Oliver de la Paz

When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September, once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action happened on Friday nights where the high school football team gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that, we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel. But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument. Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere, staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now? Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn, and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there, to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses, to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there, rising slightly and just out of reach.

I spied everything. The North Dakota license, the “Baby on Board” signs, dead raccoons, and deer carcasses. The Garfields clinging to car windows—the musky traces of old coffee. I was single-minded in the buzz saw tour I took through the flatlands of the country to get home. I just wanted to get there. Never mind the antecedent. I had lost stations miles ago and was living on cassettes and caffeine. Ahead, brushstrokes of smoke from annual fires. Only ahead to the last days of summer and to the dying theme of youth. How pitch-perfect the tire-on-shoulder sound was to mask the hiss of the tape deck ribbons. Everything. Perfect. As Wyoming collapses over the car like a wave. And then another mile marker. Another. How can I say this more clearly? It was like opening a heavy book, letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower.

The wind shakes the chimes into the siding, and the dog shakes too though he doesn’t wake you as I carry you to the bedroom. Small mouth sipping breath, you are fish-strange, bejeweled in the dimness of the microwave’s nightlight. As I turn my back to the bulb I make your form in my arms a dark weight but you are no anchor. Together we are sloops trailing a tiny wake in the carpet. In the dark it’s hard to navigate the furniture so I count distance—five paces from the tile to the sofa. From the sofa, twelve to the hall. I’m subtracting my steps to see what’s left. The things that burden me, like our lame dog’s shattered nail, blood on the carpet from his paces to the food dish, our drafty house, all are outpaced. There are no barriers, and I step over the hound’s dozing form as a quick gust cuts dead branches from the pine and the drifts lock our cars in. But I’m still counting— the none-stars in the winter sky, each hazily wrapped and strobing. The far bell over the deep waters of your sleep. Two steps to the corner where there are no animals nor animal danger. Two to the bed where behind us the shadow of the dog could be distant hills, where the clouds disassemble, where your breaths pull the warmth of the room in and where my face, my eyes are the glint of ore from a country far away and known only in a language, light as the syllables of exhalation.

1. did your child lose acquired speech? A fount and then silence. A none. An ellipse between — his breath through the seams of our windows. Whistle of days. Impossible bowl of a mouth — the open cupboard, vowels rounded up and swept under the rug. 2. does your child produce unusual noises or infantile squeals? He’d coo and we’d coo back. The sound passed back and forth between us like a ball. Or later, an astral voice. Some vibrato under the surface of us. The burst upon — burn of strings rubbed in a flourish. His exhausted face. 3. is your child’s voice louder than required? In an enclosure or a cave it is difficult to gauge one’s volume. The proscenium of the world. All the rooms we speak of are dark places. Because he cannot see his mouth, he cannot imagine the sound that comes out. 4. does your child speak frequent gibberish or jargon? To my ears it is a language. Every sound a system: the sound for dog or boy. The moan in his throat for water — that of a man with thirst. The dilapidated ladder that makes a sentence a sentence. This plosive is a verb. This liquid a want. We make symbols of his noise. 5. does your child have difficulty understanding basic things (“just can’t get it”)? Against the backdrop of the tree he looks so small. 6. does your child pull you around when he wants something? By the sleeve. By the shirttail. His light touch hopscotching against my skin like sparrows. An insistence muscled and muscled again. 7. does your child have difficulty expressing his needs or desires using gestures? Red-faced in the kitchen and in the bedroom and the yellow light touches his eyes which are open but not there. His eyes rest in their narrow boat dream and the canals are wide dividing this side from this side. 8. is there no spontaneous initiation of speech or 
communication from your child? When called he eases out of his body. His god is not our words nor is it the words from his lips. It is entirely body. So when he comes to us and looks we know there are beyond us impossible cylinders where meaning lives. 9. does your child repeat heard words, parts of words, or tv commercials? The mind circles the mind in the arena, far in — far in where the consonants touch and where the round chorus flaunts its iambs in a metronomic trot. Humming to himself in warm and jugular songs. 10. does your child use repetitive language (same word or phrase over and over)? A pocket in his brain worries its ball of lint. A word clicks into its groove and stammers along its track, Dopplering like a car with its windows rolled down and the one top hit of the summer angles its way into his brain. 11. does your child have difficulty sustaining a 
conversation? We could be anywhere, then the navel of the red moon drops its fruit. His world. This stained world drips its honey into our mouths. Our words stolen from his malingering afternoon. 12. does your child use monotonous speech or wrong pausing? When the air is true and simple, we can watch him tremble for an hour, plucking his meaning from a handful of utterances and then ascend into the terrible partition of speech. 13. does your child speak the same to kids, adults, or objects (can’t differentiate)? Because a reference needs a frame: we are mother and father and child with a world of time to be understood. The car radio plays its one song. The song, therefore, is important. It must be intoned at a rigorous time. Because rigor is important and because the self insists on constant vigils. 14. does your child use language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)? Always, and he insists on the incorrect forms. The wrong word takes every form for love — the good tree leans into the pond, the gray dog’s ribs show, the memory bound to the window, and the promise of the radio playing its song on the hour. Every wrong form is a form which represents us in our losses, if it takes us another world to understand.

The snow voids the distance of the road and the first breath comes from the early morning ghosts. The sparrows with their hard eyes glisten in the difficult light. They preen their feathers and chirp. It’s as though they were one voice talking to God. Mornings are a sustained hymn without the precision of faith. You’ve turned the bag filled with molding bread inside out and watch the old crusts fall to the ice. What’s left but to watch the daylight halved by the glistening ground? What’s left but an empty bag and the dust of bread ravaged by songsters? There are ruins we witness within the moment of the world’s first awakening and the birds love you within that moment. They want to eat the air and the stars they’ve hungered for, little razors. Little urgent bells, the birds steal from each other’s mouths which makes you hurt. Don’t ask for more bread. The world is in haste to waken. Don’t ask for a name you can surrender, for there are more ghosts to placate. Don’t hurt for the sparrows, for they love you like a road.

I wondered how long I could go on once the rain had stopped. My nerves were wedged like wings under a hat. Corncobs bobbed in boiling water. I kept a fist in my mouth. I was strident. The neat house curved like a draining sink. Hot cars shined outside. Their engines snapped like a chamois. I never wanted to leave. The streets were suet-thick. The hucksters had tinny voices. They had swollen drums. They had gravel underfoot and tongues that could peel citrus. Radios throbbed. The wet hush of my breath flung itself to mother. The soft dark skin. The sweet curl of the arm. The hum.