Coyote Crossing

[This piece was published in 2008 at Qarrtsiluni. I figured it was time it came over here to live, but do go there if you’d like to hear me read it — or if you like fine artistry by many other people.]

Thin clouds blow in from the ocean to the west. The desert air bears a tang of distant rain. Dark clouds swirl from the sea to the south. Sage and datura strain thirsty leaves toward the sky.

Soon the rain will come, will slick these canyon walls with wet, quench the lichen and the moss. The rock will darken. Fifteen thousand years of rain and the rocks turn black as blood.

You grasp a rock chisel, your callused hands hard as hooves. Place the chisel against the rock. Strike it with the hammer. A fleck of desert varnish falls away, pale granite underneath.

Sweat beads your forehead. It runs into your eyes. Below you and miles away is the river, blue and tempting in this heat, but you are not fooled.

When you dreamed of the beginning of all things, your mother knew it. Your father argued. “That doesn’t happen anymore,” he said.
“She has the headaches.”
“It wasn’t that kind of dream.”
“It has to be. She has to be. Look what’s become of us.”
When the dream came again your father understood. He cut off your hair. He bought you boy’s clothes.

Clouds blow in from the west, from the south. A deep bass whisper comes from across the river. Dry lightning strikes the far mountains. You watch smoke curl from a distant peak. The remembered taste of tobacco smoke flits across your tongue.

The desert burns piece by piece. The others brought strange grasses with them, weeds that spread as quickly as the very fires they fed, and what had once been clean bare soil between the creosote bushes now lies choked with fuel. One spark eats an entire mountain. Flame piles on flame, smoke on smoke, and nothing escapes. The desert dies. Centuries-old piñons die, and junipers. Each fire roasts jackrabbits alive, and coyotes. All that remains is ash and char. You try to chase the image from your mind.

There comes above you a scrabbling of claw on rock: spiny lizards contend for territory, doing pushups. The vanquished one dives for cover in a crack, disappears into the other world.

How many times have you died of fire? How many times has the smoke filled you, brought the haloes, the headache, how many times have you died and gone to him? He met you there the first time, the man with the spiral horns, he came to you and he folded himself into you and you became him, and you flew out over the desert and fell wet onto its greedy soil. It all made sense then. Who better to bring rain than a man who bleeds? The others were like the river below: stopped up, plugged up, unable to come up out of their concrete tombs. How many times have you come back from death, puking, longing for the permanence of the deaths the others die? Girl become man, become ram, become rain: how many trips through that crack in the rock, split hooves clinging to the thinnest flake?

Too many such deaths to remember, and after each one another bighorn carved into the rock.

Too many such deaths to remember, and after this one there will be just one more to come.

You try to chase the image from your mind. You were not there but you see it plain. The desert dies. A wall of flame, a cliff of flame, and it blocked the canyon mouth. There was no escape. There was nothing to be done. All bones; all bones. All char and ash. The sky turned black as blood.

Still, she was lucky: she only had to die that once.

Hammer hits chisel, and again. You free another fleck of rock. The new bighorn takes shape, forefeet raised, standing like a man. Another hour, perhaps two, and then all will be finished. Sweat beads your forehead, falls upon the soil.

Soon the rain will come, will quench the fires. The river will swell, will burst. The dams upstream will pop out one by one, teeth on a zipper. The sky will darken. Loud cataracts in every canyon will scour the desert clean; will sweep away the fetid river cities as dead, dried leaves on a sudden wind. Cattails and tules will sprout where once the jet skis fumed. You feel a raindrop, fat and cold, hitting your shoulder. Then comes another. Your children will plant beans on the graves of old casinos, soil marled with the ashes of those you loved.

You grasp the chisel, your callused hands hard as hooves. Fifteen thousand years and these rocks themselves will dance. Place the chisel against the rock. Strike it with the hammer. Distant thunder comes from across the river. A fleck of desert varnish falls away, pale granite underneath.

• Comments (0)

In a well-thought-out, provocative (as opposed to incendiary) 2006 essay on the perils of online collectivist thought, Jaron Lanier offers the following near-parenthetical tidbit:

The question of new business models for content creators on the Internet is a profound and difficult topic in itself, but it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.

The whole thing is well worth the read. If you do read the whole thing, his bio at the end becomes utterly hilarious.

• Comments (3)

Three years ago today I said goodbye to the best friend I’ve ever had.

A week or so later, around what would have been his 16th birthday, I wrote what I’ve pasted below.

It appears as the final piece of my book Walking With Zeke.

