THE WHITE HERON

Can I ride with you? 

A gardener is in a golf cart. (He is going to the boat dock beside the lagoon.) I show him my camera. I want to take a photograph.

Si, si. He waves me on.

The algae, I tell him.

Si, si.

He is nodding and beneath his sombrero he is smiling. I see all his teeth.

When we get to the dock he lets me on board his boat. The boat is like a ferry and like a raft. He stands at the front and I stand in the back. Where I am standing, the boat is flat and made of wooden planks. A bee lands on my knee, feels something, flies away.

Another gardener gets on and stands at the back beside me.

Hola, senora. You are going to catch the algae?

Yes, I tell him. Algae is good for your skin. I pat the sides of my face as I say this.

But senora, he smiles and motions towards the water; the sun has a kind of mesmerizing effect against his hand, the way his thumb asserts itself beyond his palm; it is very smooth and it is like a mountain.

Senora, this algae is not so fine. And he too touches his face beneath his chin. The sun now is in his voice. This water is, how do you say, not so fine.

I ask if the algae is good to eat.

Only if you are a raven, he says, or a crow. But senora, he says, you are a yellow songbird.

[[It occurs to me suddenly that I am not wearing any shoes. I have taken my flip-flops off at the dock and left them.]] I smile and maybe I am blushing a little. I heard you singing all morning, and in the middle of the night. Was that you? Yes it was me!

The man at the front starts the little motor and we push away from the dock. I take a photo of the three piles of algae that have already been unloaded this morning beside the boat house. They are as high as the window and they are dark green.

The gardeners have been out here every day pulling algae from the lake. Every time senor puts his net in, he hauls up a load that would easily fill a ten gallon barrel. He can hardly lift it and I am obliged to add my weight to the end of the stick to help him leverage. Soon there is a pile of algae between us, and in two hours—the time it takes us to go under the bridge and collect from the beds in front of the white patios—the pile is as tall as the roof of the boat, as high as both our shoulders.

Senora, the algae is very thick!

I look back to the dock and now there are five or six piles of it where there first were three. It’s like if the dock were a Japanese restaurant and someone had ordered the seaweed salad, piles and piles and piles of it. A restaurant where algae is the only thing to eat.

Senora, take care for the flies!

The flies on our boat are buzzing around the pile of algae. I watch a bird that I’ve never seen before. It is brown and with a thick beak like a vulture. It is always on the water or in the air; it doesn’t go on the grass. It goes underwater for a long time and when it bobs back up a heron on the edge of the lake is tricked; the heron thinks this is a fish. He flies to the center of the lake but when he swoops down he sees it is a bird, and up he goes.

La dia es mi amor

La noche es mi alma

My soul

Una aguila

Silencio

Nuevo silencio, mi amor

And what of your heart

No tengo Corazon

Yo tengo este lago

Yo tengo

Los ojos

de la Garza

soy un pez

si, senora,

usted es un pez

hola, hola!

Hola, mi un pez

Las algas

Es mi casa

Si, si, senora

Las algas es su casa perfecta

Y las Tortugas

Las Tortugas estan mis amigas

Si

Y el cielo?

El cielo es mi sueno

Es un gran sueno

Este es mi unico sueno

I put my hand into the algae and to do this, it is like a woman singing. She is practicing her scales and her voice is very high; with every note it becomes higher. In the grass at the edge of the lake, one of her notes is sustained by the sprinklers that have just come on. There is a rainbow.

What do we do having nothing to do?

Senor puts his net into the water and he holds it there and he looks up at the sun. Beneath his sombrero, his eyes have become two oysters. His nose has become a seed. His net he keeps beneath the water for a long time and he pulls it back in the other direction. He brings the net up empty. Water is falling through in large drops. Now I am sitting down cross-legged and he puts the net over my knees so that the water falls on me and when the water falls so do his eyes.

Senora, he says, where did you come from?

Vine de la mujer. I came from the woman’s voice.

He puts his net back into the water and this time when he brings it up there is a dead fish.

Senora, he says.

La voz.

It is white, he says, it is white as the yellow sun.

The Sender

Fire escapes fire

so,

blow. So, breathe.

