Cat

Imagine thirteen oceans. Each with its own rhythm, low and telling. Thirteen waves breaking, sucking in, rumbling out.

This is listening to them eat. They are having at the white and gilded mess of hay.

Noon in late December. You are in California; wordless, cloudless, green.

You have taken off your shirt. No one around for miles. When you were young your mother could find you by following trails of discarded clothes. You at the end of it, naked, inspecting something, or just standing in sunlight. You liked to hold still-warm eggs to your cheeks.

Hooves angling forward under impossibly thin spindly, knock-kneed and pigeony legs. Their breaths, at least, are horse-like. You think. People want you to compare the zebras to horses. You only ever rode a horse once; a pony, actually. At your friend Jenny's riding lesson in first grade. Bumpy, you thought, annoyed by the unfamiliar riding helmet. The saddle, too, was weird.

Sloping backs, round bellies, and legs whose stripes get so close and thin they look like snake's midsection.

No blossoms could be in bloom yet, aside from mother's poinsettia and Christmas cactus. And you are nowhere near those, you are at the pasture. Hay and grain have already been eaten. So why the sweet smell?

Their own windstorms, too, their own cries.

Ruthie

The hay is losing bits of itself to the ground. My dog Dugan, his long fur stuck with all manner of burrs, carries a squirrel in his mouth. He brings it to the door and sets it down in front of him, watching in that concerned-looking retriever way, and I see its little body heaving with tiny silent gasps, its eyes shut and fur tousled, wet with slobber. I want to kick Dugan but I don't. Still the little tired body of the squirrel pants, a blue jay hops along, a great vulture's wings darkly low to the ground near the cottonwoods. I want the squirrel out of its misery but think of Father once describing a king snake and a rattler in the embrace of death, a four-hour struggle. Who's to say the squirrel isn't beyond pain now? If spring grasses aren't flashing in its minute brain? The pump starts to hum. I can't do the killing myself. To get close, to carry it to and fro and watch its labored breathing, having ensured its incapacity to escape? Just finish the job. A yellowish chicken barrels past the barn, its wings back, its head and neck leaning forward. I laugh, see the other dog in hot pursuit and yell sternly to her to stop and she does. The weak squirrel noses the pavement, its small legs splayed, its belly sinking into the blocks. In Father's collection there's an old movie about a scientist who saves the head of his wife after a fatal crash and revives it in his laboratory. He leaves and her eyes flutter open, her head connected to all manner of tubes, she moans Let me die Let me die. My dog lays his head over the squirrel, jowls draping down over its body. He catches one every day

Katydid

A few years ago on the ranch I visited Ruthie in the tool shed Father converted for her into a bedroom. She was ten when she "moved out," ostensibly because she could not sleep with grandma Trudy coughing across the hall. Our parents would not have indulged me in this way. I listened to the shuck, shuck, shuck of Ruthie cutting her apple and paid careful attention to her poster of Johnny Depp, who looked like our father and like the man who had just left me because I drank too much. I wore my favorite long-sleeved sweater, the one Ruthie wrote negative things about in her 8th grade journal.

Ruthie calmly surgeried her apple and left my half untouched. My cutting has always been clumsy. Ruthie slid over a glass of water. My nightmares: a long snake, brown and thick, this burgundy-shaded one of a maze guarded by Tom, family friend, a man who shot himself for fear of growing old. "If we can't cobble together a likeness out of anything but the past, let's join at least in that," I said to Ruthie. "The companionship of memory can too easily be anything but comfort." Ruthie bowed her head. I drained the bottle. I knew that hope can be as sharp as our teeth. The universe is very, very, old, and she doesn't muck up. I decided we felt it in the sprouting of our wings, the continual upsurge of them. Ruthie's fan cleaved air, slowly. My life would be long. There would be orange trees.

Nate

Ruthie lasted one semester at Oberlin. I picked her up at LAX.

"I wish it could stay like this," she said later in Montecito at sunset. "You and I get along better off the ranch. I lose my best self while I'm there."

"By degrees? Or all at once?" I asked.

"You're so technical."

"I'm interested. And I don't know why you're not going back to school if the ranch is so bad for you."

"It's not that simple." She was looking watery-eyed at the ocean. They were always sleeping with her in earnest, then getting frightened and calling it off. She was broken-hearted every time. I squeezed her hand. She said, "I know the specific moment my best self starts chipping off. The baggage claim. You're going home, and so baggage comes up for everyone? Everyone who's going home for the holidays has baggage, right? Everyone in the family has all this emotional baggage and also just baggage. And you go, and you claim it--"

"--and you say, 'uh, yeah—all that huge unwieldy baggage? That huge burden? That's mine."

"And then you get to schlep it to your childhood home."

"Where everyone in your family has brought their baggage. Good call, Ruthie."

When we got home I went for a walk. Father was napping with a headache. The goats were screaming. On my walk the sycamores leaves were orange. I stood still a lot. I picked up the head of a blossom that looked like a shriveled, mini-sunflower dried to gray. It looked made of visible sharpness.

I milked the goats. My sisters never learned how. Mother's fondness for goats started with mine. I was in 4-H the year I would have gone into 6^th grade. My best friend Ben and I home-schooled that year and built stanchions for goat milking. Savannah, the pale baby I picked out, is now the matriarch of a family of seven goats, and permanently bulbous from birthing so many kids. Mother kept it going because she likes milking and making cheese. She leaves it to hang in a cheesecloth to strain while she knits and watches football, upsetting balls of yarn out of her lap when there's a good play.

Ruthie, the family's designated Christmas Elf, was trimming the tree and watching one of Father's old movies when I got in from milking. She pestered me to hang just one so I lifted a cardboard square covered with glitter out of the box. I fitted the sharp wire of the ornament around one of the tiny branches of the Christmas tree, pine sap on my fingers. It was all there. Pomegranate tree, roses, tangerine tree. Smell of the tool room.

Ruthie

This is how I remember it: my mother lives in a tower room with a roommate with long brown hair who first greeted her by tipping her face around a doorway and saying, tentatively, "Cat?" My mother, formerly Catherine, changes her name when she turns eighteen (as her eldest daughter Kaitlin will do), the same year she dresses in heels and a matching suit for her first airplane ride without any traveling companion. The suit is pink, maybe. Pearls, maybe. Her father tells her as she leans in the doorway in her twin set not to pay much attention to her mother's assertion that she'll go to college nowhere east of the Mississippi. "We'll see where you get in first," he says mildly, and my mother will say later that her dumpy guidance counselor was right when, upon hearing of the acceptance letter from Amherst, she said "You may be smart, girl, but you don't work." Indeed beyond the turrets and brick, the giggling friends, it is a worldly-seeming sophomore boy from upstate New York who teaches my mother to underline her books. "I can't write in them," she protests. "But they're yours, you bought them," he argues. He first dates the small long-haired roommate, who reports that he calls bumps in the road "oopsy-daisies" when he goes up and over them on his motorcycle, so my mother knows just what to say at the first crest on her first ride and Sandy thinks it's a wonderful coincidence. This, of course, before her parents make my mother stay away from Amherst until Sandy graduates because he is a Jew, decades before my mother marries one: James, her fourth husband, our father. This before Sandy becomes a top banker in Boston, before my mother settles into an unassuming life of teaching schoolchildren and keeping goats and zebras and raising Katydid and Nate and me. I remember it--my mother at fourteen years old, the most stunning girl in the choir.

Cat

All day I have been noticing the beauty of children: a dimpled finger, bright eyes playing peek-a-boo. My daughters think I do not understand broken hearts. "I miss you," I wrote once to Sandy, "with the furor of ten rose storms." That summer I spent crouching in the shadows of the dock-house on an island in Maine. This summer the raspberries fall without me. Over here the air is stale with wildfire. I miss the peppermint tea, the stairs chipping paint, the curtain blowing chastely over the rocking chair at the end of the hall.

After my AA meeting I drove to town to walk on concrete a while. I passed a girl but we did not even see one another. A great tree was between us and stood in the spot where we would have passed each other. We edged around a bull's eye on broken brick. We did not pass each other. We each passed the tree. Headlights passed, I pulled my jacket close, clouds quilted together even in evening. I felt not grief but a sadness I could not place, a dusting on many things evenly, evening out into not a place. I was remembering, you see, how tender wrists can be. Now sidewalk, now a drug store. My suspicion is that experience divorces from philosophy in a way that has us losing gifts once we realize we have them. My suspicion is that we live inside memories, inside the cocoons of our future minds. The street I walked on tonight is now nestled in the cotton of my brain. Cotton stained red of leaves. I never thought I would hunger for concrete. It's part of why I did not end up with Sandy; he wanted the city and I didn't. Plus, by then I wanted a drink. I am tired of dust. The basins of our brains hold neighborhoods, the sounds of planes.

Katydid

I have been told I am vibrant. My quilt is supposedly proof, my colorful closet. My mother chose red as a color of me because of its energy. I always thought yellow. I like that she thinks red.

My earliest yellow: my father is buying me a dress. We have gone somewhere with the family but escaped, the two of us, to a different store, one with a yellow dress. The yellow dress has light-catching butterflies on it. What is it for? A wedding? I remember not my father but his hands, big. I remember not the store clerk but her voice, cooing. As I remember it—and by this I do not mean the way I remember it, I mean as I go through the action of remembering—the yellow dress is now overtaken by that white late-afternoon light, fading into it and the light covers us all, covers even my father's hands and the voice. Memories seem to come to some people out of darkness. But the backdrop to my brain, or heart, or whichever organ does the remembering, is white, and it is the white into which images recede, the white out of which they appear.

Nate

The zebra herd stayed a steady thirteen for years, one dying off, another born in the spring, and we'd watch the baby until it urinated to determine its gender: forward, a boy; backward, a girl. The baby's stripes are brown and fuzzy. The smooth-looking black stripes sink in when they're older. Few people know this. Few people know that zebras cannot be ridden. They're the only untamable members of the horse family. The black sheep of the horse family, was the way Katydid put it. Their low-slunk spines, spindly legs, and rotund middles make them the most physiologically un-predisposed creatures to bear cargo this side of Chihuahuas.

It started as a tax write-off. When Father was still making money editing movies he bought the ranch as an investment. California's Department of Agriculture taxes you to high heaven if you live on land zoned agricultural, which the ranch is, without doing something with the property. There wasn't enough flat land for vegetables and not enough capital for grapes, so Mother and Father went to a meeting on the exotic animal option advertised in the Wall Street Journal by a woman in Buellton who kept wildcats. There was an antelope broker there from the Catskills.

Father and Mother were fairly sure they went on a double date in high school, but they weren't each other's dates. When they met again, mother had married three times, given birth to Katydid, joined AA, and become an alcohol counselor in Blue Hill, Maine. Father had done a truckload of cocaine, edited some offbeat films, and participated in the orgies that swinging 70s couples had rendered almost passé. They re-met In October. Mother moved west in February, already pregnant with me. They married in June under one of the oaks on the ranch, which didn't even have a road yet. Their first time sleeping on the ranch they zipped the door to the tent right up in case of bears. They were worried about the wrong thing. It's rattlers they should have been worried about.

Few people know of anything that went on up there. That Christmas day Mother tried including in her cheese the seeds of one of the pomegranates fresh off the tree. It was a far stretch from the garlic she grew in her garden, but at least she hadn't thought to try and use the tangerines, ripe then on the small tree planted next to the circle of rocks that used to surround a small above-ground pool and that now guard only the circular patch of earth that supported it. It was eighty degrees that day. We sampled the new cheese in the dining room. A picture Ruthie drew hung next to the living room table covering a hole Father punched there during one of his fits of rage.

Ruthie

Mother and Father and I sat together at the after-party for the Cold Mountain screening. We talked about the movie, but Father heard badly by that point so I had to shout all of my ideas, which are always a few sentences long. He gave up and went for wine, having taken pills before and after the movie.

Woke up early the next morning, thought, Damn it, I'm going to climb into bed with Mother like I used to. They haven't slept in the same room for years. The wind was blowing, the sun wasn't up but the sky was pink and dark clouds skated across it: the ranch at dawn, the ranch at dusk. I climbed into bed with my mother and cried so she couldn't tell.

After watching a movie, whenever I look at myself in the mirror, lights off and gray light against me, staring and letting it be what it will: it turns to a demon's face and I hurriedly turn on all the lights, breathing or not breathing, wondering how many kinds of pills in all. The vial he kept in his left pocket was rainbowed with them.

Cat

Imaginine a world where all snowflakes are identical, flutters and ripples of sleep lanced by fact. The kitchen needs sweeping. It's dark and quiet. I tell myself. You've been sober for more days in a row than you have held any one person close in your dreaming brain. Your loneliness is the most constant companion you've had. It knows your silhouette and the yellow lamplight creating it on the wall. It knows every secret thought. It watched you with your stuffed toys when you were young. In a way, then, it is your protector. Your guardian angel, the one unwavering star. As for the dreariness you fear, that takes over sometimes, try to remember what is so hard to believe when you are in it--that is not the truth, and sadness is chemicals in your brain. You will not stay that way you will awaken from a much needed nap and the afternoon will be swept with mist and there will be no cold, there will be no hard edge to it, and you will be rising into alertness on the drive to school where you won't even need music, you'll just watch the familiar oak trees, the gray sky, the windows of eyeless buildings, the highway.

For book group I am reading In Cold Blood. I had James shoot Mickey, the baby male goat, last year instead of sending him to the butcher. We can never keep the males. And I wanted to know, to be connected to the process. Now I want nothing to do with the process and have no choice. He didn't shoot Mickey in the face so his little face and eyes stayed intact. Blood poured out of his ears and nose. What surprised me was the brightness of the blood. I carved out the meat myself, though doing it that way makes me want to replace the word "meat" with "muscle."

Books, like songs, like any art, head into the world and set any number of things in motion. I am trying to grab onto that lens of the world, the one that zooms out. The maker of a work of art can never theorize about it. Every factor at work is never conscious. I am trying to see the greater design, a pattern made of sand or soil that is somehow, though detachedly, beautiful. I cannot stop physically gripping things. This is what I needed the wine for. I needed the softness of the borders blurring. I still need it.

Katydid

I tell myself it is only because they look alike, my ex and my father, but my daydreams feature one or the other interchangeably. In another dimension I take him by the hand into Pattibakes and we get chocolate cupcakes. I tell him to smell the air, the kind of heat that breathes. The thistles are dry and something in the smell gets me in a way nothing else does. What to do with all this solo driving? This liquid between my legs?

It seems the wise thing, to devote energy to the moment at hand. If I am taking a shower and singing, to not sing and imagine someone else is hearing my voice. To simply bring my mind back to where I concretely am, and then be there, looking at my shower curtain and extra shampoo bottles, smelling the smells, tasting mint when I brush my teeth, redrawing the blueprint. I could be folding laundry and fighting the Big Fight inside my head. Then the future reconfigures itself; its possibilities assume the shape of his face: a quarter moon out my window.

Nate and I slipped out for drinks at the Maverick in Santa Ynez. I gave my number to someone. I did not go home with him. He was a friendly guy, home from law school. Perhaps I should have gone home with him. I liked what I could smell of the inside his mouth when he talked. I got tired after the wine wore off, less excited to go home with him and smear the rhetoric of another person's wet all over my body, which I suppose is growth, since I have not always known that doing so would indeed have been rhetoric. I cannot stop picturing actual human hearts, their weight, the blood. I have seen viscera before, in mice the cats leave on the doorstep and in zebra corpses the vultures got to before Father burned or buried them.

Nate

After Father's funeral we tucked Mother into bed, then drove off in Father's Acura to have drinks in Santa Barbara. Ruthie flounced in her red dress, a dress, I noted to Katydid, that would prove to be the fourth person in our entourage, and I was right. Ruthie needed to relieve herself on the side of a building and so the flouncing became a curtsy became a red carnation opening and I stood in front of her, jacket out, "like a surprised penguin," laughed Katydid. She was swaying by then, and with all that wine in me the night was a benevolent thing. It cradled us as a child does a scuttling crab.

There was an annual oil rig inauguration so everyone was out that night, the businessmen lighting the fire, the trophy wives sitting in the boats watching. Sometimes they threw flowers. Father caught one for Ruthie the last time we were there. If I squinted I could see our ghosts. Once the three of us had put half a Vicodin under each of our tongues, a tradition we began when Ruthie was fourteen on the way to the movie theater in Santa Maria, and countered the bitterness with sweet white wine, I could not remember the flight of the white flower through the night into his hand. I only recognized the surf, the blessed, relentless surf.