What blithe naivete in this piece, a silly attempt it holds to tell what lay ahead after the grief might ebb. It has ebbed as much as it likely ever will. I am something akin to happy these days, and yet nothing in my life is what it was, except for me, and that “me” changed utterly.

Love dissolves

February here is a time of reminders, of bright creased-red flowers swelling from dank wood, green renewed and moist, succulent. Downhill is a patch of Narcissus and he always stepped on them. Each year I would forget and lose myself in thought and then look up to see him trampling down the bright green stems, the leash still slack between us. My neighbors are patient people, and never complained though I saw it in their eyes. Their patience has been rewarded. The Narcissus are blooming this week, grown tall and unbent.

There is one patch of soil ungreened on the entire hill, a rectangle of upturned earth three feet by four. We went to the nursery a week after he died, bought blue flowers to plant over him. In our yard in Richmond he loved the Scilla: he would loll about for hours among the Delft-blue blooms, a wide patch of them two feet high until he rolled on them. I always meant to grab the camera. The nursery had no Scilla, but it is far too late for planting Scilla. We bought forget-me-nots.

I have been remembering a day eleven years ago, a mile down the road from my father’s house in New York, when we walked down Buffalo Creek in search of fossils. The creek was broad and nowhere more than a foot deep, sun-warmed July water slick with ropes of algae. We found a slab of shale, oddly intact and harder than its surrounding rock, with crinoids and brachiopods, horn corals in it, and I lugged it back a quarter mile to the truck. Craig and Allison were there with Becky, Zeke and me; we waded back upstream and then Zeke trapped himself on a little island, paced back and forth along the shore as we climbed the bank on the far side. He cried, grew a little frantic. It was only fifteen feet or so across, and no more than a few inches deep, a riffle really over shallow stones, and I called encouragement to him from atop the old abandoned bridge on which we’d parked. He didn’t listen. Before I could go back down to help him cross he’d run the other way across five times as much water, and up the far bank to reach the bridge from the other side. He flew up to us smiling. A cloudburst off Lake Erie hit and drenched us all before we could get in the truck.

The sun shone the day after he died, and we dragged ourselves out in it. South of us is the Heart Place, a ridge cloaked in pines, a reservoir atop it, and both of us went there alone with Zeke. Becky took him there when I was callous, and he’d drowse in the thick pine needles as she wept. I took him there when she was gone. We sat there together the day after he died, the trail up to the ridgetop a teary blur, our howls thrown at the unfair world below us.

It rained the whole next week.

Rain a bit on our dry soil and the soil comes up alive and green. Plums blossom all at once in February on the Pacific Coast, the quince and currants with them. There is a pink currant in our garden, and a yellow one, and both show color now. The creek is up. Mallards delve beneath submerged grass stems. I have been to the creek at least twice a day since we buried him, and I have not seen the egret flying once. Instead, he stalks the creek on foot.

I stalk the creek on foot. I run down to the bay and along the shore, race the trains rolling slow past the crew resetting sidetrack ties. Each morning I leave, walk stupidly to the closet door for the leash until I remember, go downhill beset by ghosts. At this corner I lifted him over the curb his last few weeks, when his feet were too unsure to land safely without help on the slanted pavement below. My right arm around his waist, my left hand under his breastbone I would lift him over, and steady him for a moment when his feet touched asphalt. At that long patch of ivy under oaks he would stop, smell the leaves that overhung the curb. His last visit to the park we lingered beneath that plane tree. He was stretched out on the lawn and I sat leaning up against the trunk, telling myself I would bring a book next time. On the way back up the hill he would stop again at that patch of ivy, look imploringly at me until I hoisted him, and he would lean against my shoulder for the next two steep blocks.

I turn the key in the lock and I hear him jump up to greet me and he is not there. I walk into his room and from the corner of my eye I see him lift his head from his bed to look at me through clouded eyes and he is not there. Until a week ago the sparrows foraged between his feet, trusting and unafraid. They pick over seeds and ants on the upturned soil now, and an Anna’s hummingbird browses the rosemary flowers next to him, its red head patch now dull, now brilliant through the breath-fogged window.

The plums will bloom, and then the cherries, and then the Bradford pears. When the crape myrtle blooms this summer we will travel, we tell ourselves. We will hike together unburdened by our love for him. The oaks will flower, and the grasses. The hills will brown. The wind will shift from the east. In October, or not long after, I will look up and notice rain. I will remember congratulating him, by that patch of ivy, for making it to one more season of rain, and not long after the plums will bloom again. The memory will fade and soften. I will forget him an atom at a time.