Remember, two men are beating a nest of bees. This is the house of straw.

Our skin is not solid, nor is it empty

The tremor of selves

=============

Why should a body make us an orphan?

[[[[what if we had a war and Nobody came?]]]]

The smoke was actually rings of light and the fire let go

We walked across the bridge

We walked across the river

The two sides did never meet

THE WEB

Tonight Darwin would cut up a body, the body in the flood channel which had become a bowl of fruit. He would cover the fruit in a fine mist.

Darwin weighed 280 pounds. He was just over six feet tall. He was too big to sit on telephone wires. He was too big for most utility boxes. He sat on the sidewalk with his many things, and at night he pushed his carts—five or six of them—behind the Burlington Coat Factory, and this is where he went to sleep.

You know I did not see Darwin for one year, because he had followed the flood channel to Flamingo, almost all the way to Desert Inn.

I looked for Darwin when he was gone. He must have been somewhere beside a synagogue, somewhere near an empty acre of land, a big acre, and on one side of this is part of the flood channel called the Flamingo Arroyo. In most places the arroyo runs beneath the street, as where Darwin is crouching now.

Darwin is too big to fly, but he walks quickly.

When he is finished eating he emerges from the tunnel into the open part of the flood channel. It is the first time Darwin has seized that kind of body, but it had become a bowl of fruit, and he had been hungry. The man had been hungry too. 

Darwin picked up some rose trimmings which had been tossed over the fence into the flood channel, and he carried these to the place where the body had been. He spread the rose trimmings over the floor at the mouth of the cave; some of the flowers he separated from their stems and he placed these where the hands had lain on each side.

On each of the man’s fingers had been a letter. This was the name of his friend, and it would become them both.

In the name there are no unknowns.

In the corner of the name, a spider is hanging in a web that is full of dust and piecemeal. The web is moved gently by a breeze from a fan on the ceiling.

Terminal One, Terminal Three.

The spider has unfolded her ribbon so that she can hear music. She listens to the sound and grows into it, a kind of undulation, a kind of wave. It is her lovemaking. When the fan blows strong she holds on.

Darwin is holding onto this thing.  

The air is like a cloud.

The spider loosens her grip to drink from a new place on the fly’s body. Who would have thought she could touch the sky this way? She is holding the fly with two arms. 

*

After Darwin was gone one year, I saw him finally in the business complex parking lot across from Sunrise Villas 9. He was walking in from Eastern Ave, pushing one cart. It was January and the air was cold and the sun was bright and the sky enormous.

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas Happy New Year! We said, waving at one another in the reach of Magnolia’s shadow, in front of the blue dumpster, the Monte Carlo, the Stratosphere.

[[The sun became a centipede on Darwin’s face and he cocked his head so that it fell into his mouth.]]

In another year he might come back. He said this as he walked away, as his cart made a sound like centuries on the asphalt, ringing as a mountain beneath a house. [[He was walking towards the home of Bob Bigelow, the house which is built like a rocket ship.]]

It was January so a year dissolved like cream, and Darwin was back in April. He sat in his antique chair on the sidewalk, in front of the Tropicana flood channel and the Burlington Coat Factory, across from the Sunrise Villas and Bigelow’s south wall. He sat with his wings bulging over the arm rests or folded loosely around him. He watched the sky and stayed still and stayed quiet, but when clarity so heaped him he had to cry out, so that the birds on the wire and the pigeons and crows in the tree and the grackles and the magpies and the yellow songbirds would all begin to fall into orbit.

The Mulberry tree was bursting its blossom, and the black fruit was beginning to appear in its seed. JP Moonsberry has taken up residence in the New York hotel. He drives a black Italian Selvano, the fastest car on earth.

Once a day, Darwin makes his way to the garden which was called Harom. In the garden there are statues placed along a stone path and at the center of the path is a small white house built in 1945, and at the top of the stone chimney a golem sits cross legged as if looking out over a long valley, full of pine trees and cedar, where the clouds lull a person to sleep. [[If there had really been any pine trees around, the figure would have appeared wider.]]