Ruthie

We went to buy peaches, my mother and me. Her eyes still got to me, the wisdom she dispensed so wisely to everyone but herself. She was smaller, bent. The day floated along on its own heat. Fading in the evening, manzanita trees, palm trees lined and the surfers looking: layering my own words on top of the hip hop beat when no one is in the car I have Santa Barbara all to myself, the car rumbling under me, the scent of flowers coursing through the car. "When you love, finally, you will know it in your bones. So it will be the loveliest feeling," Katydid says as when we were getting stoned under the oak tree where we buried Father's ashes. "Your existence has always been oddly blessed."? I must be careful, the words I choose to describe something. The baby goats are brown and squirmy. Katydid and I walk behind the barn smoking cigarettes under an enormous moon. "It's the good kind of sore," I remember she said in Costco, one day years ago when Father had stalked off to roar at an employee about photos that turned out badly, "the just-had-sex-after-a-while-of-not kind of sore." The first thing I saw out the window the morning we buried Father's ashes was a zebra with an erection.

Cat

I saw Sandy on a trip my adult choir took to England. He was there with his family. We bought roast nuts on the side of the Thames. We walked and I began to understand that Paul Simon song—I met my old lover on the street last night. It could so easily have been him. And yet I have spent many more hours with Lynn, who teaches next door to me, than with James, all told. Lynn keeps goats as well. She still butchers hers. Sandy spends most of his waking hours in his office.

Most of the sadness of age has been a reunion. The process from innocence to maturity is rediscovery of what has been buried there, but without the pomp and circumstance. It's not realization, it's not epiphany. It's arrival. One hasn't garnered new knowledge, just new images, new aches, which quickly become old ones. You return to knowledge from which you've blinded yourself. It is more a settling in than a shock. In this way I am connected to the moment of my death: with muffled knowing.

Fall bitten air leaves stain the sidewalk, puddles reflecting muddled sky, leaves bright against such cloud. Redness and nip. I see in them spines. These leaves. They are fractured. That the socks in the dryer will be lost, half-pairs. I can hear James's voice: the dreams are not what blind you. The moon is.

Katydid

Riding the bus to the airport I saw a woman at a drugstore leaning her chest on the counter, staring into space. Same with the young man in a butcher shop a block later, shaving meat off a huge cut. Then two people putting a baby in a car. The baby was crying. I thought, the baby gets it. It had not happened to the baby yet, the wax wrap of fatigue over one's features in the face of grief or fear or pain. Blank looks tugging at our jowls.

Absent, he is at this point a mirage conjured by my longing. I think I would be very good at being religious if I could make Jesus the man I imagine watching me. I rearranged my room to try and get the memory off. My bed under the small white window now. Mornings, broad white knives of sunlight pierce into my brain seconds before the dagger of what had happened hits my chest.

I think the Second Coming happens in blinks, continuously. Jesus keeps reappearing but we ignore it. In the gray slime of a baby sliding out of a womb, then in the net of a fisherman, then in a man lighting a cigarette. Jesus is in the trash on the curb, but only briefly, a cluster of fireflies taking specific turns to light up for a wink. Here, then there. Blinks of light in the disastrous design made of grit in which we are caught. A pulsing, gray thing.

Nate

Before flying to California that Christmas I walked blearily through South Station and there were a man and a woman kissing like they had no idea the world around them was trying not to miss the train. The train took me past a yard with a lone boy skipping and kicking dandelions. Nothing in that space when I saw all of those quiet dinghies in the harbor either, lined up like shoes with no mates under a sky growing heavier. I should have known two weeks was too long to spend on the ranch, dreaming of birds taking a string of us by the beak and flying through Mother's garden down into the roots of the oak tree where we buried Father's ashes. Looked out the window. Hold onto this wonder, I told myself, the world beyond the ranch, before the ranch swallows you: dusk, a BMW, balcony, cold air, art galleries.

In college I took those trains all the time. Through a screen of trees one could see the river frosting over, certain spaces of it rippling, alternating with slats milky and frozen in sheets that lay like continents. The soft gray that hills take on when the many trees covering them lost their leaves. I tortured myself with useless thoughts: What if the bridge broke under us? I have to love the flock of black birds raining down from naked branches if I love the white ones, fluffing and shaking their wings atop the ice slats. Some float in geometric pools left open in between the icebergs. The ice crunches and forms in blocks; the white powder is gone and I have always felt a mistrust for the unrelenting forms left behind. Winter is not a time when things are forgiven.

Ruthie

Nana and I sit and look at the sunset. She notices the birds. Her warm, tiny form next to mine. Her soft and knuckled hands. Her white hair lifting slightly from her head. Her low voice and bent shuffle. The things she thinks, the things she notices. The clouds, watching their color turn as sunset progresses. We sat on this deck one Thanksgiving a while back shelling nuts for the stuffing. Nana called them "filberts." I tell her I feel bad about daydreaming and she says, "If it's there it's supposed to be, isn't it?" She says, "What were you like before? I don't remember," and I say, "Younger," and she says, "You're different now. It's interesting, learning to get along as you are now. I enjoy you as you are now, dear. I enjoy and admire you." She says a couple of times that my mother really is a special person, isn't she, for all she has done and is involved in and will do, for all she was and is and will be, for having optimism. For being capable and adaptable. "You're always growing up," she says, "even at my age. You change and yet still are yourself. To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven." I think about sex, and maybe because I am eighteen and feeling wrecked by someone I have had sex with then hurting me, and I look at Nana's little legs in her polyester pants alone now and how they opened for at least two men, but look at the years of moments she has spent alone. We all go it alone. We look at the sunset. I smell her.

Cat

When I was young I thought I saw atoms. Every object I see, and the air, are made of them, they are like refined pixels, like the infinite stitches that turn out to constitute silk. I told a group of grade school friends about this and they pshawed me, no, atoms are too small to see. But the tiny maker-uppers I see aren't small enough for me to register one of. They are simply always there, and I register their presence every time I remember that I am seeing. My vision is not grainy, not because I cannot see them but because the grains are so very fine.

By this I mean an other that can be here, in this room, with my quilt sending its colors all over the lamplight. By this I mean multiple lovers. By this I mean any urge that has surfaced remains so whether the love itself remains. By this I mean what the lover does in the face of a memory so strong that were I the subject of it the muscles in my thighs would tighten regardless of time's passage, regardless of reconciliatory or non or friends now or letters here or new girlfriend there. By this I mean the ghosts that populate even the most colorful of places before even their bodies leave, because the other is ever unreadable, chasm of memory or no. James might lie beside me. I might see through him.

Katydid

Ruthie, going through Father's acres of books, hands me a dusty copy of the Guinness Book of World Records. The book reminds me of a fear I have had on and off since curling in my parents bed under the faux zebra-striped coverlet, baby-powder smell, the usual cricketed and coyoted night outside the dirty and thin white curtains, at eight years old to read it. There is some sort of disorder that has the body disobeying itself, not just the unchecked growth of cells, but of one hand buttoning a shirt and the other unbuttoning it. The case that made the book was of a hand that tried to strangle its owner. I looked in horror at my hand. I looked up. The quiet was cold and the bug-infested light no longer my friend. Who was to say my hand wasn't next? Now that the introduction of the idea, the concept, had made its way into the warm womb of my brain where ideas were nestled, festered, rotted, cycled over: once the introduction of the inability to concentrate had presented itself: it's all over, isn't it? Unaware of the far-reaching and insidious effects of the birth control pill upon some who take it I sat on my pleather couch senior year of high school and watched through a nameless veil of sadness as my body ballooned and my mind would not quit its broken record player. I have looked down at a book and been unable to process the words, and I fear that recurrence. I have come to the belief that problems that do not arise at the surface cannot be treated there. Often told I think to much, I think of moon-silvered fields, I invite grief in for tea, I follow the line of flight, and finger like pearls the difference between intellect the heart and that of the mind.

Nate

Fire across highway 101 from the ranch today. I had forgotten. It's something the body remembers, the nose specifically, not the mind. The smell is something our noses got finely attuned to detecting growing up on the ranch. The whole of Santa Barbara County is a pile of matchsticks. I forgot the heaviness of July. The heat is heavy. The risk is heavy. The fires are many, always, always. Usually, the worst are around my birthday—in fourth grade school had to evacuate because the Moray fire wouldn't quit. We evacuated tables and chairs and schoolbooks. For days we went to school in a local church, ash falling like dirty, straggling snow.

The fire today crackled and the flames licked the ground like fluid. Only a little smell on the wind. People who grew up here can tell before they see the smoke on one end of the horizon or the other. You could hear it from all sides. Started by a cigarette. I had forgotten, too, the sheer ugliness of bright orange against the yellow smoke that billowed hugely like a stomach turned inside out. The fire moved like lightning down south right along the highway, but never across. There were ten minutes there, though, when I sat still with the fact that some decisions are not up to us. Held my own fist. I had forgotten. Along with the smell of drying sage comes occasionally the smell of danger, of immediate cleansing. I said aloud to Ruthie that some part of me thought a fire would make things easier, instead of finding ways to manage the ranch now that Mother was alone. The fire would have swallowed the ranch whole. It moved like a snake. Two hours later, though, it had been contained save for some smoldering oaks up the hillside and an astonishing stretch of black.

Ruthie

Mother plays Shanghai on the computer and I prowl into the bookshelves whose books have stood dusty and untouched for years behind pictures and matchbooks: past the broken bone dog-biscuits in their box and the heavy flashlight in the outgoing mail basket strapped to the lamp are Goethe, Rilke, atlases, Freud, Marx, my parents' various and sundry college texts, dusty and impromptu arrangements of the inquiring mind. Decades.

Next to a book of photos of Sweden there are brown booklets of piano music. The piano hasn't been there since I was very young. The keys always played sour notes. The thorns remain on the rose Mother put next to my bed in a blue vase. The dogs howl outside under a moon so full that as it rose it swelled to orange, true to late November. Simon the scruffy black cat settles on the crossword. I got him for my ninth birthday. Camus, Kafka, Woolf. Where are the hallowed halls? The mind?

Katydid has done everything from shoot warm water up an old guy's ass to get him to shit in the morning to DJ In Santa Barbara and write copyright and perform weddings. The change of activity is beautiful. We agree, Katydid and I, on that at least. Outside the tree whose type I can never remember shuffles its spiky, ball-like pinnings with the wind.

Mother sits at the computer in the other room and I move speakers and chairs to get at Aquinas. She has acquired a book about organizing things. Clutter bothers her. Part of why she made Father keep the piles of old New Yorkers and New York Times in the room he slept in, and the cats, and the cold night air. They didn't talk much but they didn't fight either: cordial and affectionate housemates, old friends.

The zebras stood below the two trees I named the Dancing Trees when I was eleven because they seemed like two goddess-dancers, touching long withering hands, green hair, coarse skin. The moon those days was like a hanging onion, yellow and large, casting some sort of energy like baby powder everywhere over the oaks still and stately in what would be the dark.

Katydid called Mother drunk Thanksgiving night and did not believe it was Mother. "Yes this is your mother." "No you're not. Is this Ruthie?" "No, this is your mother, you were born July 21st 1974 in Blue Hill, Maine. Our secret password has always been Blue Hill." But Mother couldn't convince her and was on the phone with Nate at the time so she ignored the call waiting until she got off the phone with Nate. Meanwhile Katydid had left two messages with me. I called her at 6am. She was sleeping it off and said groggily "Oh yeah I don't know what was up I thought something was wrong with Mother" then went back to sleep.

I had a glass of red and a glass of white Saturday, and then of course wakeful and upset, thinking. The rose was about to drop its bottom-most petal. I wiped the wine off of the pillow with a cold wet sponge. I walked out into the dark by myself and sang weakly wrapped up in my old blue coverlet, the songs to which I had felt sad lately, and like clockwork I froze and stumbled because I thought against all odds, midnight in late November, that there was a snake on the ground when it was only a shadow.

Ruthie it's your sister and its Thanksgiving and I'm a little fucked up and I'm a little worried because I just called home and some fucking person answered and said it was Mother, but it wasn't Mother, and they knew a lot of stuff about Mother, but it wasn't Mother, and I'm just worried and upset, upset because I don't know if everyone's all right up there and everyone is safe and I love you and please call me please please please

Cat

The beauty of a gem depends primarily on its optical properties. Gem durability depends on resistance to cleavage. The physical properties by which gems are distinguished from each other include presence or absence of cleavage. Other distinguishing factors: type of fracture in stones without cleavage; luster; and transparency.

Roeser's doesn't exist anymore. Thrifty replaced it, then Rite Aid. We didn't even boycott it. I don't know when it happened. I'd sit cross-legged on the floor at Roeser's, the bins of semi-precious stones prescribed in a row the same way those delicious candy smorgasbords are set up: silos of sugared orange slices next to caramel in cheerful wrappers, delicious gleam after delicious gleam. And how they felt, the tiger-eye and hematite, especially, smoothed. I remember saving my allowance. I remember my breasts were long in coming. I remember one very special plastic box with compartments for beads of quartz, aquamarine, topaz. I got fishing twine and strung them together.

Rose quartz and I got along well, which is odd since pink and I did not. I lost my heart necklace in Oregon. I still, thanks be, have not lost my heart earrings. They belonged to a beautiful woman, Deena, who married a close friend of my father's. The friend, Harry, gave them to me when he became her widower. I wear them often, they are my most elegant jewelry, they somehow give the face whose lack of my mother's jutting cheekbones pains me a somehow heart-shaped softness; though I look nothing like Deena did, the earrings look nice on me. I somehow think this is Deena's doing, and I wear the earrings to anything she might have liked: a concert, a dinner, a romantic walk somewhere. She, like the stones, like the memory-whitened sunlight, is other, is elsewhere, both ethereal and the result of something compressed into bead and shine. "A gem" is how my father described Deena, alive.

I would like to say that the origins of these stones, their place in the steamy inner workings of the mantled celestial body, their former life as cogs in the groaning, close sprockets of the turning planet, fascinated me. I would like to say I ran home, looked up the hexagonal structure of their molecules, and drew their chemical bonds with educated relish. I did not. It was their smoothness, manmade, my affinity for sparkles and pretties, also arguably manmade. It wasn't their history and identity as inlays of the great, shifting vertebrae of the world, it was that they seemed in their splendor to be not of this world. It was their impossible smoothness, it was their weight in my sweaty palm; I would angle them on my eyelid as I laid on my back, I would line them up on my belly and one would sink below sea level into my navel.

What can I say? Quartz is the most common mineral on the face of the earth. The first time I saw the earth heave it was actually a red rug, and it was 7:30am, a red rug pulsing and heaving, and I was 13 years old, and hoped in my adolescent outsider fragility that this meant the world was beginning to speak to me, that I was like the girl with the silver eyes. I was in English class. I loved English class, and no one loved it with me, and sometimes even now the ceiling or floor will churn in quiet seriousness. It is as shadowy a thing as my ability to account for how it feels to have breasts and know that they weren't always there. Roeser's, Deena, the effects both have on me are as mysterious as the strange compressions of the planet and the heaving it does at odd points, despite having learnt something of geology and chemistry, even of the biological facts of death. Somewhere ghosts are not transparent and their bodies are hold-able and striped, luster ebbing pain. Deena's skin turned yellow from the cancer. I scavenged crimson, rubbing with my girl fingers the beady eyes of wonderful beasts.

Katydid

Me-sized blue bowls, often for cereal. Grasses sent up their smell to doctor the receiving, whatever they thought dust rose and swept quiet meant. Cats rubbed. Mother bent garden, upping pungent. The line of cottonwoods separated us and the cottonwoods were separated by artichoke plants. The day I taught myself to ride without training wheels, back and forth. Extra bags, extra memory, extra cardboard, rust, fatigue, breasts, powder. Red sweatshirt watering smoke Father begins fire. The shape of a temper both a cloud and a wall. The shape of my receiving a slept blossom, out, curl in. Not haunted as stilled. Pluck ladybugs into jar when grasses grow long enough to hide body, let them out after showing Mother. Lemon tree. Sand pile. I remember red and black, but know king snakes are white and black even when folded under your own house. For the sissy I am the ground coming does not hurt, even as spiked oak leaves met hands I threw out falling. April, May pull along in way of garden cart. Father pulled me out of pool I fell in and I did not cry. On such hot days the quenching smell of water on smooth bordering stones is enough.

When we were younger caution was taken that we not walk close to the tall but loosely wired fence lest our soft skulls be dented irreparably by a powerful hoof of one of the zebra or antelope. After telling myself not to be afraid of snakes I crawled alone into the huge grasses by the water tank. Grandma Trudy sat on the deck in her wheelchair and cashmere blanket letting the white cat eat her yogurt. Lisa got the tennis ball wet with slobber. Halfway through I saw neither head nor body but segment of scaled body, black marked.

Spoiled and tyrannized by one and the same. Another sip. Not such suffering as exists but then again some marks are internal. Closet smells. This is your fault. There was a girl with cowboy boots and a purple-hearted turtleneck in the mirror with whom I was not on good terms. Every day at school the day burns and chalk rises, fame and shame rhyme for a reason. We give thistles President's names. We march. Lengths of wave. Catholic is not a prerequisite for guilt. On warm length of deck board I got splinters trying to roller skate. Nothing to do with lust when the paint is so rough.

