiet, penitents, lunatics, marauders and ragpickers,quiet. Only one left behind and the moon is his hieroglyph, one creature padding down the mountain, coming closer. Coyote knows a good joke, he only wants to let her in on it. He can't stop laughing, can't stop crying, can't stop licking the crevices clean, licking safety and duty until they're empty. I hear the dog listening, ears lifted. Coyote's tongue slides into night air, pressing narcotic vowels through wonder, through longing and longing and wonder awaken. She's close to that edge, that border in the night where one thing becomes another and even an old dog who's worked a ranch eleven years feels the urge to let loose, blow this little settlement,go wild. Clouds loose and blue in the arms of the moon, slant light on this mountain raking us, the dog and I, we feel the pull. Imagine a woman trying to come between coyote and the female he's after when she knows what is dark and offers itself and vanishes has come for her at last? The body wants what it can't have, to follow the path of thirst through the rent in the wire beyond the corral. The dog doesn't move, but who knows better than she the small outpost death has set up in her, maybe she's all desire now to slip under the moon and chase down that lure. Coyote wheedles and croons another minute or two, then lopes off, calling over his shoulder in a language even I can understand, the right names for things not kept in heaven.