*

Last night a pigeon set himself in the corner outside our patio—a little white puddle emerged and I thought in the morning it would be dead, but the bird is there again on the lawn. It has a small imprint on one side of its head, an indentation, something which might appear on the soft skull of a new human.

Do you see, there are the seeds of sand coming, falling down.

Darwin has come to the garden called Harom. He is in there with his wings flat against his warm body, and he is walking towards the center and the white house. He sits down on a bench carved from brass and bronze beside a statue of a dove. A hand is raised in the air and the dove, its chest out, is about to depart from the open palm.

The shadow of the dove’s wings are cast in the sky, as a thunder cloud moves in front of the sun, slipping now behind the Monte Carlo. The sky opens and closes, an armory of stars waiting for their moment of exchange.

It is said that this exchange is impossible, and yet it occurs suddenly. The orchestra is one violin and one cello, and Darwin is moving the sound around with his breast.

Far up beyond the stars are the Bigelow Space Mansions, a hive of rooms each connected to the center by a network in which distance cannot be discerned or maintained.

There are eight rooms around the center and thirty-two rooms around these, and then one hundred and twenty eight rooms around these, and so on. The hive goes out in all directions so that the rows retract towards the north and south poles, and in the center of this is a field of statues, not unlike the statues inside Harom, and in the very center there are three stones.  

The people who live in the Bigelow Space Mansions come once a day to the field.

In room four are Stella’s mother and father. They have been there for twenty three years; they speak to Stella by way of palm trees, and of course by way of stars. 

Stella is frosting the layers of a cake. Darwin can hear her inside her home; her kitchen is crumbling as the house in the center of the garden. The cake is yellow. The frosting is white.

Darwin is too big to fly. He listens to Stella.

The spider is pulling back around. 

COYOTE

Yesterday I saw a coyote.

I had just come from around the lake and I was on the north side of the field at Lakeside Middle School. The coyote was all the way across the field, and he was looking.

I was so startled that I did not continue walking around the field. I stopped and considered the coyote and I walked back a bit towards the lake.

The coyote didn’t move.

I saw two children on the blacktop walking towards the portable trailer-type classrooms. I thought, they must see the coyote, but they gave no indication that they did. They didn’t act frightened. They didn’t scream.

I continued to look at the animal and finally I began to walk around the field, and I knew then that, somehow, the coyote wasn’t real.

This was true. He wasn’t real. He was there to scare away the Egyptian geese.

On our lake there are two kinds of geese: Canadian and Egyptian. The Canadian geese are quite large and they live in flocks of eight or more, while the Egyptians are considerably smaller and live only in pairs.

The Egyptian geese live in a duprass.

The Egyptian geese are quite mean and their honk is like a whisper only melancholy; they walk as if theirs are the kingdom’s feet.

I walked around the field and onto the blacktop. I remarked to a teacher that I had thought the coyote was real.

It’s not, she said.

*

At dawn there were missiles flying over the lake, launched from that very field. The missiles were bound for Iraq but some of them went awry and exploded over us. Everyone was running. I had to jump from the top of a high building onto a ladder swaying and when I looked down the ladder was full of people and they did fall and I did jump and I did fall.

It was the field and it was the desert, it was Las Vegas. It was the Ivanpah Valley, it was Pahrump.

*

This morning I did not walk around the lake. I took a different path. I walked directly to the bridge and to Tiger Island, a small island down a stone staircase in the center of the bridge. I sat on the cement bench facing south. I saw two Egyptian geese at the lagoon.

I saw two vultures fly through the sky. I saw one dead fish.

The fish was a white fish, floating as a cane in the shallow water.

And when I walked back up the staircase, I saw a fire in the distance, to the right of where the mountain side is cleared and barren, as its substance is being used to fill a hole just below it, where our trash is buried.

I ran home to get my camera and the kids were out at Lakeside Middle School. They were in groups sitting on all the lawns and they were receiving a lesson from their teachers and from Irvine Police Officers about being nice to others. They should use kind words. They should keep their hands and their bodies to themselves. There was music playing all over the school, to make it a kind of energetic event, and the music was the pop music about being in love.

A boy on the sidewalk said hello as I was walking back to the bridge with my camera and I pointed to the smoke in the sky.