Nate

The Boston Airport ball machine dinged and dropped balls that were then routed and cinched up slowly. I remembered the machine, but thought it was in the middle of the gates, not a side room for kids. I could tell no difference between the memory of a ball machine--glints and rigging, rust-red and ringing, in the middle of a light-filled cluster--and memories of other things. I forget sometimes how easily dark-cut sort of clicking heeled flight attendant could be apparition, how easily they could all be, running about playground. How easily I could be to them, crouching against the wall, clutching my briefcase, watching them run.

In flashes the air was mottled with my residual, standing at the ball machine, ten years old next to Ruthie, who was in a very pink windbreaker, teeth missing. Much has been said about relationship between space and time. There are said to be laws. Man, was that windbreaker pink. A yellow ball spiraled down, the hammer let loose and clanged the bell near the thing that looked like a rake where the blue ball rolled along. Father called to let me know I would need to catch a bus at LAX; I told him I was looking at the ball machine. He made a fond noise. So it was a special thing. But he was gone. I felt like I was having a bad trip but was right there, boarding pass, briefcase, the one ready to deal with lawyers and death certificates.

Years ago at the end of a semester abroad I lay on the cold floor of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. The cold felt good on my upper back through Father's tried-and-true 1970 Eddie Bauer parka with real fur hood—white outside, so goddamn white—because of the tattoo I'd gotten the previous morning. I got it by myself after circling Moscow Ministry of Defense by mistake in efforts to find a tattoo place. I spoke through a doll-faced interpreter to the young artist about the design I'd drawn during the preceding three months while living just west of Siberia, and the tattoo's placement across my shoulder blades, then told them no, I didn't have hundred dollars, and bargaining down. The owner brought me black tea with sugar while the tattoo was being done. No one touched my bag or passport.

Years ago a man and woman visiting a son in Albuquerque gave me a bruised apple and kept me between them as we waited to board. I looked quite little through college. In the Syktyvkar domestic airport, 6am, bitter frost, a man in box-shaped fur hat turned as I struggled to get my jacketed sleeve through my backpack strap, turned from his companions and yanked the strap wordlessly so that I could get my sleeve through it, then turned back. A huge, smelly Armenian with thumbs like potatoes in the seat next to me on the airplane said he was going to America to visit a dentist and kept plumping my pillow as flight stretched on, holding it in place so I could nap.

Children will never tell us, and we'll forget. To just need to run. Does being aware of forces chip away at being at their mercy--chip away until we are older, sadly so, squinting to distant time wherein we didn't name the naming things? Another child belly-slid down the baggage claim. On the plane I read the sentence fragment "there were birds and butterflies" but my brain registered word "magic" instead of birds. No magic elsewhere on the page, even. The book was about Vietnam. When I looked a second time, there were birds. I don't know how that happened.

I am supposed to be connected through a steady stream of time and measurable space to a flat in northern Russia, ninth story, fish heads and mewling kitty on stairwell, to a drawn woman who looks kindly at me when I express concern at her white face, her husband's sleeping form in son's room. "This is, after so many years together, married," she gestures and says haltingly, "black line, white line, black line, white line, Russians say. Good and then bad. Good."

It is dangerous when it rains, Maria tells me by way of introduction. The whole city is built on sand. Houses fall every year. Water loses itself off the windshield, sky deep and cupped. Up in El Alto the city is an accident, tan building blocks spilled all over the mountain. The shape of bare earth on the mountainside is like someone bending over, someone walking, but I am prone to see people in natural structures. Solitary skies like these make more room for God. God, or whatever name you have for vastness.

I am afraid I will wake one day, arrive on my dream-float to old age, which seems a jungle of dream-floats, never having gotten off, never having disentangled myself from the gold circle of light. In afternoon as I doze and the chest on which my soft breasts sag heaves with breath, I will do the same as I do now in my twenties, as I have always done--daydream that someone will come in and notice me, the way I did as a child when I pretended to sleep so potential spectators would think tender thoughts.

I don't know yet what holds us. I arrive in La Paz from Quito at night. The taxi descends into a bowl of lights. Bolivia´s independence day, groups crowded around backs of trucks. I am here to meet the Diva but she is still away; her daughters, Maria and Isa, wait with a sign at the airport. I say as we dip and dip that this is the one place where old people could say, When I was your age I had to walk uphill both ways to school, and actually be telling the truth. Ley, says Maria and pours me some more spiked tea out of a thermos. "Ley" is a word for "cool" around here. Technically it means "law" or "rule."

My first day at 12,000 feet I round a corner in your basic cobblestone street and suddenly it all tilts up and the street ends in a long stairway. I climb them and que jodido wevon it´s like the thump of a heart, a hammer. The walk began with a sewer, open top. Outlandish weeds surround, disappear into, appear out of. Look around at a barely true city that has just bloomed, deserted and pale. A neighbourhood shop, a woman in traditional dress hanging onto the bar of the locked front door, elbows bent, one toe swaying. Peculiar winter sun, broken mountains.

The afternoon angles away like a flag, takes itself with it, begins to rain. We all go home in our somber work clothes in an evening hidden by fog. Gets darker evenly, around us in the buses, fanning out across the road, a curtain dropping. Their city built entirely into, out of, around, mountains and rivers. They point out and hold dear the red, but no one knows what makes it so. Anything I touch. You gotta let more love in than that, Tauthacho tells me and leads me down the dark, rank cave.

Man who walks, the green man in the stoplight, then as the countdown begins from five he begins running, encouraging pedestrians to sprint across the street before oncoming traffic instead of waiting for the next round of green. The staggering fire swallower performing at no one's behest in front of cars at a stoplight. Drunk, they say, and wave him off. She always looks for coins in her ashtray when children knock with gum. I wasn't supposed to be this fazed by altitude, arriving as I do from another mountain city. Maybe the glimmer never lifts away.

I stay in a small room by the garage. The room on the roof has a guitar on the wall that Wyatt immediately takes down and starts to play. I hastily smear charcoal on paper. I do not know Wyatt well; he is a brief lover, we are both in transit, he is meant to help me live in the here and now. His own circle of atoms knit together, face naked as a petal as he sings. I stab the fabric with a needle I will later lose as lights go soft and rainbowed the way they do between night and day, my hands full of scrunched fabric as Wyatt looks openly at me. His body reminds me of those of my older brother and a certain former lover: freckles, stray hairs. The first time I fell in love, I was astounded at how it felt to adore errant moles and other imperfections; it was like an axe in my chest made of honey that hardened with loss.

In the Diva´s house, where by the Diva's decree I am allowed to wake up and put on whosever clothes are lying about since I need more warm clothes than I brought, there is Isa in ruffled skirts, just back from Switzerland; Maria, outside practicing with her band in the same sweats she has been wearing all week; Johann in one of the woven ponchos from the marketplace, a week away from the end of his year in Bolivia and his return to Belgium; cousin Ale in his Illinois sweatshirt; and the Diva herself in shawls and spectacles, described as a "Diva" of the literary scene and director of a library of important and rare Bolivian literature. No telling who will be home at any time of day aside from lunch; everyone is off to do this, back from doing that. Sometime I awake in the large, dark, cold morning and pour yogurt with a cloaked Death and piles of books my only attendants.

La calle de las brujas, the street of the witches. Always going around curves and after every turn the city looks different. I catch glimpses of myself in the silver bowl ashtray. Jessica, the young poetess I am dining with, says of Bolivia: I would want people to know not just the stereotype of donkey, poncho, violence, corruption, illiteracy. I would want them to know of the young people who want to seguir adelante, kids in El Alto who are doing rap, want to study film. There should be art and fellowships. El Alto is where, in early summer, protests took place against the privatization of the country's resources, protests and blockades of the indigenous majority ousting Bolivia's president. Now anyone who reads the New York Times knows El Alto is the trouble slum, but not about kids spitting their poetry, moving hands down with the beat, the mental photos taken for lack of a camera.

I receive a letter from a friend who says that tea parties with invisible friends are one of her favorite kinds of silence. I know what she means. When I wring my hands at the hard luck that befalls good people Annie Dillard pauses, pinky lifted, and says simply, "We are moral creatures in an amoral world." When I am caught between what might have been and what is George Oppen pipes up while pouring more tea, saying, "There was no ocean liner." "Only the mist is real," agrees Octavio Paz, hard at work on his crumpet.

Down to Maria with her shining red guitar, ash somehow on the back of her right shoulder, her messy ponytail and no-nonsense sweats. Isa practices break-dance moves she learned in Europe in the tiny, walled-in yard. I wrestle with thread, cannot see the eye of the needle anymore, shreds of pink fabric in my hands like bunches of blossoms. I tell stories to people who aren´t there. I feed on thin air.

Elders say heart pain passes with time but I am shocked with a living vision of myself older, sitting, my body's folds grown softer, fingers interlocking in front of me. I will look out the dining room window and be stabbed by pain remembered by what I do not see there in the dark, silver branches etched on a blue porcelain bowl, myself ice skating alone although I do not know how to skate. In the Andes it is too-thin aired even to think of ice, or of heavy heat. In a violet room above the crowded plaza, sounds easing through wooden shutters, Wyatt brushes my hair back, gasping, and looks for my eyes as though he might weep or break. Thank you, is the first thing he says, in a whisper, and I am stunned at the profound grace of his bravery, breaking where he could be seen.

On the roof with a jolt you realize how close the clouds are. Admiring a huge harvest moon, sharp relief of gold and black, with the taxi driver in whose custody you have placed your body, what is near and far transmutes, shifts in jars and rows. White dust comes in storms. Dogs lick your fingers. You try to be patient with yourself. You will realize there are some things you never did do.

Morning holds us like bread, and from my vantage point on the trolley this sunny city day I cannot see exactly how we're suspended, rocking, across the bridge. I understand now something my mother said on a road trip up the coast of California. We were waving back and forth under colossal redwoods, my hands full of drive-thru chicken fajita, and she said that a car is an interesting thing in which to travel since it's a vessel that goes through the land instead of over it like a plane, a capsule hurtling through surroundings without really participating in them. On the trolley our bodies are like a bunch of trees, packed tightly, arm branches reaching for the metal bar. We all sway in the wind of the trolley coming to a halt.

In the dark our minibus dips down suddenly and an Elton John song comes on. I turn to Maria and tell her this song is on the first cassette tape I ever bought. I was nine years old, and in Isla Vista with my mother. It was the same day she noticed that my right foot turns out when I walk. We ate Chinese food on benches painted deep red.

Pale moon fingernails in the shower that kept turning cold, green shower curtain cocoon encircling in the corner, barley soup, a picture of Angelina Jolie on Maria´s wall, Maria the drummer and chef, Isa the younger, eighteen years old, just back from a year in Switzerland, in a skirt and jacket, clearly wanting to practice her English and play hostess. Maria produces a carrot pipe. No one who did not grow up on ranches as I did ever understood before why I would suggest an apple when rolling papers were not to be found, and here is an old kitty purring on my lap and an absent Diva. What does my mother do? asks Isa, blowing out smoke. She directs a library, she writes, and she is a radical leftist.

Years ago I served hot chocolate every Wednesday to residents of an elder care home, wandering the halls waiting for a resident to wander the halls looking for someone to talk to. Secretly I loved best taking advantage of a faraway gaze to watch the TV program the occupant wasn't really watching. Something in me twinged when I thought about the faraway gaze. What it might mean. Where they had gone. Where were they wandering?

The mountains, Johann says immediately when I ask what he will miss. It´s so immediate it's almost like I didn't ask the question.

Later I notice a slight tear in the skin of my thumb and cannot remember where it came from.

In minutes the weather goes from chilly to baking. This sort of dry, lifted heat reminds me of being smaller, and all the time I spent being warm. Summers in southern California are so damn hot. Afternoons yawn on. Slightly removed, hanging in the heat, objects, even. A series of images, as it all is. All memories are. Isa stands beside me, describing seasons I can´t imagine.

I return to a coffee shop to take a picture of the square-jawed, small-faced woman who heats chocolate cake for me and she gives me the ring I left on the bathroom sink. Las almitas protect her, she says when I mentioned angels, little souls, little souls flying about her sweaty face. On her day off she cleans her daughter's house; her son in law does not work.

Black dog nearly bites me in the thigh, won't let me pass. Think about the hairs standing up on my body, about adrenaline, about the body language of the dog and me, conveying cowardice, wonder about other humans in other times in other generations, lions maiming them. In short I do drift off while awake, but often these thoughts connect to a philosophy, an idea developing. We´re all riding the wheel in thin sunlight, hanging dreams on the hook of someone just out of reach, working out the kinks of being in worlds with abilities to dream, suffering the sweet pain of texture. In the white minibuses of La Paz, the money-takers call the name of every stop.

I awake to sunlight on heavy tie-dyed blankets. Isabela and Johann, back from the market, stop the music every couple of seconds so Johann can write down the lyrics Isabela slowly repeats. Maria and I smoke out of her carrot. She leafs through an art history book. The old kitty is one Maria put into her pocket for keeps when she was eight years old. The kitty was scurrying through the market. Johann writes these words down: Nunca fue facil, como explicarte. Maria tells me Angelina Jolie is amazing—"the voice of the '80's," is the way she puts it in Spanish, and to say it's true she says no ve, don't you see—because she does whatever she wants and people are still in awe of her. Another kitty, this one 13 years old. Another stretch of lace fabric. Strangely sleepy, I let sun lie on my cheek and eyes. Outside everything is pale mountain. Lace flickers its shadow on my jeans.

Bridge higher up than you would believe. Many people commit suicide here, Maria tells me. "All those who are tired and carrying heavy loads must give themselves to God" is painted along the edge and maybe it's just my translation but that seems just the thing to tell me to get me to jump, stains of red in the mountains, here where we are lifted higher than belief, parsed out whitely, they slide over each other; here between towering mountains like turrets I might just fly.

The Diva has a white-cloaked death figurine on her shelf. My mother loves death, Isa explains. It's the one thing we're all afraid of but it will happen to all of us. On top of her shelves, which overflow with every kind of book, a headdress from the Beni region, plus all the cats and dogs whose distinct personalities are part of the household. I find a perfect purple pen at the end of the day, near a Rancid album and a copy of Lolita. Walk out into the unbaked unmasked mountains the color of blood mid-soak into the earth, houses of the poor wherever earth is even remotely flat, stuck in crevices.

Clouds so close they move across tops of tall buildings like sheets of feathered glass, tilting. Night approaches, hence the purple mood, lights on wet cobblestones, vendors laughing at me handing over 20 cents when she wanted two pesos, juice steaming but only warm. They won't change the money because it has a pen mark. I am surprised also to be reminded of Syktyvkar. Here the streets are the same kind of quiet, feature the same strange white minibuses. People appear, disappear, glimmer like mirages.

My first day Maria and Johann take me on a hike behind a rich neighbourhood. I notice nice cars outside the houses, not locked up like they would be in other South American cities. Maria responds, Not so much here. In El Alto and other poor areas, though, they're always finding bodies in rivers and buried places.

A wealthy family watches us from a large turquoise living room. We climb the strange cement-like wall of rock crags made almost of sand. Everywhere frozen landslides, evidence of the last hard rain, of earth sliding away.

Sun will hit one strip of houses but not the other or one mountain but not the other and create a sharp contrast. Que extremos, Isa observes of the extremely wealthy minority and the extremely poor indegenous majority. Shows me the gated community. What do people do in Bolivia to arrive at such wealth? I ask. She smiles sweetly. Roban, is all she says. They steal.

We stop to rest. She says, Here it is, La Paz from a different side. One must climb or descend to get absolutely anywhere. The altar to those who have died in the tunnel has a little light on inside it. I look up. It is connected to the streetlight's powerlines. I am under a white net.

I climb down the rock with Maria. She remembers being in Finland in 2001 when the big crisis hit in Bolivia, the one that was harsher than what just passed in early summer of 2005, the one where people died. This last shift of government (though Isa told me no one wanted the job) was Todo normal, Maria says. You could still get things. I was inside watching TV--it´s not my problem, she says. I see faces everywhere in the rock.

They don't just bury the llama fetus. They burn it first in the fire with liquor and little wooden houses. It´s ceremonial. You ask for what you want as it burns.

On the way down I spot a piece of paper crumpled in a fissure in the rock. Have some charmed notion of a treasure hunt or secret note. It's a piece of notepaper someone has used as toilet paper. Johann is waiting for us at the ravine. He wants us to come inside the cave he just found. We follow dry sewage to its dark mouth.

The spirits are complicated. A city known first through words, localized on the page--but then the words disappear. Looking through the hole in the high bridge at the impossibly small world under my feet, I realize I don't often think of what is outside an elevator when I am in one.

When I finally meet the Diva, she is smoking cigarettes and chewing coca in her bed. I bring her peach pizza. De la puta los colores comments Maria on the gift I brought her mother of painted ceramic—"of the whore those colors," but it's a compliment--while Johann, all thin over-six-feet of him, plays with Manuela the moppish white puppy on the Diva's bed. The Diva flips through radio stations and suddenly one of her own poems is being read aloud by some man and is just ending. Both she and her daughter recognize it.

