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.