When did that happen? He said.

It is happening now.

I took pictures of the cloud ballooning over the field and I took pictures from the bridge. The cloud was ringing as a bell. It was singing and dancing as the sun.

*

Dear Moonsberry,

Your name need not be on the wall; everyone knows the bank is yours.

*

Dear Joseph,

The duprass is empty.

*

Dear Wendie,

The lion is father to the son.

*

Dear Rabbit,

Run.

Zzyzx

When you turn four, Preston, you will be as old as the sun and the earth and as old as Heaven. In the kitchen, I am lying on a rug next to the sliding glass door.  I am holding a rabbit against my chest and one arm is behind my head. The words inside are a voice. You spoke of this one thing that is freedom.

Preston, when you turn four, you will see a sphere rising from the front courtyard, as you are awake in the room which was your father’s, and first was mine, where my sister too slept in her crib. The sphere will rise with its light in every direction. The ferns which were once animal tails will each one come into its shadow, and the palm frond will become a mouth. The angel will be the whale’s middle. Its belly will go out the front gate. It will open and close the gate quietly. The key is to be thinking of these things at the same time.

What is felt in this room is God’s mother.

So does our material become.

When you are four, there will be a spoon to frost the layers of a cake. The light will begin in the cement and travel up the stucco wall—Bob Peterson’s house—and the bells will become loud. No one can hear them.

Some of the light is violet. Some of it blue. Some of it is yellow. There are no ghosts. 

Look Preston, the cloud is coming down in the form of frost. It is like a sponge. When the moment comes to run, I want you to go as quietly as you can. Run around the lake, get to the fountain at the edge of the west loop, to the bridge which goes across the loop and into the plaza. You used to play there. Go into the little movie theatre. Get to a row in the middle and get down behind the seats, lay on the floor. If you are small enough, pull your knees all the way beneath the seat, go as far down as you can.

You will know when the device is ready.

From the whale’s belly is also a light that is green. To breathe you need only shut your eyes.

The sphere you see in our front yard will make the waves around you stop. The waves will make the living and the dead as one. The sun is rising. The wetlands have burned. The water has burned. The doves which made their nest in the entryway, there did the shore begin its exchange. The family is quiet, and their eyes are clean.

You can see through the courtyard into the family’s home. If you stand very still with your hands empty, there is the feeling of a white blossom opening, and this circumference is without line.

Preston, when you turn four, we are going to go on an airplane, all of us together. You will get to sit in the window seat and the clouds and the sky and even mountains will be beneath you. You will be in the clouds.

Remember those clouds.

Preston, you will find yourself in Mr. MGregor’s garden. He will come at you with a shovel and a spade, he will come at you with the sound and smell of diamonds, he will remind you of a neighbor, but this man will have gone too far inside his house, so that his pain comes out a star field.

Keep the scent of mud in your nose and in your belly. This will make you invisible to the man who cannot read sky. If you become thirsty, think of a time-scale. If you are hungry think of the door.

Remember to look up. You know the way. Remember, everything is a circle.

April 25, 2014

Ellis Island

There was the crab man, above the street where the angel was.

The crab man had been in Harlem once, that is where he made a name for himself. Right now he is not frying any crabs.

It’s the horses, it’s the horses, was all he could think as they went by him. They weren’t real, the horses. That is, their bodies were a hologram, a kind of language, not unlike a girl with one green eye.

Across from the corner where he was standing there was a strip mall nearly emptied. The strip mall was no place for people. It had boldly gathered itself into its center skin, and as soon as it became still it began sinking, as it knew that it would. It quit breathing.

This was when the wheel had just been built. So many men had been killed building the wheel that the bodies became a dam in the river. Each body was an empty reed. Finally a storm washed the men loose.

Things were moving too fast, and no one was surprised when it all quit working only five days after the grand opening ceremony; a clearing had been opened inside every man, and in the enclave of every woman’s voice.

Down the street was Ellis Island, and at night the crab man left his cart beside the east-facing wall of this building. It was a monstrosity this place, a place famous for its lemon custard and its meringue. People always said

The meringue is better than anything.

And, the pie is so nice.