Puede ser persona, says Maria of the mostly-buried soft ball-like thing in some sort of bag in the sandy soil at the mouth of the cave whose entrance is littered with human shit. It does smell like a dead animal around the bag. We continue through the cave, climb for long minutes in the pitch dark towards a small bit of light at the other end. We emerge into a strange sort of rock-room with tall, flat walls and no way out but the way we came.

Six kids! The Diva exclaims at the heavily clothed Dona Clemencia. Dona Clemencia cooks the meals and is the first domestic employee I've met in South America who eats with the family at the table. Six kids, repeats the Diva, shaking her head. I've gone half crazy with two. The Diva sits at the table with her girls in front of her, having just debated with them about police and dirty hippies smoking pot in front of everyone (it is Maria who can't stand them, oddly enough), and reads aloud from the Hot Chocolate for the Soul in Spanish book Johann has just given her. Listen to this, she says, and reads aloud: We don't teach our children that they are unique; we teach them that two plus two is four. What about the fact that there has never been anyone like you in the history of the world? You are a marvel. You could be anything. You could be president or the next Einstein. Shit, says the Diva, look at the emphasis on success and recognition. She goes back to her soup.

I look at the pale pointed leaves as I consider smoking pot with Maria in the rock room. Wonder if I should. The world takes care of you, how many times have you realized that? Leaves and rock don't pass judgement. As we get stoned Maria starts talking about the gruesome death of some famous Latina singer, then she and Johann start talking about the possible cadaver at the mouth of the cave. We should open the bag, says Johann. Haven't you guys seen the movies? I plead. When you find a bag that might contain a dead body in a really dark cave, you don't want to open it.

Sprinkler water smoothes the tile as the Diva agrees that hers is an enchanted city. The elite, the Diva says, gesturing, moved from this area, now run down, to another farther south. The elite seemed to move as a dark tinted heat mirage moving the glitter of money across the city leaving cracked buildings behind. The elite lived here once, the Diva says of the calm circle with the closed church. The church is good luck, better luck than the other churches, so on busy days numerous couples come to get married revolving-door-style.

I defer to Maria about the spirits, the mountain's spirit and that of the possible cadaver we must make our way past to find our way out, about the possibility of angering them. No way, man, Maria says in Spanish, we're learning about natural processes. We open the bag, look at the body, thank the spirit, then take off.

Perhaps it is the altitude but looking at the starfish-shaped orange arms of desert flowers and imagining a December awash and bursting with blossoms and wind--as Isa describes the month, and I listen incredulously--she says the word lagrima suddenly I am walking with red-haired freckled Maureen in high school, dust under our feet under the oak trees, and Maureen says, Those lyrics, lagrima de oro, tear of gold, what a beautiful image.

I am petrified to go back into the cave. Johann guides my feet to their footholds. Only as she enters the cave to go down does Maria say, Damn, now I'll get paranoid, it's dark. On the way down Tautahcho appears, shaking his head at me, but lovingly so. Tautahcho is there in his black hakama. I am remembering how he sat leading Aikido class because Maria and Johann start talking about martial arts. I am grateful they did and thereby nudged the poised domino of Tautahcho in my brain, because the entire way down the excruciatingly dark cave with the possible cadaver at the bottom, the image and sound of him comforts and distracts me from the dark cave and possible cadaver. How we breathed, the exercises we did in our white gis to stretch our backs. Suddenly I have a full body memory suit between me and the rocks and darkness and dust. I am brought through it by my own dreams.

All rich thieves have something to do with the government. Although Isa knows a girl whose parents are wealthy in that way, and the girl is very nice. I can see, says Isa, how if you grow up with a lifestyle and understand that you have to rob to maintain it but it is all you have known, how you might come to live that way.

Do you have a knife, Maria? Johann asks to tease me. They poke the bag. That has to be the belly, Maria says, swollen with death. I don't look, walk forward. I look back. Johann has succeeded in rupturing the bag. The stench is unbearable. The blood is slow, black, trickling. Bueno, vamos iendo, Maria says. Let's get going.

I ask the Diva for advice about life as she gets us strange crunchy bread. We are standing on a very steep street. There is a green light above the plastic bread box. We hug our jackets around us. Every wise woman I have met, she says, be she rich, poor, young, old, has listened to her intuition. That voice inside or outside.

And when we finally find our way out of the cave the tranquility has a strange...not edge, but backside. A wealthy sort of suberb, yes. But the city hides things. The city scarcely exists.

In an artist's hangout, a cave-like bar in the historic part of town, the Diva's picture is on the wall, part of a mural of the artistic greats of La Paz. A couple makes out in the corner. A large table of people laugh and talk in the tavern room. We sit at the bar and sip spiked tea. And do you not like girls? asks the Diva as we labor up the hill in the neighbourhood in which she was born. She is looking for her traditional dance troupe. She is not sure where they are rehearsing. Black people shipped as slaves from Africa, dying of altitude, sent down to the mines. It's the dance of their children, who mixed with the indigenous inhabitants, the Diva is learning. Not many lights, not many stores open. I say no, I've tried to like girls, but I don't. The Diva knows what I mean. I think it's a fault that I don't have a girl in my life, she says.

In any white minibus people get on and off in a constant stream. Some know each other, may even be related, others have nothing to do with one another. In the white minibus of my brain, Wyatt sits alongside Oppen and Paz and a beautiful boy I saw in the plaza today. One by one they leave, replaced by others, sometimes leaving an empty space. I think of an almost empty minibus rocking its last passenger into the night. Maybe that is sleep.

But you should see us in La Paz when we are out protesting against the government, the Diva says as we leave the hole in the wall, violenca, policia-- princesa, that last word she says at the same time as a young woman with heavy eyeliner sitting on a bench with a rod full of woven bracelets. They chat and the princess offers me a bracelet to buy. We descend a long series of steps and the Diva says she is a wise one, she is. I was upset because a guy hadn't called me and she gave me a bracelet and said it would be fine. He called right after that.

We come upon the crowded rotary and I show the Diva tokens I wear from people that I believe protect and care for me, but also tell her I realized recently that superstition is a form of self-defeat. Why assume the world is a disastrous place and disastrous things will befall me if I lose a certain earring, that good things only befall me because I don't? At this the Diva guffaws.

The car doesn't hit me exactly. The car nudges me. Either the backward downhill give of a car switching gears, or intentional. Ya paso I say to Maria a block later, but more to myself. As we walk down the gentle slope Maria says, Oh wait I did go to Russia. We took a bus to Saint Petersburg from Finland. How beautiful, the bridges that lifted up to let the boats pass through, how lovely, those boats.

What do you think about motherhood? I ask the Diva and she says, Well shit it's hard, man, it's not just to care for them as children, it's their whole life. She talks with her dancing friends and I wait as per her orders at the threshold. Two men pass and keep looking back at me. I signal to the Diva that I am going to get something to eat but she doesn't see. I get chicken and walk back up and the Diva is walking down and says, I told you to wait! This neighborhood is really dangerous. Shakily lights a cigarette. She asks if I have a novio and I tell her I am tired of young men using their brains to try and avoid heart-work. I ask her if she has one and she says she had one, but she is tired of intellectuals. They are too suburban.

The logical part of the brain would be the money-taker, calling out where the bus is headed, the part of the self that knows its route, its location. Moments like a corridor but the minute they have been lived, the lengths of corridor shift, disappear, rearrange. The floor under our feet disappears, the walls cave in, the minute we take our next step forward. Worms in reverse. We go through somewhat of an ordered survival and leave behind mirrors broken, bobbing up and down, liquid.

Are there any female monkeys in Belgium? asks the Diva, because she is considering becoming one. She is actually considering becoming a female monk in Belgium since Johann is thinking of monkhood, she just confuses the words in English. Everyone hoots. In the end the Diva decides not to live in a monastery since she would have to give up smoking and drinking. Do you smoke? Asks the Diva, then looks at my face. Are you suffering? she asks, laughing.

From the minibus the Diva points out gleaming spoons and hanging teapots. After the part of the market that smells acrid after a day of fruit bazaar she tells me that there is the same difference of opinion in Latin America between the inclusive nature of "hybrid" literature and those who believe genre should continue to be entities with enforced, distinct limits. There is also a debate in Latin American literature between the largely socially important literature and more internal literature of a higher level, she says. For example, I prefer Jessica´s poetry because it is more internal and intellectual. Historically the political and social turmoil of this part of the world has led to fables about the common man, social theme, that sort of thing. But I like the higher level of literature because every worker, every mother of eight, every miner has that internal life.

Am I wandering through it now; will I be shaken by a kind younger hand into the late afternoon with a woven blanket over my frail legs? It could cave in on itself, the insubstantial shelf, could bottom out into nothing.

Even in Jessica´s upscale suburban house there is a patchamama figurine. Fires for the virgin, dances and mantles. Sit among dogs and fading light. In the building across the way two figures move side to side, lit with late light. What looked solid isn't. The steps we take dissolve; footholds turn to dust. Hidden dark places where poets squirreled away. In a city where there naturally as many ups as downs, and plenty of both, I realize that every time I have told someone or been told of a memory we have been descending, going downhill. I can't explain this city any more than I can explain memory. When buildings fall to shadow uneven houses on cliff start, various certain ones, to spark.

The words we learned in the elementary school of which my mother was principal went like this: spiders and snakes, spiders and snakes, I'm gonna learn to love them no matter how long it takes. Home for the summer among long dry grass and my parents' marriage and routines I avoided walking outside in daylight as I always had for fear of snakes, kings and gophers and rattlers, I suspected to be out in force. I watched movies in the cool living room, languishing instead of moving and growing unhappy for it.

My sister said in a letter after my mother's heart surgery that words would continue to open for me and adore me. I did not know they had been doing so.

This time I decided I was going to try and send a snake love if I saw it, a decision made due to the influence of my sister and T, I saw four huge snakes in a month. On my parents' ranch, gold in high june heat, a long dense marked body lying among the thistles. When it moved it would inch along in little pushes led by its small head, little black tongue peeking in and out, then suddenly it would jet like streaming fluid.

The young man whose tongue was the first to coax an orgasm out of the shy shell of my labia used words to lie, obfuscate, skirt the issue. He used words to get what he wanted without having to do or look at what frightened him. Then he wondered why words did not lie down for him when he went to write a story.

What is it about a legless lizard that makes us shiver? Snakes move in a way no other land animals do. They're so slithery, my brother said once, trying to explain the phobia he and I had had since birth. Something about the very sight of one meant danger, caused an involuntary startling. I would always see them in dreams, which earmarked them as nightmares. T says move like a snake: listen to the heart of the earth.

The afternoon of graduation my mother had me ascend the railroad tie steps to carry something heavy from her car and there it lay. I in my brain, which was addled with a day spent hibernating then a burst of sunlight, addled with dreams grown vivid since I switched antidepressants, I could not tell for flickering moments, standing there in the heat looking at the snake, whose head was hidden in the grass, if I was awake.

My old teacher Lynn and I held hands and cried while the little graduates sang wavily. I do not even know them and it's still breaking my heart, I said to her, and during the speeches lifted my eyes to the tinny applauding of cottonwood and pepper trees. I understood I had been born without the mechanism to disengage, to just not go there, in the face of sadness or pain. I understood it was risky to live with my ear to the ground; grief can be deafening.

Looking at the snake I thought how different, how impressive, it was compared to other animals. No wonder the poor creature had been tagged as the devil. There is an undeniable power about it. All that raw power in a muscle languishing there.

That night we watched my mother's favorite movie about old men in space. The bare bones of the story were the same as occurs everyplace: down to one man or motley crew beating the odds, the world hanging in the balance, and as with every savior, a betrayal. Mom and I walked to the car in the June evening and I knew that I was being shepherded through a danger zone by a network of mother-teachers.

I called my father to come look, then turned and it had gone. I saw it again in the dry flowerbed, threading through stem carcasses. I called my mother. It disappeared again. When she went back down the stairs I carried her basket out of the car and there the rascal was, all four feet of him, stretched out on the rocks. I was tense but not terrified. He was playing with me!

Words are not dispassionate.

My mother finally saw him too, right as he careened through the bottom of her rose bush.

One of the children in the graduation ceremony belonged to T, who was not surprised to hear that the snake played hide and seek with me. I told him I was trying to remember to send snakes love and respect as other living things when I saw them. He told me, They're showing themselves to you. Animals sense fear. They also sense love.

Words cannot be inert when we created them. Words are inventions. I trusted him because he was physically sincere, because he opened his mouth on my body. Inventions are manmade and pieces of us end up in what we make. There is a pain that has curled round in my chest, in its caverns, and I am beginning to think it is here to stay and that my body must get used to ferrying around dense pieces of darkness.

If a snake could speak, what knowledge would it impart. If you are insincere, or anything else you become when you allow cowardice to shepherd you, words will sense it and curl away.

What if that boy, who skewered my heart and handed it to me on a plate in a pizza parlor, were somehow in doing so saying something other than the words his mouth and tongue were forming. All signs form a language, just not the one you think you know. When I think of his body, of his flicking tongue, or the cursive of a snake's body on the hot road or between my mother's roses, my muscles flinch involuntarily.

I.

I am accustomed, now, to being in a room with seven men who are drawing my pubic hair. I have been on the other side of the drawing board, and I know that bodies are reduced to shape, distance, and shadow: hold up the pencil. This is how far the nipple is from the armpit. Squint. It is not even a nipple anymore, not to them, though my nipple has not changed any since I took off my clothing.

The first time I posed naked in the basement of the man whose ad I answered there were only two artists. The host would grimace and then relax his face in quick succession like a broken smile doll while he sketched. The other rubbed my shoulders over the thick blue robe during a break. The music was incredible: blues, and old music from 1940's Japan. Bad luck for the band, my host comments, because then Hiroshima happened. I found something to focus on so my body would hold still and steady. One time it was a finished drawing. Something about the light on the woman's breast made it look like the shape bread dough takes before rising. I do not know why there are no women in this group. I wonder sometimes if I would feel differently about shedding my clothing for a woman. I do not think I would; though I am using my naked body in a way a man dictates, I have sanctioned this and am making forty dollars in three hours. I also love the bluegrass, I love lying down during breaks and reading essays and books for my courses, I love the corner with all of the records and pastels strewn like pick-up sticks.

When I arrived I asked for the bathroom. Perhaps because I come from a place where basements and attics are rare I love them, and his basement smelled pleasant and damp, pastel and cardboard everywhere, with a cat who wound round the artist's legs. The kitchen and bathroom betrayed the smell of the five cats who live there total. I have five cats also, but they spend their time outside accruing foxtails. The wife had headphones on and didn't look at me as she hurried into the car he had taken to pick me up from campus. He spoke to her as if he didn't know she had tuned him out. I stood bare under the hot lamp unsure of whether I was welcome, holding onto the curtain so my arm would catch the light, staring into the face of the clock until it became an object representative of nothing important, bread, an elbow, skin, scattered records.

They are drawing my person but it is not personal. If it were not my body, but another's, they would still be gaging, squinting, marking. The only time the fact of their masculinity becomes acute to me is when it occurs to me that I know as little of their minds as they know of mine, that any or all could have committed a rape twenty years back, or two days back. I do not fear for my safety. I only would rather they not see me when I slide the robe off and hang it over the chair: that is the one moment that feels intimate.

How are you? one of the irregular comers asks the man who leads and hosts the drawing group. I'm okay, he says, in the kind of way that suggests both men know he has recently not been so okay. This man, who teaches at a nearby art school and whose figure drawings sell, tells me which way to roll my hips and whether to expose my ear, but I have no right to ask about these other things, just as I have no right to sneak a dried apricot or two or a vanilla cookie from his kitchen when I take my bathroom break, though I do just that.

At the end of the evening sessions there has started to be that clarity of star winking above the deck, a bite to the air, to the shadow of roof: autumn. At the end of an afternoon session I straighten my jacket on the deck, scoop-shaped yellow leaves heaping all over the deck and deck chair, and turn to smile at the men filing out, saddled with art supplies. Take care, they tell me.

II.

During the first broken heart I ever had I woke up feeling like ropes were tying me to the bed, crisscrossing plushly but firmly, and I could not move my body under their weight, and my mind did not want my body to move under their weight. That was also the way it felt when I woke up after election day 2004. Certain thoughts I have make me a political leftist. The thoughts have a lot to do with my body, actually, and its landscape of hip and skin being one over which I, my thoughts, preside. I read the results of the election and I floated on my bed, floated and was also tied there: I could not nudge my thoughts or my body and so they could not nudge each other, either. And when I talked the next day to a dear friend who devoted her vacation time to liberal activism, she had a hollowness to her voice, and described it like this: it feels like I have had a break up, it feels like someone has died. Neither of us could move either our thoughts or our bodies in ourselves or in each other, but it was a lucky feeling to not nudge together, to not be able to nudge together.

I remember to think sometimes, in the middle of the twenty minutes between breaks, the muscles in my calf or neck or arm starting to ache, the tiny muscles I did not know were there and certainly have never used for this long continuously, that these men have traveled, been married, probably been divorced, probably been discovered masturbating by their mothers, perhaps discovered their own sons masturbating, perhaps raise their voices when they are angry, like cream in their coffee, do not like cream in their coffee, prefer Toyotas to Acuras and rain to sun, hate their job, love their job, remember that year they spent hating their first out-of-college job in Phoenix, regret smoking so much weed or starting to smoke cigarettes, miss their grandmother Doris who smelled like rice pilaf.