That day in New York I breathed hard putting the slab of Devonian shale in the cab of the truck, in the hollow behind the driver’s seat, and laid his blanket over it. He would sleep on it as we drove west the next two weeks, step around it for eleven years after that. He grinned in the downpour as Becky loaded him in the truck bed, climbed in after him with our niece. He was always so afraid we’d go on without him. The slab is twenty feet from him now, a jumble of Devonian crinoid stems and modern California dust. We found brachiopods that day, hard dull gems of the detail of life preserved. They shaped the rock around them. Years of proximity welded sediment into rock, a perfect imprint of the animal, and then the animal dissolved away into the world and left a void in its exact shape. The fossils we held were that void filled, a bit of dust at a time and pressed into the creases, a representation of the lost one finely detailed but still without life.

There will be years and years, each small forgetting a betrayal, each small betrayal a comfort, each small comfort another death. There is no lesson here, no lesson. Narcissus sought himself reflected in the world and found only death. Plums will bloom until there are no more plums. I will join him diffused into the soil, our component atoms intermingled one day soon, a dog and a man who walked together for a time, a brief spark of sweetness in an aching world.

• Comments (13)

There’s a long thread over at Dana’s joint entitled “Why Poetry is Bullshit.” It’s a list comprising more than a hundred reasons why, all submitted by Dana’s commenters most of whom, I am guessing, are either poets or aficionados of same. It’s wry and depressing and funny, in a despairing sort of way.

I posted a comment over there that I’ve decided to post here, with one minor word choice adjustment.

I’ve been appreciating tetrameter these days. There’s something light and simple about it, straightforward. Maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking about Philip Larkin, who often used the meter to good effect, most notably in his greatest hit.

Anyway.

Poetry is bullshit, ’cause
it takes the language as it was
and crumples it, all fold and dent
to hide just what the poet meant.
Poetry is bullshit, since
the other poets groan and wince
and say the work is twee, like elves;
and wish they’d written it themselves.
Poetry is bullshit, for
all poets really know the score
and criticize with rueful smirk,
condemned to read each others’ work.

• Comments (6)

My post Why Joshua trees are shaped the way they are has been included in the Scientia Pro Publica (Science for The People) Carnival #20, this iteration of said carnival being hosted over at Kind of Curious. The carnival includes posts on topics ranging from the inspirations of amateur astronomy to prairie dogs of the Chihuahuan Desert to dyslexia to civility in online science discussions. Great stuff: Check it out.

• Comments (0)

Thanks to that quick post I dashed off a couple weeks ago, this site has been getting a lot of new readers. With new readers comes new comments. We like this.

However, a few of these commenters have left comments whose apparent purpose is not to engage in conversation but to troll. I just deleted one in the coyote-hunting tournament thread that extolled the “fun” of killing coyotes, for instance.

The vast majority of those of you who’d like to take part in the discussion here don’t need to hear that kind of stuff. In fact, the vast majority of you don’t need to read what’s in the next couple of paragraphs.

This blog isn’t a “safe space.” Nothing interests me less than running a “safe space” here. But I delete hate speech without prejudice or warning or apology. Trolls will not be fed here. “Hate speech” is construed here to include paranoia about worldwide jihad, speculations as to the True African Agenda of elected officials, or extolling the joy of murdering top predators in order to work out your own personal psychopathy.

What we do like here is intelligent discussion in which the commenters presume one another’s basic humanity. Disagreement is a wonderful thing: it helps all of us refine what we think.

I am a leftist and radical environmentalist. I don’t hide this. I’m older than most people on the Internet — hell, I’m older than the Internet — and my convictions in this regard have only gotten stronger the longer I live in the world. It’s unlikely you’re going to persuade me that our species’ own convenience or wealth-garnering or desire for “fun” outweigh the rights of other species to exist. It’s even more unlikely you’ll do so by leaving a comment on a blog.

But I’m glad to talk to anyone who’s willing to talk to me, and more importantly to the other commenters here, as a human being worthy of courtesy and respect.

If you need more explanation for some reason, check out this old post on my previous blog.

• Comments (16)

I should know better than to compose posts in a browser window: Safari just crashed and took with it about 20 minutes worth of writing on Obama’s miserable-from-an-environmentalist-POV State of The Union address on Wednesday.

Fortunately, Rana has said essentially what I wanted to, and much more economically. She quotes the atrocious moment in the address where Obama calls for more nuclear, more coal, more offshore drilling, and says:

People like to talk about Obama as a visionary, as someone who wants to change the way we do things in this country.  I point them to this.

This is not visionary.  This is not change.  This is more of the unsustainable growth-at-any-cost nonsense that caused the very problems he alludes to when he mentions the climate bill.

Read the whole thing.

• Comments (6)