It reminded the man who made the meringue and the custard and the pie, it reminded him of his mother just before she gave birth to a girl, his sister, who was dead at the age of nine.

Sometime soon I will make a mousse, the man often thought.

[[[[This was 10,000 years after the spirit had come to Earth.  ]]] ]     ]

It was unclear what mousse actually was. After all this time, the proof was in the pudding. The mystery was in the mousse.

At the age of seven, his sister had carved a magic stick. It was held like a bow, with little rivulets on each end. She called these the rings of other planets.

I’ll make a river here, where there was one before.

How are you sure there was one here before?  

You remember anything if you ask for it. She put her wand on the ground and began rolling it in the dirt.

The thing is unlocking little strings, and letting them go into music.

Her brother remembered when she was an infant and he sang to her about the ocean. He told her their father was a Beluga, that he was white white, and he was in the moon so when she looked at the moon she looked at him. He had been on Earth once, their father. He stayed in a neighborhood with strings of little white lights and streetlamps that were the small, beautiful kind, and people spoke quietly there. People spoke quietly.

He said they should call each other God so that is what they did.

Dear God,

I am getting the sun inside. It comes through my head and I feel it making its way in all four places. I fill the sky by listening.

Dear God,

My body is mountain and fire. In the space around, I see white birds. 

His sister had known about animals. She remembered everything, his sister. She remembered 10,000 years.

At this moment, the man was taking lemons off his tree. He twists them off one at a time and sets them in a yellow bucket. Making custard for Ellis Island. It is the best custard in the world, that is what people say. Everyone says it. Everyone who eats it says this.

Suddenly the man began shaking. He held on to the tree and the tree also shook. It was not as a child who eats a lemon shakes from the inside. This shaking was something that took hold of him. The man saw the ocean. He saw his father in Lake Mead, his sister, and the river opening from Earth.   

They stood there shaking, man and tree. The bucket of lemons was far enough behind so that the man would not spill the fruit onto the atrium floor, into so many waves of light and string.

The sugar was grown in California. It was something like Agave, and it was always deep blue, at times mostly black, and it had the taste of sulfur because of iron. This gave sweet food a kind of glowy taste, it had agency, and a natural leavening. Because the sugar was so blue the lemon custard and meringue looked like a greeny moss. If there had been any mousse it would have been this color too.

The crab man used a little sugar in his crabs. This was his secret—a little sugar, a little lime.

The horses had gone, so he began to fry a few crabs. It was almost mid-day and people would be coming soon for lunch. They would make a little line in front of him, waiting for his good, fried crabs. He would give them the crabs in a cardboard cone, and the sauce in its own tiny bowl.    

Sometimes he also served clams. But not now. Today, just crabs, fried with their shells on, all of them soft enough.

(The crab shells would take the blue sugar very quietly, the sun folding the crabs into a kind of heat as it touched the crystals.)

It was not unusual for the crab man to serve his old friend from Ellis Island, and of course he often stopped in for the meringue. They had known one another a long time. They had been on this road for most of their lives, and before they knew each other as men they had been friends as children, growing up on the same street, playing in this street until sunset and even into the dark. There was a pool for children called Lemongrass. The boys made a fort on top of the wooden patio cover at the edge of the pool. A wide tree grew up and over this structure from the other side of the gate, and the boys kept jars of curry and cans of iced tea in these branches. They often watched the children below, sitting in swimsuits and wet towels, pool water falling off the girls’ hair onto the table, even sometimes onto the sandwiches.

One time a kid said something that neither of the boys would forget, and both of the men remembered even now. They remembered even though they did not remember being boys together. They did not really remember the tree fort or the pool; they never left that place.

It was actually these words which opened the river, when Lily moved her stick through the Earth.

Neither man remembered this river. It was this river which filled their bodies. It was this river which came upon the man picking lemons for the Ellis Island custard, now carrying him into the old Colorado basin, a valley where once was water and now are ravens. The man saw the ravens and he cried out for the valley to free him, but the valley was already inside. The man would be there forever. The crab man would not serve him the soft, fried crabs in a piece of rolled cardboard with the special pink sauce to dip in [[he loved that sauce]]. And now no one would eat the meringue. From now on, they would be served lemon mousse.