It does occur to me that it is the right of any person to say I do not want to be naked anymore in front of you and step down from under the bright lights, and that were I to do that nothing more than losing this job would come of it whereas over history this may not have always been the case. I have never needed to do things with my naked body that I did not want to do, as is my right, and for which I also feel guilty since most women I know and most women who ever lived have had that right taken away from them at one or many points.

Slavery, also, has been described as not owning one's life; in other words, not owning one's body. Since we can think whatever we like and not say it, for one's life to be controlled is then the control of the body, which is trackable and seeable in ways our thoughts are not. We can even use our bodies to say exactly different things from what our minds are thinking, like I hate you when we are thinking I love you, or the other way around. I cannot tell if one of these happens more than the other. They both seem to happen a lot. Sometimes my fingers fall asleep from holding onto the blanket hung from the ceiling, but the artists need the arm upraised so I keep the fingers there and rub them when the clock's wide face looks roundly up at me with the right whiskers and then I move.

III.

There is a red rose on my desk that has been opening since Friday. It is Sunday. On Friday my new Boy's only very recent ex-girlfriend came into town for a tournament between universities. I have not met her. At 3am Friday morning my new Boy bought me the rose in a Providence Seven Eleven. My new Boy is not actually mine; I do not own him. The rose is in the only thing that I could find to serve as a vase at 4am on a Friday morning in a dirty apartment shared with three dudes: a washed-out forty-ounce beer bottle. The rose has done quite well, blooming an aching red on my white desk next to my printer (though the desk is not mine either, it belongs to the university) and I have somehow attached my hope that the Boy will still want to hold my body and call it his--in the nice way that we can lay claim to one another's bodies sometimes--to the rose and how well it has done over the weekend we agreed he would be sorting things out with the ex. Now on Sunday evening one petal, full and triangular and on the lower left end of the blossom from where I am sitting, looks like it might drop from the flower soon. There is only a faint smell, but even during more difficult moments this weekend when I have thought in my mind of imputing things to say to the Boy if things do not go as I would like I have touched my nose to this, this cracking-open red star, and pushed my face into a smile to get my mind to follow.

Sometimes, on break, I hold my breath through the kitchen that smells like cat pee to the bathroom and take off the robe and look. I take off the robe and look at what they have been drawing; it is strange that they know better the shapes of my shoulders than I do, strange that I forgot about the tattoo on the back they have been drawing and on which they must have seen the tattoo. There is a New Yorker Cartoon on the wall: "I'd invite you in, but my life is a mess." Up in front of all of those grown men, on display, I do not feel vulnerable.

IV.

After modeling I walk with my book into my kitchen where there is a poster of Andy Warhol. The one with two of the same picture, two of his faces ringed by a tambourine. Paul's pressed leaves are on the hall wall. The floor is littered with trash. Take care, meaning, take care of yourself. And the self that takes care of me, the me that is different from the self that does the caring for, are these two different parts of me, even, from the me that does the thinking and the me whose shapes and breasts and thighs seven men just spent hours drawing? Even to owe something to oneself is a schizophrenic term, someone told me once. To do anything to oneself. There is I, there is I doing something to myself, to my self. I think now that our language just does not know what to do with this: if someone cuts their own wrist, then the giver and receiver of the action are the same. Why isn't it my self is doing this to my self? I am doing it to me? But no, the correct way to say it is that I am doing something to myself, and so I am a different entity from my self.

I pause while reading an essay about holocausts and crimes against humanity because my roommate Chris has enlisted me to help with a short film for his media class. I am to act. I am glad to, because I need a break from the part of myself that is trying to gather up feeling good about anything after the election and an essay that is about what this one is about. I need a break from the part of myself that looks at the rose every few minutes. I need a break from the part of myself that is imagining all of the bodies in Sudan and Rwanda and back centuries in the Ottoman Empire and back decades in Germany. I need a break from the part of myself that thumps painfully whenever the part of myself that looks at the rose every few minutes looks at the rose every few minutes.

I have done theater before, and I like to assume the expression of someone else with another set of memories. What I think is interesting is how many actors say that in order to cry for a scene they think of something sad from their own lives, not of the sad thing that has happened to their character. If that is true, then people watching the film or play are something like the men who draw my naked body: they are only getting part of the whole, they are seeing the part of the actor who cries but not the part of the actor who thinks of reasons to cry.

It was Chris who decided on Wednesday to be nicer to everyone than he had been during the preceding weeks and think of people primarily as systems of family and friends and not as participants in the body politic. My roommates and I know about and read about and talk about the body--and by the body I mean the bodies we use to get too drunk and make love and have sex (which are different things, even we know) and get our selves to classes, and by the body I also mean the big body whose disconnect I feel in this, my small body, when I cannot nudge this, my small body; I mean the big body that is the body politic.

Brendan sits on the curb in his beret and moccasins and watches, waiting to help Chris move the dolly. I crouch in the street and wait with the matchbook. I do not know what Brendan thinks. I do not know what Chris, fiddling with the big clunking camera, thinks. I do not know what the Boy, who has light green eyes, thinks. I do know that I love them all, Chris and Brendan and the Boy, as I crouch in my jacket with my hair on my face and matches in my hands. I know also that in some way I love the seven men who have drawn my pubic hair, not because they have drawn my pubic hair but because the room is quiet save for the bluegrass music playing while they draw and I stand still, and there is buzzing and whirring inside them that I cannot hear, memories inside them that I cannot see.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Those days it all seemed to tremble with love, every object, and I understood, if I had no body, no life, and I awoke suddenly to standing on the stage of a dirty, cold church as the deep pink shawls local women wear moved and settled like wings (como p‡jaros, ustedes I told the cozy row of women doctors when they all looked up at once during coffee break and they giggled and chirped) I«d take it, I«d take this rain in my face, these patchy mountains and patches of light and patches of cloud, yes I do want a body whose toes can rot and curl, whose skin will purse around the bones of my face and gum up my eyes (oscuro oscuro the viejita kept saying, her eyes full of clouds, weeping into her forearms as the needle went in), that first stain of red like an axe.

250 meters deep. You live where the lizard comes alive, you live at the end of the world. Over the city the statue of the virgin presides over the violet afternoon, wings aloft. Skin like petals, falling at our feet. Sheets of skin paving the road.

Doctora Teresa, short black hair, wide set lips, holds the post of the bunk bed steady as another doctor hammers. They keep the bed parts around for visitors, this time four Canadian nursing student volunteers and me, a random gringa solita here to write about the clinics. I ask if I can help. They laugh me off. I haul blankets and mattresses up the outside stairs, scrape a mattress for a second on the concrete, look guiltily behind me but there is no one there, no sea, no one.

An older indigenous woman comes into the church's makeshift clinic. A man follows her. Her eye has been damaged. She says to the doctors, hiding her face, I will cry. Teresa says, Calm, mamita, you can tell me what happened. She cries and says, Twenty years ago when I was giving birth to our last child my husband went out drinking. He came back at dawn, asked why I hadn't come out with him, and hit me in the eye. You were drunk? Teresa asks the man, who all this time has been fiddling with the latch on the door. Yes. I start. The man here is the abusive husband? He's in the room with us? The man touches the woman on the back as they exit, the first time he has touched her though she has been crying for long minutes. Teresa turns to Martha and me. Interfamilial abuse, she says. A dirty glass vase on the windowsill. Sunlit cornfields beyond. It«s just this kind of brightness against grey that always made a twitch inside my ribcage. The flower in the vase is of cloth. The eye should come out, it«s why she has been having such bad headaches. The wound is twenty years old, still fresh. Tired folds of skin. Holes in her smudged slip.

Teresa flips through the TV channels. One program is about pleasuring females sexually. She pauses, then flips to another. I train my eyes to the page in case she wants to watch. She flips back to it, then away again. I look up. Good program, I say. Yes, she says. Should be required, I say. Yes, she says. We are both very solemn.

We«re special, Irina says as I stand at the edge of her bed, looking down at my fingers fiddling with my keychain. God gave us these problems because he knows that we«re strong because we are here to do something. You know you did things from your heart. Must let go of the feeling; we cannot keep rancor inside. I raise myself up, I raise myself up, sometimes I raise myself up crying but I raise myself up. All I have to do is put my head out the window and breathe the air, see how fantastic, how fantastic the sun and the view, and continue although many people don«t do from their hearts.

There is a balance, of course. Heaven is here, around the table, as Teresa strokes Irina's hair and jokes with me that since her husband and children are all atheists and she the only Catholic she must ask God's pardon for all of them. But she does not truly believe in the underground hell of eternal suffering. She says this when I ask her: Hell is here, in this world.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Pig«s head is still attached to meat sold for lunch. Look down quickly, and again an hour later on the bus when a browning wall in the derelict Marin district plays sudden backdrop to scraggly fellow swaying, eyes closed, stomach pouching and pants sagging so as to reveal thick pink penis hanging like so much sausage. See my blonde head in a window as I walk on. Think of my mother, who believes that animals killed for food should be named, treasured as a living thing: such is the sacrifice.

Teresa, dressed nicely in yellow, holds out her arm so I can roll up her sleeve. We do this in silence in her turquoise kitchen. She washes dishes and I lean on the counter since she will not let me help her. I have just asked her what she has done today as director of the largest family planning organization in Ecuador. A proposal to work with homosexuals and sex workers on the coast, she tells me. Educating them about AIDS, how it is contracted, what the symptoms are, how not to pass it on to los ni–os. She puts scraps of food in the pot for the dog, Trotsky, to eat. The lives of sex workers are dangerous, both because of disease and physical abuse and attack. Outside I can see the cement tub where Clari washes the sheets.

Patients quickly line the wall of the schoolhouse—the biggest room in the community, children relocated though they sneak back to get their lunches and take hasty looks around at their turf transformed. Here there is no room in which to conduct paponicolaus. Doctora gives a man a shot in his trasero in full view of his community members waiting patiently in the tiny schoolhouse chairs. Martha is having trouble, over in her corner, making herself understood by older patients who only speak Quechua and have never had a thermometer in their mouths. They wag their tongues around in confusion. Martha aims for under the tongue and shuts the hanging jaw with a snap.

Comfort Irina on one of her sad days, wrap the blue blanket around her, lean our foreheads together, heads against the wall, her little face soft as a fern, eyes moving around. Yes, I remember, this is why we are here, this is what it feels like to recognize calmly, touching wrists, this is. Pink river. She asks me again of my time since last living here in this house. I close my eyes until it is just scaffolding, pale orange blossoms, making love to a landscape of cracked earth, in the flatness. The wind howls. The verb for to prove in Spanish is the same as to try, to taste. Irina grabs the spilled bathroom trash with her bare hands. For a woman to be homeless is synonymous with her experiencing assault. How to tell her that where I come from, mi casa is more a thing that can recede? Here In Ecuador where children do not move out of the house even after they become adults, how to tell her home is more of a phantom though the house still stands? Still dark on the kitchen things before morning hits the shadowed kitchen, beans in a pot of water speckled pink. I descend stairs in lonely sunlight, thinking of debarking a boat, when there is no sea, no one. On the way to the church earlier today Teresa bought olitos from a streetside fruit vendor who passed the bunch to me like a bright yellow platter. Teresa handed them out to the nurses along with mandarin oranges. We stood in the dry air, spitting seeds into our hands like coughs.

Black oil in rivulets on the stones below near the flowers on the corner, so bright they look to catch flame. I know this game. I only half-choose what I bring. Coffee candies in a dish, children crowding in front of corner stores. I do not have all of my Spanish back, the would haves, should haves, the if I hads, we could haves. The window on the top floor, where I live, the window with no pane. The sound of a creak has a shape. I look outside it, sun bright on quilted green of startling mountains, cardboard box houses. Concrete slabs of wall, shanties, shards of glass pricking light atop walls, growing out of cement. Less like the top of the sky is thinner and more like we are all simply closer to the sun, elevated, even the roaming dogs, observing small leaf storms. We are living at the center of a synapse. A nerve ending. The translucence in the soup is pig skin.

The bottom of a day bottoms out as the bus careens off of the highway and into the neighborhood of Jardin del Valle under clouds split with lightning. In the clinic's laboratory, where blood is first mixed on a circularly moving tray, liquid is added to make white blood cells float, then it is shaken to further make the red blood cells countable. Teresa offers me a look at a sample of vaginal fluid. She shifts seamlessly between samples of blood, urine, and other bodily fluids. In a mind that keeps reconstruction within its binding of pillars. These are the disasters of the body, the harbor in which we are forcibly anchored. If I remember correctly, the tinged smoke scent rises up from orange fires slicing the ravine.

Teresa, finishing her husband«s drink down to the dregs when she asked for just a taste. Looking sideways at me when I ask how it has been to try and cover all of the clinic's expenses with fees for its services, now without donations from the US. It is a look I have never seen before, none of the motherly affection, just cold hard exchange as equals. It«s fucking hard, she says in Spanish, her eyes hooded and unblinking.

Wet, tropical. I am sixteen: I circle the block alone in indirect, overcast heat, green, yellow melons burgeoning out of turquoise corners. Proprietors sit in canvas skirts murmuring things to me as I duck my head and smile. In a narrow door and up some stairs, in the local clinic, there are three children, two girls and a boy. One of the girls stays behind in the waiting room. What happened to your friend? I say. He broke his arm falling, she says. She is impossibly tiny and curvy, with dainty eyebrows. A doll face. How old are you? Thirteen. I am traveling with the circus. I have for years. Those others inside are not my siblings, but they are like my family. Sixteen and so much younger than her, clouds clean as milk, offering no predictive symbol. Knew it then, looking at her red lips. Perhaps it was true that without proper academic preparation, I did not know what I was seeing. Apparitions bloom up out of the concrete, tasting like that fruit with burgundy fur from the coast, their skin, flowers so bright they could be burning. Those dark eyed ones. I want to fit all of them in my belly and tell them stories about love undone by its own length.

She sits in front of a local dive fanning insects away from bronze prongs of corn. In the pine-thick sunset before I left, my mother and I drove the winding road to find some historic church in the sleeping woods. I produced a map. My mother, eyes forward, driving, accustomed to asking me to read fine print, was less alarmed than I at what happened: for the first time, doubt burrowed into my clavicle, fluttered: the tiny print blurred. What will she do when it gets dark?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Look out the window with no pane. The morning buzzes. From the top window, quickening air, silvery white throngs of rectangles. The plane had to fly between mountains. Awake only in the margins, I sit alone in the empty house across from crystal-filled cupboards, candle wicks untested in the silver centerpiece. This is the house I cannot leave. How could I have forgotten. The conditions. There are sadnesses against which I have no provisions. On TV boys play soccer on the highway leading out of La Paz. Their parents, shawled, bowler hatted, form the blockade with flint in their voices for nationalization of resources instead of their privatization. Clear place mats from the dining room, look up and outside past black metal fence, cement wall, on top of a neighboring wall, at a dog in a yellow Ecuador soccer jersey, shivering in spats of afternoon rain. Can only see the little dog and a stripe of temperamental sky, otherwise walls and fences. Painting of Paris on the wall has begun to crack in spirals. I know this game: myriad ways strength doesn't feel like strength.

I shelve patient histories according to number, pair up laminated fallopian tubes and ovaries with Teresa. Penis, please, she says casually, waiting for me to place a phallic cutout in her tapered fingers. Later she comes into the fluid analysis laboratory where the technicians are reciting the dates of battles for Independence every Ecuadorian knows. They all laugh and jest, scootch past me. One is reading directions for complete DIU insertion from the computer to her colleague, who follows the steps with a sample t-shaped DIU in a plastic dish shaped vaguely like a woman«s uterus. Still, the little threads don«t bloom out sideways against the uterine wall at 2.5 centimeters like they should. They watch the instructional video. It begins with footage of a butterfly emerging from cocoon.

Walver, Teresa's cranky professor husband, takes a different route than Irina through the city as he drives Teresa and me to the clinic. Language flies over, a wide-winged bird. The uterus, voluptuous triangle, pink softness. Two red arms touch the sides, emerge like dainty wings. Here as each evening enters sharp, unfamiliar green cliffs like a violet knife. Physical amnesia. That«s your voice box. Your solar plexus. No one takes the same route. I would be enormous as the night. The yogurt I pay 40 cents for every morning, cat calls I keep hearing from cracks and from windows, humans who make them. I would carry you all.

Trash among cornstalks. Walk back to schoolyard, disoriented. School on a platform, swept mountains, clouds doing a slow waltz. German shepherds, llamas, shy schoolgirls parting ways; step onto the concrete. Traditional flutey Andean music with thumping beat. On a dirty concrete platform at the top of the world, they dance. Among stretched taut mist-quilted Andes, about forty schoolchildren in yellow shiny shirts are dancing. They hop dutifully, rows of long black braids down the girls side, no fussing about touching hands the way we did at their age, little two-step shuffle over and over, forward, circles, going under arches made of their fellows' arms, two pulsing rivers of yellow in motion as if on air. Boys kneel. Girls approach them, dance around as they clap. Mist nearly strokes us.

