Soon after arrival...

1

Soon after arrival, I forget the reason for arrival. Only a certain dehydration. From saturation—rooms wet with laundry and sodden expressions, the expended regard for what we once were. We were full of it, up to our necks in spoiled baggage, scattered as if a tornado had struck: books split at the spine; photographs fisted, then flung; words shot like singing knives through the dark. Truly, it was a kind of a beginning. Though we didn’t see then. The trees. Flaring outside our windows.

2

A train slices cross-country, north to south on an eastward slant. For days, the moon kept pace as dry pastures slid past my window. As if I sat cool on the tracks while a desert diorama scrolled by. From deep shadow to blush to full blown illumination. My body shifts orientation, mind unravels like a kite. There is so much additional sky; I don’t want to turn back. Backwards. To embrace apparitions.

3

I leave the station, a thoughtless motivation in the feet, yet who thinks of the feet? Except as shoes about to step onto thorny ground. Or miles later to massage, fingertips pressing the dull ache of ball, arch, heel. My shadow drags behind me, a gray dress that shifts in the sun, expands and contracts with the hours, gathers completely under my feet—a noon disappearance.

4

It began with a vision. Something geographic, borrowed from slick magazine pages. A generic desert bristling with cacti under a hard seamless sky, myself, tapping the ground for water, turning over rocks for signs of life. But find, when I get there: another desert, another life. Where I sought dryness, it swelled with rivers, flooded arroyos, washed-out roads. Where I expected barrenness, it swarmed with colonies of weed, sage, piñon pine. And people, each with a name and a reason for being. Names and reasons that slide and merge in my memory.

5

I want to remember everything: each face, each place, each step. I want it recorded, labeled, stored, under categories of light, temperature, underground tremors. Before the mind effaces what it knows. Before I efface. Rub out. What words remain

6

To speak of past as present. To say, I walk when I have already arrived. When all is but a retelling, an intense reliving. Indicates to you that I am alive and lucid in my remembering. And that, finally, nothing is decided, for to remember is also to question. What really happened. And when I left, why the desert in the first place.

7

I walk without maps, without intermediaries. Disobey arrows and lines. Unguided except by chance—what to do with chance? The unexpected convergence of events. Then direction. A finger points to a name on a page filled with equally possible destinations. The choice, almost arbitrary, a simple matter of a coin-toss, a child’s game of scissors paper stone. What decides my fate: a ruptured compass. A decision to travel north that rests on the pitch and timbre of a voice.

8

No one gave warning. About storms. Waylaid among rows of infant lettuce and squash, I run from sudden charges of lightning. The whip of rain. Hail the size of fists. Inside, the roof pops and puckers like paper. I boil water. Steep tea. Read words that are picked clean of excess, like bones. I gnaw them thoughtfully. Proverbs from the 4th century. Christians in the thousands flee the cities, resettle in trackless arid regions of Egypt, Persia, Palestine, Arabia. Each a solitary tree. Weaving reed baskets. Seeking salvation in a God not given, but found. Outside the window, the density of night gathers.

Excerpted from Radiant Field, a chapbook published by Tinfish Press, 2004. Purchase a copy at SPD Books or Tinfish Press.