They would say, this mousse is better than anything. You know that is what people would say.

The Air Field

To be rooted and unrooted as a tidepool, to spread into the world.

Dear God,

Desert Inn is opening a hole into you. A bird is hollering from a man’s shoulder, as the man is making his way around the earth. The bird sounds like a white macaw. Across the pool, it is a black cat on the wall, ascending the stairs to your apartment and lying around on your bed and beneath your desk, a big fly coming in through the window, the sun rising.

Everyone is going someplace. The sound the bird makes is a whisper, a string of green lights into the heart as true love.

Remember the olive tree which sang these songs, dressed as a noble savage wreath. Remember the blades of grass reflected the moon and those lights, another cat inside crying, slapping its tail.

Dear God,

The horses seem to have switched in advance of the switchboard—the ground is not what you thought!

Dear God,

We see that you have ruined your streets and made your people sick and fearful. You have grown lonesome, and now nearness has come for you at last. See you, all the foundations of the earth. See, you are moving.

It seems to be expanding. It seems to be expressing
its true nature.

Look at that, someone said, the whole is becoming wide. The ground is opening like a bowl. Into the bowl goes the rubber tree, and the air, the high leaves, the yellow ball.

In goes the world’s largest mineral store. God has become so dense, and he is sitting up in the back room. [[the largest crystal sphere taken down out of the truck]]

Dear God,

First put the stone on your head. Open your hands and face, palms up. Now move the light around

around

around

Do you feel it through the air? The world in your hands.

Dear God,

In the darkness I feel the voices you sent through grass when the moon was the light reflected beneath the olive tree. I am in the white shell.

Dear God,

The white shell goes all the way to Ellis Island, and once you get there the island will have become a woman’s breast; there will the oceans give way to a forest, and there will words give way to sound and finally voice, and will the pain become a blanket, will it become an hourglass pulling, its sand become crystal, its mind become crystal, the web getting its rocks off with the windows shut, the frontier exploding.

Above the children’s table, so many jars of curry. The children were dead leaves blowing across the cement. No running! The boys would shout at them, No running in the pool! But the children were dead leaves and all they could do was run. And when they finally ended up in the pool they would float for a while and then they would sink down to the bottom, becoming the sound of the gate spread around like an electric fence.

The operators watched the hole grow open for one hour, and then it became them. It took their eyes and their batons and used them to open itself faster, so that everything around went inside. In went the dead animals, their tender pink sores. Their eyes became the opening also, their blood and skin became the wind rushing all around.

We’re losing the animals, someone said.

In went the black cat, and the stones stacked outside the fence.

Poetry became the opening with the rest of them. It became the feeling in your hands when the stone is on your head and your hands are a bowl. An echo around the rim.

The field was a long wild mole hill. There were palm trees of various sizes and there was one tree that was a fruit called Manhattan fruit, an ornamental. There was its shadow and the grooves running outward from its trunk.

Beneath the tree there is Lily, since she died at the age of nine.

A man and a woman are eating at a table. There is a television on the wall of the restaurant with images of mountains and clouds and valleys, and the man is berating the woman for using fork and knife to eat her chicken wings, didn’t she know how to eat those damned wings!

The woman was fat and frowned.

The man said he wanted to watch something other than the mountains and valleys, anything else but that.

Everyone in the restaurant was enduring an enormous pain.

Outside, the crab man thought he saw an animal, like a beaver or a huge raccoon, but he didn’t see any tail and it seemed to be running upwards on its hind feet. It reminded him of a sloth and an anteater and a wild hog. The animal was running from beneath Manhattan, and it ran across Paradise interstate and disappeared behind the row of restaurants, but to the crab man it looked like the animal ran into the window of the saloon, and he saw it run across the tables, which were empty except for the one where the man and the woman were beginning to act sick, and the animal vanished into the far wall. The man and the woman were hot inside. Their noodles were in the bowl. If anyone prayed, a storm would pull the man out of stratosphere. A black crow drifted across the sky.

It’s the ravens, it’s the ravens.

The fire and the rose.