On the packed trolley a young man finds my crack through layers of sweatshirt and pants, presses his finger in. It is my stop. When I turn he raises his hand as if in a stretch; he is inches away but will not look at me. I glare. Later I wish I had spit in his face. What was your need? Was your friend egging you on, impressed? Did he dare you? Here, as Teresa and Irina and each person I talk to explains, there are fruits, the biological diversity of the Galapagos, ancient rainforests, shrimp, land rich in everything you can think of, here where the drilling continues, a pair of little boys run to catch a bus but only one hops on, the other waves up at his friend and waits for his own bus, where bodies cannot become invisible. In the trolley I produce a knife and cut off your finger. You, insolent, powerless. You I can think about. You do not mark the borders of my dreams, and when I cross the border of this country I will not take you with me. Where afternoon rains bathe the buses, angel statue keeping vigil over a city of pain and intrusion. You, a baby, when you slept your face was a moon.

Lightning to the left and now it streaks the house, lashes the side with sound. Irina disappears to bring her birds inside. Now hail, now sun. She laughs at the thermos with the top jammed on. Mi mami no tiene pacienca with the thermos, she says of Teresa. Though she has infinite patience for people.

If one remembers to pose the questions that exist above them like roses, like smoke.

Teresa hands me a cookie from her booth while dispensing meds, turns to a teenager in a bowler hat and long skirts with a baby on her back. Every dusk seems purple in its entirety, even buildings and lights. Every evening spent on one of the cheap green buses seems green all over, highway and warm bodies between green bus and green mountains green too, air at least takes on tinge, mint smoke endowed with hue. I tell Joaquin that I cannot say most people are kind. I can say most people in my life have been kind to me. Secured by a strange assortment of things, dry rice, the tower of fruit rinds Teresa leaves behind in her bowl, scaffolds erected inside the mind when sound grains out into evening.

An alarm sounds. Emerge from the cold church heavy-bellied into afternoon, thatched roofs, cut piles of wood picking up light like honey. Peel a mandarin carefully sitting with Teresa atop a dirt mound, turn piece of peel over, shaped like petal. We eat ice cream bars, the kind my father would buy for me at Mission Market before it closed. Que es la vida? she asks me at one point. I believe in kindness, I say, implemented kindness. I cannot say for sure anything more. You believe in a god that holds everyone's hand, Teresa responds. What makes you? I lick the ice cream off my fingers. Fact of every memory, every person I have talked with and some I have not, every dream, every reconstruction. Teresa passes me another orange. Fact of the wounds and worries that nestle deep into the body regardless. While one«s own story keeps being written. Storms arise when the sky becomes slabs of stone.

After a silence she asks me what I am pondering. What would you say to the woman whose eye was put out by her husband? I ask. Teresa says slowly, so I can follow: I cannot say anything because it is the product of ignorance but to work and work to educate. Arguably life should include working land, raising animals—this is their tradition. But keep them with no books, no chance to be educated otherwise, like animals themselves, and they will be treated like animals. Teresa doesn't pause to wonder about heaven or hell, she just accepts that they exist because she was raised that way but why are you thinking about this? Prayer is something we do with our hands.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Back in Quito I fall ill from the water used to wash the plates in the church. Climb the wooden stairs to my tiny apartment on Teresa's rooftop. Laundry on the line, people in doorways—it continues, will continue. As always inside a fever the air is cross-hatched and body heavy as I sit in Teresa«s pink shawl with the family for coffee. Teresa tosses a handful of something brown and hardshelled on the table and they rattle like stones. My mouth likes the work of biting. They are talking about impassible highways and a new government with no power. How often does this happen? Hijue! They say. All the time!

After it«s diagnosed as a bacterial infection, Teresa, in a blue shawl, leads the way in her house slippers through the teal evening—grey cobblestones, broken glass—to the pharmacy. I ask Teresa to come closer and talk to me for comfort while the needle is in my arm. ¬Your blood is black,¬ she says simply. I look down. She is right. The infection—intestinal, blood, yeast, urine—hibernated while the Canadian nurses puked and shat theirs out and I translated for the doctors. Now the pharmacy attendant bids me to sit down on the bench and relax. Rows of candy eggs whose wrappers promise a surprise inside the shell. I can feel the injected fluid spread into my muscle. Again needle pierce. Time fractures.

TV is the only distraction from the pain. On the screen, wolves prowl around a frozen Russian boat. I burn, my skin peels. I would carry the young man from Serbia working for the summer at McDonalds who said he wanted no war, no more, just a farm with many children and ¬each kinds of roses.¬ Ascend to the rooftop, skin a loose muscle wrapper, squishy organs and eyes, black blood. Where am I? Carry prescribed compress of warm chamomile tea under strange green light on stairs. Chamomile bits settle to bottom of yellow water in a ring. Roof is quiet. Baby in next house hollers. Saw with own eyes injuries borne for years without medical attention. They labor nonetheless, carry on, toes rotting to black dust. Lay narrative across like train track. Give it all a skin. Supposed to be a smoggy city but stars prick, fall apart in wingbeats. We are animals who hunger for story, and it is not our eyes we blame if we lie.

Fever-dream of mother in transit with cat in carrier, train or whatever it was packed with showers flooding and occupied by strangers. Irina wakes me with a loud knock. Want a kitten? Sure, I say blearily, and hold out my hands. I found him in my room, she says. Take care of him until I get back, when I will give it to a friend who has lots of cats. The kitten, sleek and multicoloured, ventures immediately under the covers and stretches along my side, purring into my armpit. We doze for a while. I massage behind its ears the way I did with my mother's cats. Emerge to find Clari hanging laundry in the fierce white light of morning. Colors hang like bells. Kitten noses large lace tablecloth in sunshine that plays at being a fluid. Disorienting; colors and objects behaving like music. It makes sense, yet I am unsteady in the center of so much beauty.

On road stenciled blue painted hearts, hearts plump to bursting, signifying where there has been a car accident and someone has died. Two dead dogs in street on afternoon that seemed to fit itself wrong, overcast and hot: one stiff with rigormortis, other still warm, two blocks down. Displaced displaced, shadow of heat mirage. Blue petals on potted road.

We sleep at a dairy farm. Martha coos at a baby cow's face. The farmer's son Felipe tells us that all cows are inseminated here. When were we ever promised a linear dream? Milk the odd finger-like teat and get nothing out of it. I can't believe I«m not moving, Martha said after 45 minutes in the back of the farmer's milk truck. Felipe tells us about money troubles and a grove of young pine trees that froze in the frost and were then flash-burned by the sun. Concepts like error are phantom scaffolds. Music. Story. Punishment. Imposing graphs on a globe.

Put what you wish to release on the back of the lizard whose shape is in the shale on the opposite cliff, eucalyptus wind, lifting it all away—the two pairs of tiny boots abandoned near a dune, then the lunch pail on a crest further off, then finally, the shepherd boys themselves, twisting back to study us in a moment of confusing grace. They are minding their sheep. Don«t beautify it.

Where the lizard in the rock comes alive and mountains yawn to reveal a deep green body of water, where an old woman weaves as goats cavort on cliffs below her--God is off spinning some other yarn, God has left us with the particularities of an experiment that smells like eucalyptus, dirties skirts of little girls who follow asking for bread, gusts of wind so strong that pieces of orange peel on my palm let fly like paper. Don't worry so, says Teresa, laughing into her papaya at the crease between my brows. She pushes a platter of bread toward me. I will not carry the rancor with me, pounds of moth decaying. I will take this body, its clefts, its strings, its silences. I will rise with it. No latitude, here in the center of the road of flesh that will constitute my carcass.

Woman stands on roof. Beyond concrete walls where frosting of broken glass shards spread into cement to deter intruders, she sees city turn violet after rains. Overhead she has suspended underclothes of her husband and children like white prayer flags. Her shoulders ache. Last orange daylight steals away and lights of city together look like quivering animal across ravine. She takes off her body, hangs it on hook, disappears into doorway. The statue overlooking the city is the only statue of the Virgin with wings.

1976.

Summer evening, Hill House porch, Eagle Island, Maine.

George, Mary, and Helene talk of something philosophical.

Helene stuffs a chicken. George lights a match for his pipe.

Tractor rests in sunlight.

I.

I plant spinach with Helene, ocean on either side. Bob's tractor sends up dandelion seeds. My head on Helene's lap, on a couch, in the back of a lobster boat. We feel like queens on top of the protective plastic wrapping. Dirt under nails.

I listen to a book on tape as my mother does habitually. I slide into being her as we putter in gardens on separate coasts. We talk more often now, about once a month, and her voice comes in round shapes. I think spherical is glad.

Before and after taking the mail boat out to the island it is tradition for me to stay in a roomy white bed in the roomy white house of a woman, Dindy, who met my mother in a college dorm in Oregon forty years ago. They hit it off immediately, downed a case of beer, Dindy's dark hair already striped with white, my mother intelligent and stunning. We were very philosophical, says Dindy.

I remember this wandering at low tide: mollusk-ridden ridges. Plucking not one snail from the conglomeration of them. In blue soup with water and seaweed, those bubbles one can pop. A cold day in early June. Time bends. The rock is striped. Possible to read rocks for age, for events in their history. Life happened to my mother and Dindy; they correspond rarely. Forty years is but a trifle. Fire in grate thrums. Rain streaks. I have only ever known Dindy with hair pale and light as petals. I shook-shook a carrot with a peeler. Marked already by what is about to happen, by how life-gravity draws to place where hands deftly employ tools fashioned from sky, metal, regret. On the piano, pictures in frames. The tide is low. The moon is pulling.

The submerging is easy.

Sweet wind. I handle tender seedlings, ocean wherever I glance up. The garden-way cart has lost its back panel. A candle flickers on the dining room table, set for supper, Bob's favorite spoon where it should be. The island groans as the wind kicks up. Full of Helene's poppyseed muffins and skinned-kneed, I'd stare at the attic window, sure a pale woman would appear there, looking back.

For here ghosts are loosened.

The air upsets across open meadow and perplexes them into ruffling, acting. Helene never specifies when we ask her if anyone died in the farmhouse, in the attic rooms where we, her dish-washing, odd-job-doing "summer daughters," sleep and hang stray pieces of frilled linen over the rafters.

But if there are ghosts, she says carefully, they manifest themselves as a benevolent presence.

The here-and-there baby sunflower plants must be moved to the north corner of the garden. What if we are god's playthings indeed, his trinkets, his pendants? Earrings his mother left behind and loved, living in the smooth wood box. The box that never lost its rose-water smell. I loosen dirt with fingers that morph, wizen then soften, and the scent of dirt is then loosened in plumes and the worms loosened in violet haste, arching.

My mother calls hens "biddies." Bob has built a handy sliding door with a nail or two and a board for collecting eggs. The biddies eat table scraps and line up like pumpkins when light falls away along the edge of the planet. "I'm learning to invite my daydreams in for chats," I write.

The blackness of night is not the blackest there is. Nor of soil.

What forces work on that patch of ocean to lighten it so? Not sun, just. The flies group on that side of the rock for a reason. I take a walk after the morning routine to a currently tenant-less cottage called Little Camp, lie on top of the scratchy wool blankets. I look up from a book and between mothballs a sound like music swells with a heavy thing, a thing like love, unbalanced, webbed and diagonal. Outside things are ebbing.

Bleeding is supposed to be the loss of something.

Phoebe, another summer daughter, cuts my hair. Helene has gone ashore, so we are to act as satellites around the radio in case Bob needs something. Jaaron clicks the Rubix cube into place again. This is heaven, I think. This moment lives on. Sometime soon we will make cocoa. I am thinking of basil, and of participation. I scribble in my journal: "Isn't participation in a moment the biggest thanks I can give for its arrival? And what about widening what that means? How can a daydream be outside of that if, during a moment, one daydreams?"

This rain might wash away the seeds.

Look.

Look at all you've

Forgotten.

Red top-grass. A black crow lining over billowing laundry. The pieces of your life, the ones reflected in the wiggling glass, the cracked glass—here where she digs mollusk shells from the compost heap that baby radishes might grow unhindered.

The summer you began to garden, the summer you again picked up your paintbrush.

She is thrilled I fit into her old clothes, the ones she saved. In the warmth of the attic my belly morphs with time's erratic twinges, bulkens, softens after birth.

He was a fine sailor, is the first thing Bob has to say about George. Bob knows a number of sailors and does not say this about many of them—any of them, to my knowledge.

Next he says: he was on the fringes of keeping bad company.

Then heads out the door, slanted forward not with age but with purpose, to fix the propane tank. Helene turns to me, wiping hands on apron, explains: He hung out with Ezra Pound. In France. He and Mary drifted, went to Mexico. Bob, home for dinner and accosted by me on the couch, puts down the paper and says, They were like hippies but too early to be hippies. Bohemian, I think they were called.

One kind of night everyone loves: foggy, when candles are lit and Bob is persuaded to read rhyming, rhythmic poetry written by Robert Quin, Sr., and kept in an aging binder. His voice, and that of Helene, cradled by Down East accent, sounds itself like a prow through dark water, a rich growl.

The word I keep hearing from Bob, Helene, and their daughter Treena is gentle. They were gentle people, George and Mary. Helene pauses: highly evolved intellect. They went where the wind took them, loved their boat. Went, god knows why, way-the-hell-and-gone out to Metinicus—the farthest islet in the chain out from Deer Isle. Bob shakes his head about this in the same way he shook his head at that fact that I have been to Siberia. Bob knows his rock, knows it very well, stays there if he can. Couldn't go out in storms because their boat was small and George and Mary were small too, wind would've knocked 'em clean over.

Bob stayed on Eagle even after all of his siblings left saying get off that rock, Bob, go have a life somewhere. One day when I was thirteen Bob and I walked through the wood up to the farmhouse. I asked him what he did after high school. Bob served in the army. I learned how to shoot people, he said, and didn't have much to say beyond that. Naturally he came right back to Eagle when it was over. On the way through the woods he pointed at a Maine Forest Association sign and indicated unhappiness at a mark made on it by a rock someone had thrown.

What I can't stop wondering after Helene mentions that a poet came to Eagle summers of the 70's, after she says he was named George Oppen, after she tells me that the typewriter he used and other things of his and his wife Mary's are in the Hill House attic, after I am shocked that no one has ever wanted to go see them, after I find the key to the attic on the crowded ring that hangs next to the outgoing mail basket in the farmhouse, after I arrange to do the dinner dishes so as to have the afternoon off and daylight to see by, after I struggle with the door in the floor of the attic and heave myself up into its must and close heat and mouse shit and toys and clothes from the 70's, after I realize that little light makes it in here anyway, what I can't stop wondering is: is this anyone's to unearth?

A Gulf of Maine map covers the top of a box bearing the markered label: "clothes: G & M."

Between a rusted stove and a pile of 2x4's, something over which is draped a blue polyester shirt covered in red paisleys.

It is gray. It says "Royal." The Y, V, G, and H keys are stuck down.

I hit the tab button.

It rings.

Breezes sneak up the eaves.

1976.

Summer evening, Hill House porch, Eagle Island, Maine.

George, Mary, and Helene talk of something philosophical.

Helene stuffs a chicken. George lights a match for his pipe,

Succumbs just then to consideration of topic, holds lit match.

The fringes of the tablecloth catch fire.

"We laughed about that one for a long time."

The Education of Henry Adams. Virgil: The Pastoral Poems. Basic Readings from the Kabbalah. Woolf: Between the Acts, Jacob's Room, Letters of, Night and Day, The Death of the Moth, To the Lighthouse, The Waves. Koestler: Dialogue With Death. Maritain: Existence and the Existent: an Essay on Christian Existentialism. Brod: Franz Kafka Biography. Euripides III. Aeschylus I. Adams: The United Sates in 1800. Heidegger: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Jeffers: The Women of Big Sur and Other Poems. Helman: Scoundrel Time. The Canterbury Tales. Brown: The United States and India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Sayers: Gaudy Night. Bancroft: The Life of Washington. Polk: The United States and the Arab World.*

The many islands constituting part of Maine's unorganized territory boast two official year-long residents. Bob and Helene Quinn both come from families whose involvement with Eagle, a mile-by-half-mile swatch of land just off Deer Isle in the Penobscot Bay, goes back for generations. Bob went to school on the island in the white schoolhouse people can visit if they borrow the key with the bell attached from the farmhouse kitchen. The chalkboard is covered in signatures, and the maps are comically outdated. Most of Bob's family is buried on Eagle in a small cemetery down the road from Haeni's beach where fake flowers garnish white, moss-covered stone. Only one road goes down the middle of the island, and it's called Highway 1--people call it that, some people, with a smile in their throats.

