Snow on the Desert

“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,” Serge told me in New York one December night. “So when I look at the sky, I see the past?” “Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.” On January 19, 1987, as I very early in the morning drove my sister to Tucson International, suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street the sliding doors of the fog were opened, and the snow, which had fallen all night, now sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants, its mineral-hard colors extinguished, wine frozen in the veins of the cactus. *   *   * The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read: The syrup from which sacred wine is made is extracted from the saguaros each summer. The Papagos place it in jars, where the last of it softens, then darkens into a color of blood though it tastes strangely sweet, almost white, like a dry wine. As I tell Sameetah this, we are still seven miles away. “And you know the flowers of the saguaros bloom only at night?” We are driving slowly, the road is glass. “Imagine where we are was a sea once. Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly sapphire, and the past is happening quickly: the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched out their arms to rays millions of years old, in each ray a secret of the planet’s origin, the rays hurting each cactus into memory, a human memory for they are human, the Papagos say: not only because they have arms and veins and secrets. But because they too are a tribe, vulnerable to massacre. “It is like the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,” Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved arms. And we are driving by the ocean that evaporated here, by its shores, the past now happening so quickly that each stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky taking rapid notes on us as we turn at Tucson Boulevard and drive into the airport, and I realize that the earth is thawing from longing into longing and that we are being forgotten by those arms. *   *   * At the airport I stared after her plane till the window was again a mirror. As I drove back to the foothills, the fog shut its doors behind me on Alvernon, and I breathed the dried seas the earth had lost, their forsaken shores. And I remembered another moment that refers only to itself: in New Delhi one night as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War, perhaps there were sirens, air-raid warnings. But the audience, hushed, did not stir. The microphone was dead, but she went on singing, and her voice was coming from far away, as if she had already died. And just before the lights did flood her again, melting the frost of her diamond into rays, it was, like this turning dark of fog, a moment when only a lost sea can be heard, a time to recollect every shadow, everything the earth was losing, a time to think of everything the earth and I had lost, of all that I would lose, of all that I was losing.