Helene meets my mother while my mother is living with my half-sister in Blue Hill. My mother, Blue Hill Hospital's first alcohol counselor, has advertised at Stonington High for a talk-to-your-youth-about-alcohol meeting. Helene, who works at the high school and has a youth (Treena), is one of the only four people to show up. They all troop back to someone's place for tea. Fifteen years after that I see the island for the first time. Five years after that I return alone to work for Helene and Bob, and do so for the next six summers and counting.

The Oppens are doing their perfunctory exploring when Bob finds them on his island around 1970. A fan of George's on the mainland has been a little too ever-present even for the kind and open-hearted Oppens, so the Oppens have sailed on, looking for a quieter spot. The Oppens stay on Eagle. Bob isn't much for the kind of poetry George writes and has just won a Pulitzer for. The Quinns and the Oppens cherish the company they find in each other, and it isn't poetry they talk about.

Very worthwhile people, says either Helene or Bob retrospectively. One of them says it right at the time sharp sunlight filters into the dining room to slice candlesticks and glass. I don't remember which one says it. It is something either one would say.

Big Camp, a cheerful red cabin on the West side of the Island where a Swedish seamstress now stays every summer, didn't used to be red. I don't know what else about it was different when the Oppens called it home each summer. For however long it was their home, for whatever conditions made something home for them. By all accounts, the Oppen's home was in each other. By all accounts, moving from place to place helps one to locate a space, a home inside oneself. By all accounts, the Quinns travel rarely. But by all accounts, the Quinns are at home.

I walk to Big Camp at sunset on my last day on Eagle summer 2004. Every summer I forget about the thorns in Big Camp's yard and wander there barefoot. Big Camp is locked, just a modest three-room cabin catching the best of the dying light. There is a 1968 car, rusting between Big Camp and Little Camp, the neighboring cottage I sneaked into to read. As it turns out, the Oppens would put up their guests there. The guests were often literary types and fans. Before and after entertaining them, recalls either Bob or Helene, and between random stretches of days when boat and crew would disappear, the two small adventurers would return, walk up to the farmhouse, waving.

Sometimes we go ashore. Typically it is to grocery shop. Flour, milk, tomatoes. Helene's informal Eagle Island Bakery has been a hit with people staying on Eagle, Barred, Great Spruce, etc. One thing I have done a few times is pick my way down the path to the shore slowly, holding a package in my hands firmly horizontal so as not to disturb the pie.

Sometimes Bob delivers, say, still-warm Anadama bread over to, say, Great Spruce Head and lets me lie on my stomach on the nose of his boat, TMII, staring at the churning white, glancing up to look for seals. I'm terrible at knotting rope, though Bob tries many times to show me, looping it around a spoke of the steering wheel, then undoing it for me to try. Bob carries the deep smell of lobster bait in with him at the end of the day. His lobster traps are furnished with buoys painted orange and black.

The path down to the shore is the same one Bob takes every day to his boat, and I have been with him as he stops and takes a gander at the view, the view that only for him and Helene is not a rare one. Not showily. Just looks.

Bob's boat is named after his daughter. The last boat, Treena Marie, was totaled in a storm some years back. Helene described it once. Bob sensed what happened to his boat before they made it down to the shore. He could just tell.

Bob is having trouble with his teeth lately. It rankles him. Helene cooks up a lot of yams, boils vegetables until they are soft, prepares tender fish. A good guy, Helene says about him once as I sweep the kitchen floor. I have just asked her how does someone know when someone is right for them and she has boiled it down to whether you would feel okay taking care of them when they are sick. That's not all of it, she says, but a necessary part.

Anna, another summer daughter, asks Bob once if he has any regrets. The only one he comes up with is keeping Helene from traveling with his homebodiness. He knows she loves to travel.

This summer I nap in the car while Bob and Helene do errands in Brewer. The inside of the little Swedish car is a yellowish brown. It is hot. When they get back, Bob reminds me to sit up for the car ride part because he could be fined $60. They've just been to see their accountant. Bob explains things in terms like "inheritance" and "entitlement" but I can't understand on account of the lump in my throat. I've just learned what "imminent domain" means, and though the worst hasn't happened, Eagle is on a list of islands the government would like to appropriate should the owners like to sell. Bob and Helene settle on a restaurant and inside it is beautifully cool. Helene asks what I'll have and I think maybe just an appetizer. She straightens, her brown curls lifted with hours of heat. Don't order something just because it costs less, you get whatever you want. Bob agrees. He is in his customary button-up plaid shirt, glasses clean, eyes twinkling. Helene beside him in a striped cotton T from Reny's. Just warning you, Ming, I'm going to give you some money before you go to Boston, she says. You don't have any money to give, I protest, I work for room and board. I have more money than you do, she says. This is the first day, alone with Bob and Helene away from the business of the island, that I know to ask harder questions. I have never heard Bob speak in terms of meaning. It's simple. The meaning of the island to him outweighs the financial hardship of living there. The same goes for Helene. We could be millionaires if we wanted, Helene says. I glance up quickly: they look different to me. Sitting together. Spectacles gleaming. They could if they wanted, but they don't. Side by side.

A stethoscope.

Wet-weather gear smelling of bird shit.

"Desk Materials: G & M"

Empty used manila envelopes, most addressed to the Oppens on Eagle. On 7/25/77 someone sent George a manuscript to look over from Blue Bird Press, called "Night Shift" by a Maria Someone. A can of smoking tobacco. A postcard or two from 1977. All well, how are you, etc. Can't read name of sender. I begin to feel strange. My hands are separate from me, sorting through inky shrapnel. Looking at them sift through someone else's things, I think, those can't be mine. The things. The hands.

At the bottom of the box, one piece of yellow legal pad paper, folded. On the bottom half is written:

Sometimes I cannot move at all and will not either

I imagine myself looking over a group of hills

The trees begin

begin to sway and

as I watch I Turn

Turn Turn inward

And outward toward myself toward myself standing

Standing in entrances-------about to come in. When

when am I going to enter?

Come in come in I say to all the fragments

(written in pen; a graphite pencil line drawn across the page as if to discard it)

Helene recognizes Mary's handwriting.

Dear Helene,

We are both well. George

is having trouble remembering—

This problem of age is hard to

place, hard to accept, hard to

understand. We are together which

is most important to us both—

almost all activity & decisions

devolve on me, this again

is hard on George who has been

forced to give up & give up

and give up—perfectly

conscious of his loss.

We will be here when

you come—a long time or

a short—just let us

know the dates. We have

two rooms for you—and

we will talk. We'll show

off San Francisco, of course

also.

Love to you all

we think of you so often, as

though time had not elapsed—

Mary

A family friend called Sally visits Mary at her house in Berkeley in 1989 and sends a report and photos back to Helene. We spoke of you a lot . One of the photos is of a painting Mary did on Eagle of the view. It stands on her mantelpiece.

In the red grassy field where children have played tag every summer for a century I see silhouettes, light pulsing. Even in the photos, in old age, Mary's eyes hasten blue.

After leaving the Island I read the 1975 George Oppen issue of "Ironwood 5," Mary's memoir, "Meaning a Life," and "The Materials" on July days riding the subway to and from Russian class, marveling at the people, the words, the starts and stops, my first time living in a city, and alone, too. Sweat. Words. Sticking. I duck my head, read, look up.

It's not that this does nothing. It's that I double back, try to do it properly. Research.

No use. Before I even try to read a bibliography: the deed, or damage, is done. These were the Oppens I met.

Not mine to think, sifting through sweaters, undergarments, socks.

Sun has grayed the dock posts. June is still cold, sea-water wise. The boat's motor idles.

Precedence dictates that the world will reconfigure like fluid around their absence and function on.

Their absence will probably come sooner than mine. It is the way they would have it. My calves are longer now when I dangle them over the edge of the float. My shoes triangulate.

After loading the sofa covered in plastic off of the dock into the back of her husband's lobster boat, we sit on the sofa, my head on her lap. She mopped my vomit off of the attic stairs when I was thirteen at 1am; her mother radar went off, she knew something was wrong, came out of her bedroom. My vision is slanted, edge of boat, edge of her bosom, soft body I never knew when pre-child thin and sinewy. Now we talk of different things, unintended pregnancies. Land development. No point in dwelling. I only knew her soft.

I would like to soothe the ache of that hole where lived old friends who died, who keep dying, the hole where you number among the last. I won't. Just as I'll not be consoled when you go, just as nothing will fill or be there to be filled. You call yourself old, I call myself worn. By future losses whose shape I cannot paint. I would like always to be a pair. Like blue jeans. I would like to paint your shape and hold it there, in sunlight.

September does what it always does, red and receding.

Their shapes flicker and glisten, gesturing. They gesture for my head to turn, turn forward, to look down at my hands, lucid.

A clothesline. A wide tree. A baby garden bed, darkened with water lugged from the well.

Simple to describe: Two soft-spoken people choose a different life, a life close only to each other. They go about things quietly, grace thundering behind them. Wisdom gentle, light-catching: glass, fish, water.

No one positioned to inherit their place. Simple. No one will live how they lived; no one will be who they were. Simple. The home will sleep. Simple. The light won't get up again.

*The books left behind by George and Mary, in order of their stacked-ness as I lifted them one by one out of the box.

** These are of all the words I could make out from George's notes in the soft book cover of Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics.

***Same, for Maritain's Existence and the Existent.

George's handwriting is lively--his notes are scribbled over each other in faded pencil and pen, things are crossed out, exclamation marks here and there. He also had some things to say about Aeschylus 1 in the margins: "Crime," "murder," "Symbol," etc. I guess Mary had been the one to take pencil to Adams' The United States in 1800, as the underlines were clean and straight and the letters well-formed.

Outside a block of flats, a group of children. A boy circles on a bike. His companions chase and laugh. On the second floor, a man stands on a balcony and smokes. A woman leans out of the fourth floor, shakes a rug, recedes. The wall is huge, with orderly windows and stacks of balconies. The wall swallows the woman and her rug.

No, not even that.

The brunette woman and her red rug.

They were never there.

Olga and I walk in the fog to the canteen. I remind myself to go faster; she is always waiting for me. We take off our coats and scarves and hand them to a woman in a blue apron. She gives us dirty plastic tags. The old guard kicks his feet up on the desk. I am learning to fix my hair in the mirror like Olga does, though mine doesn't have the flip she blow-dries in each morning. Thick, warm juice. Boiled cabbage. Fish. Cream globs on the surface of my soup. It is here I look at her face. The walls are pink. Outside, litter. The curtains are frilled. Outside, birches just now bare and stained with rain. I watch her everywhere we go. At twenty-seven, she has no particular wish to be somebody's wife. I look at her shapely buttocks in tight pants as she buys tickets for the Board of Trustees' trip to Finland. She earns a good salary. Her voice is soft.

Even in Objachevo, a village of 8,000, there is a Lenin. He is silver, and pointing. I can see why men prayed to him. I want to discuss the irony of this with someone, but I have already plied my English-speaking friends with too many questions, and so far I only know enough Russian to say Thank you, I'm full.

What would Lenin point at? The future, maybe, though on such a brilliant morning, silver finger afire, the future is too abstract of an answer. A particularly graceful birch tree leaking yellow onto the pavement? Stark land, northwest Russia, forest as far-reaching as grief. Thank you, I'm full.

Around us business people in dyed red hair or ill-fitting suits are taking their lunches, looking seasick under the fluorescent light. Olga nudges me, says the man in back and to my left is Katya's boyfriend. Which one? The married one. I have no idea what constitutes an appropriate glance. The instant I look, he is biting down on a roll. The reel of film plays over and over, the mechanical lift of the arm, eyebrows working down with the chomp, over and over, grinding into Katya's thin, bronze body, over and over. Grimacing the way someone taking a bite does. Over and over. A business suit sleeve and a roll glazed with sugar. No face. Just a bite.

The stairwell smells like sulfur. Empty cigarette packs and fish heads on the steps. I hurry up eight flights, hoping to somehow stave off the meatball weight gain, shedding layers of clothing as I go, remembering half the time to be conscious of dark corners. The words "hip-hop" are written in English on the walls. Windows are broken. A window of the staff van was broken during just one night in Objachevo. When a window is broken the conclusion is always that someone was drunk.

I try to write hip-hop lyrics, alone in my room before Nadezhda and Anatoly come home. I sit cross legged, facing the window, a cup of instant coffee in my hands, struggling to make my voice loud when it has always been quiet, to take the recent pain of my first broken heart and spit it out with conviction.

Anthropology 140: Cultural Anthropology. The lecture is about the political lives of dead bodies. Lenin's body in particular. It was moved a few times. I listen. Quickly cease to remember. We discuss statues. Immortalizing people. The philosophical meaning of Lenin's statues. He is everywhere. His face is godly. He is dead. He is worshipped. His body a political symbol, its movement a political statement.

Russia in my mind is a dreary place, cold, wide, unintelligible. Solemn. Frightening. I leaf through the class text, imagining other humans endowing a corpse with meaning as a sort of collective ball of light, a 5-o-clock p.m. honey light, behind the head of the corpse. The audience wowing at a product of their own wishing. Like the quark machine at Princeton someone told me about once. Not very many quarks recorded while no one was there. If someone came, sat, looked at the screen. Wanted quarks. There they were. There is Lenin, handsome, a man of the people. Peasants crowded round his deathbed.

The head cashier notices me the first time we come to this particular canteen. She has a large mole and sharp eyes. I only need to know once how she reacts to my not eating everything on my plate to subtract the heavy potato from my selections and dutifully gobble the rest. She comes to fill the salt shakers and checks my progress, nods, says something to Olga. At my request, Olga translates. She says you're a good girl.

Time behaves strangely, swallowing events. The puddles have frozen but cars still rush between potholes and swerve dangerously. It is an odd feeling, these Russian mornings, these dirty buses. I am everywhere. I am nowhere. I am stretched between people. Women trudge, shawls around their heads, crossing themselves fervently at the gate of a brand-new Byzantine church. I walk past a park filled with birch trees to a warm office where there is tea in the kitchen and aerosol room freshener in the bathroom. My daydreams are vivid enough to be happening somewhere. On the day of my father's death the man I love lies in bed with me, looking at my face. The Russian word for car sounds to my untrained ear like the Russian word for men.

We all know it is one of the last clear days of autumn. I am about to experience my first Russian winter, but there is no trace of it in the broad sky and river. Stout golden light. Birches half-naked and still. We roast sausages over the fire, celebrating the weather with a picnic of equal parts meat, potatoes, and alcohol. The factory across the river leaks smoke like ink in cursive across the sky's pale edge. Vladimir's favorite soccer team, St. Petersburg's club team, won yesterday. He belts out its anthem on the steep riverbank, spilling his oddly colored drink. Lena adjusts her quiet toddler's hat. Katya redoes her lipstick. Sasha and Olga joke in a language I still don't understand. It sounds like they are rolling marbles in their mouths. As long as I am a stranger in a strange land, I decide, drunk, I have no choice but to hibernate in the den of my internal world.

Sasha bundles little Lucia in his jacket with his big hands. She fell into the water. She sniffles. Vladimir undresses a birch limb with his knife. The shavings fall like snow.

I read Einstein's Dreams, in bed with my first Russian cold. We cannot know the nature of time; we live according to its nature. Time could go in a circle. We might know. Time could be a sense. We wouldn't know. The cigarette I have longed for all afternoon is in my hand, the railing of the front steps dirty and bent and too cold to touch. A huge machine pounds cement stakes into the ground in the next plot, which shakes our building to a slow rhythm—a giant approaching, screaming maiden in his fist.

I walk beside Alexei, thinking of a quote: "The soul of another is a dark forest." (Who wrote that? A Russian did.) His dark forest like a sphere around his head and body, pathways of solids and fluids, thought and matter. The lines of our lives touch like moths, stretch parallel on a damp street. Which dimension is it that has us seeing everywhere we've been? The first snow falls and barely sticks, dusts the tops of logs. Women in fur hats glance curiously. His face is fraught with acne. He tested well enough to go to Moscow to study physics, but he must stay here. He does not live in a flat. He lives in a wooden house with electricity but no hot water, taking care of his mother, who works at a telegraph center. He never knew his father. He has drawn up a list of questions in English to ask me.

"The soul of another is a dark forest." Quotes validate writing, supplement, elucidate. Supposedly. Quotes depend on the past. They emerge out of it as out of a deep pond. Goldfish, at least, do not pretend to have enough of a grasp on the past to thrust greedily into a context. A life. Emerge triumphantly with something to gut. The body of Lenin is empty of vital organs. It is currently being dressed in a new uniform by people in a laboratory. A good quote illuminates an essay, gives it a back. Good lighting illuminates Lenin's husk to make him look godlike. According to Olga, Lenin has no back. Alexei would like to read my poetry. When it is time to leave I say Thank you and he does not respond. I say Thank you again and he says I do not know what to say. I say Maybe you're welcome. He looks at me, thinking. Those are common things. I like to say original things but I do not know enough English. He shuts the door. Lenin's body imitates that of a saint, liberated (or restrained) from natural decomposition. Look closely at Lenin's mouth. How easy it would be to open it, fingers working the cold skin (stubble?) and place the apple there (teeth?). I wonder what it is like to own a brain that devotes itself to the consideration of atoms, neutrons, magnetism. Alexei certainly does not know enough English to tell me that. Which dimension is it that has us seeing everywhere we've been?

When I am six I teach myself to tie my shoes, waiting on a railroad tie for my mother and brother to come out to the car. In Russia they keep the original soundtrack under the voice-overs, so British movies aired on Russian channels sound like crowded airport bars. I am two, telling my sister I don't want her to cut my food, I want Daddy to, and Daddy complies. At the bottom of a Russian glass of juice there is solid fruit, which one spears with a fork. I am fifteen and I tell my father I don't think he should shout at his doctor just because the doctor might not give him his Vicodin; my father pulls over and leaves me by the side of the road. Russian schoolgirls walk arm in arm in pink jackets, long braids down their backs.

The organization I type English documents for is dedicated to implementing sustainable forestry. The biggest obstacle is turning out to be changing the mind of the local population, teaching them the process of democratic determination when they are used to a Soviet state issuing orders that are not questioned. Convincing them that they have a voice. Teaching them how to use it. Old-growth forests are protected now, according to agreements between scientific institutions, logging companies, and the people. The soul of another is a dark forest. The soul, a forest. Does this mean we are reforming how a soul works? Protecting its untouched parts. Reforming.

Are we saving souls?

Olga takes me to visit her parents. I can't tell if the shouting and breaking is normal until Olga sits on the edge of the bed I have been napping in, tears in her eyes. I am sorry, she says. I didn't know things had gotten this bad. It is our first time alone together outside of the office. I want her to like me. I am lonely. I touch her shoulder. Her mother comes in, speaking unevenly in Russian. A cigarette dangles from her hand. She lifts the other hand, strokes my forehead in jerks. My feeling has no name. This touch belongs to Olga. I ache to lean into it; I have not been touched this way in years. We leave early, I look out the window, the sky opens with rain. There is this longing. Our weeping is out of sync.

I am nineteen, a number, and numbers give names to time, which either doesn't exist or exists in fragments. I am nineteen and learning to wear the painted lips and forward glare of Russian women. I am twenty-six, fiddling with the engagement ring on my finger, feeding rice to my sister's baby. I am fifty-five and a spinster, driving a purple car I have named Pollywog.

I am nineteen, shaping my facial expression like clay. I am twenty-two, at my first job, nervous.

Lenin died in nineteen twenty-two.

This from Sasha, and not a fact I bother to check. I give my Russia to the people I meet to shape like clay.

I lied I do check and the year the book says is not the year Nadia sitting up straight in her chair eyebrows knit remembers it being.

According to records, someone broke my heart. Ah. Records. My own words become a quote, then. The onion of remembering. I walk across Katoovskaya Treenadtset, parting the air of an outer layer. A layer where someone broke it but it is not broken. No, not even that. If there is no break. How can one claim it was broken?

Lenin to my right, eyes forward as soldiers.

The past replaced.

The past effaced.

The past retraced.

The past erased.

And it is never someone, really. Not, at least, when we are nineteen. We are all too alone together for that. You broke your own heart. The sky is cranky with fog, government buildings stuck with antennas like acupuncture needles.

Neighboring town. Paper mill puking smoke and providing jobs. Nadezhda takes my picture. I just want to take a picture of the mill. I do not smile.

You see. I am learning.

Logging equipment, factories, bare trees, flat blocks. We sit in the flat of one of the workers. Nadezhda supplies cookies for tea, buys me a cream basket simply because I point them out as my favorite. Onions dry under the handsome son's bed. The wife has a yellow dress on. They speak quickly. We look at photos, and I sit between Nadezhda, who turns the pages too slowly for my liking, and the father, the hunter. A hunting album, for the most part. Antlers on the walls. Tattoos on his hands. I want to sleep. I want her to turn the pages faster. I look over at the soft-spoken man. Sitting beside us, not to show Nadezhda, but to show me. What he loves. I am guilty; I search for common ground, flip back to the cute hunting dogs. He shows me the tags. I ask about the dog competition. He produces a real rabbit foot, six inches, roughly stitched. He caught the rabbit in September. I tell them it means good luck to rub it. He says to keep it. I say thank you, thank you, thank you. I rub it against my cheek. To remember. They ate the rabbits and birds he caught. Two of my favorite Russian songs came on the radio during the car ride home, the snow falling, the sky dark, the flats lighted, the air sharp with cold.

Memory is not fact, a friend says in an email from Brooklyn. It is perception. What we call the past does not guard fact, it guards reconstruction. Images. Missing. Wishing. Compromises between the involuntary shedding of experience our brains do in spite of us and the light we prefer to cast a history in. Nostalgia: the selection of pleasant memories. Grudges: the selection of unpleasant ones. We are all alone together.

Remember. All the advice that sticks. Remember this, then: love is work. Who we are is different from what we do. Add time and stir if there is no apparent solution. If you are unsure of a moment's meaning, celebrate the poetry in it. Every act is an act of love. Earth is a hard place to be. Feel thankful for the confusion, because it is yours. We are all alone together.

I work at an old computer in the big meeting room, where I can easily hear the glasses clinking and voices laughing. Teatime. I like knowing the drill. I pour apple yogurt into a black bowl. Vova gives me bread and potatoes for lunch. I am famous for wanting milk in my coffee, which around here is endlessly strange. Sasha looks dashing in his business suit. He is off to give a lecture on forest biodiversity. According to office gossip, his wife rules him. Sugar cubes. Earl Grey. Madonna's latest video. I bite into a pastry, groan. I should know by now. Russian food is full of surprises. Ham and cheese inside the chicken. Jam inside the cookie. Fish inside the pastry.

When Anatoly asks to look at my passport, he gives me his, and I study every stamp. I point to one. He says My woman. Points to Nadezhda, slim and petite in her green housedress. His marriage registration. I laugh, say Your wife, Anatoly. Wife. Nadezhda looks up, smiles, says Woman, maybe other. I am wife. I am almost certain she jokes. Russians often joke about adultery.

Magpies wake me up every morning of third grade because the dog food is kept in a barrel outside my window. Screeches. Yellow beaks. Black and white. I smoke a menthol cigarette outside the tax bureau where Olga waits to have a salary report stamped. It flies between two dingy apartment blocs out of a sunlit morning on my front deck. I bury my head under the rough, pink comforter. I tuck my fingers into my jacket, mint smoke in my mouth, painfully cold air. Can't we just put the dog food somewhere else? Do menthol cigarettes have worse chemicals in them than regular ones?

In the car on the way to the forest, Premslav tries to explain to me the virtue of infidelity. Maybe you are not used to the idea, but when you are young and want to have a family you look for a good father. Later maybe your priority is to have a good lover. I tell him if I cannot find a man who is both I will not marry. Alongside the highway, tan grass and red berry trees. I fix my expression, try to work out the kinks. Learn the Russian glare. Nothing is wrong. My protest, too quick. He studies me, knowing.

In Syktyvkar, everyone meets at Lenin. In Moscow, Nadezhda informs me, the popular meeting place is Pushkin. There is a statue of him here, too, one arm across his chest, under a stone branch with a nest. He is nicknamed Man Taking A Shower. The three women waiting solemnly for their heroes to come home from the war, a pine branch across their outstretched hands, are Women With Alligator. There is a nickname for every statue.

Lenin, the territory of the Komi Republic carved out of the stone behind him, is Man With Backpack.

Against all good judgment my brother watches a video about snakes with Mom. I know better. Still, I am awake in the night. My blankets rustle. I know better than to look. Maybe a man in a trench coat? A mummy. A ghost. Morning, Marc has bags under his eyes, says It was me, I was scared, I tried to get in bed with you. I turn, lift up the blanket for him, hug him. We sleep. Over and over I turn and lift. He isn't there. Not only that--learn from the statue, the hard gaze of stone. He never was.

Olga takes me on the majority of her errands. Fresh air. Walk. Tax agency. Her duties as administrator are apparently to answer the phone, type financial reports, and wait in line with them. Wait in line. We wait. In line. She sends me to find cream baskets. I take a ticket, wait in line to buy them, sound out the labels of chocolates and meats. I walk around the block to kill time, still catch myself smiling at old women. Used to Soviet suspicion; they are caught off-guard by my unlocked expression. I set my face. I am examined quickly. Their features do not change. I begin to teach myself not to look back. One foot. The other foot. A tricky thing to learn. Like tying shoes. Sparse snow. A rifle shop Open 24 Hours. A room filled with tired, long-coated women. Olga is text-messaging Nadia on her cell phone. The line has barely moved.

Flat blocks: inevitably gray and trimmed with purple. Flats: identical layouts. Neighborhood: 40,000 people living in cement blocs. Inside a flat: warm. Cooking: something. A family: each member folds up sofa bed in the morning. Stairwell: foul and shadowed. Expression: inevitably solemn and trimmed with suspicion.

On the 9^th floor of one of the blocks there is a woman with a baby. The woman has a shock of red hair and a deep laugh. The baby is the fifth of her husband's children. His eldest is her age (twenty-nine). She has a little boy with tremendous ears. Like angel wings, she tells me. Which trees are the first to reproduce themselves after a controlled burn? Birch, spruce, then cedar. She makes a mean batch of mayonnaise. When I was fifteen, she says, I led the preteen communist party youth group. I listened to live punk music. I drank beer. I smoked pot. She high-fives her teenage stepson. She explains to me the three generations precipitated by the end of the Soviet era: older than fifty, most cant grasp it. Angry. Thirty-five to fifty, some get it, work new market jobs, some don't and are angry. Under thirty-five, they get it. Oceans away from their grandparents. They have choice. They have selves. They must decide. They must ponder. Better this way, she says. Enough of angry people waiting in lines. She looks sex at her husband. In ten years they move to the forest, maintain ecological trails, fuck in between the trees. In five years he takes another woman and leaves her. In fifteen years he gets too old to fuck and she takes two lovers who tell her that her hair is like fire. He leaves her. She leaves him. Three children in the house, none with the same parents. They dance, grab hold, make a family, let go, grab hold of another. Perhaps it is more honest this way. She leaves. He leaves. They dance.

Where are you hiking with that big backpack, Lenin?

Summer evening. A girl of five lies with her father in a rough hammock. Oak branches above like dark arms. The air is warm and smells like aging grass. The father pulls the rope, the hammock swings. The girl says Let me do it. She pulls hard. The hammock barely moves. The girl says Let's play Airplane Girl. Excuse me, miss? Yes, sir? How much time until we reach New York? No, not New York. Where? UmÉSeattle. Okay, how much time until we reach Seattle. One hour--what would you like for breakfast, sir? I would likeÉpancakes. Pancakes? Okay sir, I'll have that coming right up. Would you like juice? No, I would like coffee, and please remember the cream. I always remember the cream! A flight attendant wouldn't say that, sweetie. She would say yes sir, I will remember the cream.

The girl leans into her father, smelling baby powder and musk deodorant. They have a secret language, the girl and her father. A cat language. They meow to each other. The daughter says Well then I don't want to be an Airplane Girl.

I read 1984. Winston Smith's job has something to do with erasing people from history records. He burns proof, doctors archives. He aids and abets reconstruction. The enemies of the state were never there.

In the Russia I am living in—and I know by now that it is likely not the one anyone else is living in--a church is replaced by a swimming pool. Later, a church again. I ask Anatoly what the Soviet era was like. His answer, in full: it is over.

The town that bore Lenin's name is now St. Petersburg, as it was before. Russia is not only home to the unscripted touch. Churches and pools do the same dance. Continual editing of the script. Perhaps it is more honest this way. Replacing. Reforming. It is names, too. They dance.

I glance at Anatoly's purple food. Nadezhda watches, clucking, while I eat soup and meat and cabbage and cake. I want desperately to smoke a cigarette and shower. I do not know the words for Honestly I just wanted to know what it was. I say Thank you, I'm full. I say Shower. They say Yes. I run into the bathroom, smile. Victory. Nadezhda's voice. My name. Eat. A little bowl, beet shavings in sauce like hay in purple goat diarrhea. For you. Eat. I sit heavily. They laugh. They are my last parents. I swallow tears and beet salad. They have no idea.

Sit across from Anatoly. Stare straight at the place above his head. He is bent over his studies, a mathematician preparing for a law exam. The world begins. A yellow kitchen, his form, thinking, angular face and large glasses, the red triangle of broad shoulders under his shirt. Breeze lifting curtains. Each morning he sees you at the kitchen door, butters bread, lines salami on top, hands it over without a word. Their wedding album, imposing meaning onto a day no more meaningful than this one. A photo album: a gallop on a circular track. On their wedding day handsome Anatoly cannot suppress a smile as they exchange rings. Black and white photos of the traditional walk to a war monument to leave the bouquet. Married during Soviet times. Spectrum of gray. There was still love. A striking picture of Nadezhda, loose dress, flyaway hair, big smile on their Black Sea honeymoon. An instant encapsulates either all meaning or none of it. At what rate? Anatoly's form across the table, the bread and cheese between you. His own saga. Squint. Try to detect his genius in the air, reforming.

You are missing the point.

Every love story is not one book, it is two.

Outside the window, the day brightens and darkens with bundled people waiting at a bus stop under tree skeletons. The end is not the plane ride home.

Now rain.

The purpose is not a deathbed surrounded by grandchildren.

Clouds part.

The apogee is not the wedding day.

Sun, only for nine minutes on the west side of the flat.

I ask my Russian friends about Lenin. Their translations are different: Lenin, the Father of Russian Socialism. Lenin, the Soviet Father. Lenin, the Father of Communism. They speak casually, they care little, they are annoyed by my questions as if they are being asked to dredge up facts from a high school history class.

Lenin, Russian Father. What do you keep in your backpack? A map of your Republic.

Seeds.

It is not just the walls that talk. The sidewalks, cracked and wet, tell you. These things you say you remember. Your world never split open every time your father shouted and your mother never devoted herself to painting over the crack. They were never there. We are all alone together. The world splits open against a somber Russian public lot where a couple kisses with passion so palpable it makes your thighs ache.

The window of the plane from Los Angeles, your first polar ice caps, silent, the moon over them.

That moon never happened, either.

There is no broken.

There is only break.

A scar on the heart proves no former wound, it proves only a scar on the heart.

Rows of car garages say things in the language of four sides and rust.

They say.

If the past is the purpose then there is no purpose.

Someone is breaking into one of the garages.

Past.

Purpose.

Your past purposes.

The purpose of your past.

Birches finger the sky. Over and over again, stand on the asphalt while he drives away, lift the blanket, watch the dark. Lenin's stare is clear--his eyes are eyeball-less, stone. The world begins; it opens out. Calling each other's names back and forth, the sounds arcing through bruised skies like faith long in the gloaming.

Are we alone, all together?

Alone, all: we are together.

A forest of birches, fingering.

A dark forest.

So dark you can barely see him receding; he is taking decisive steps away from you between crackedwhite trunks, and finally even his backpack is hidden by branches and leaves.

Out the open barn door a tree stood against the baking sky in sharp outline. An oak, normal for this area, but a taller one, a more up-reaching one, a slenderer one than most. Near the end of the lesson a flake of moon, light as something one is forgetting, appeared off to its left, sky still roused with afternoon, and it reached.

I always have trouble getting to sleep. I finally put myself to sleep the other night by recalling how it felt to be thrown, the rich flop of a gi on the mat. I conjured the particular feel of each classmate's hand around my wrists. Betty (expert), Leann (gentle), Geneva (unsure), Cassie (wide), Ryan (questioning), Dallas (ouch). Incense, spearmint-green mats, Tautahcho standing erect off to the side in his black hakama calling out one through ten in in Japanese as we hurled ourselves downward only to spring up again, panting, belts and braids coming loose.

I saw the tree during the two years the Muhu Dojo was in the barn when we stretched our upper backs, peeking through the window my left arm made as I reached my right arm under it.

More than once I have put myself to sleep by closing my eyes and flying back to the mountain, stars winking, red dirt, sagebrush.

My father would wait for me at the end of class. Often he had gone for coffee and a library hour or two. Often he had bought a cold tea drink for me. We listened to the radio and raced to call out the name of the artist and song. Whoever got it got five points, but we never kept track.

Some days Tautahcho, or "T," or "Tauch," brought me to Aikido since my school is on the way into town from the mountain. One day I ran out to the parking lot to see his old red truck receding. I ran tearfully over to the elementary school across the creek to see whether any parents were late in ferrying their offspring into the valley. I found Tonya, one of the only other visible Chumash in the community and an adopted relative of Tauch. She wasn't planning to leave quite so soon, but she gave me a ride.

Orange of old leaves emerging shyly in dawn. Fog along mountains, light spreading bands of seashell pink, branch and wildlife stirring. But before: night. A blank page. Coyote's bright eyes meet with mine, maybe twelve inches between us, and a pane of glass, glass which will blow out in a matter of seconds. Many sounds: singing, screeching, screaming.

It could be earmarked as misplaced affection.

When Betty's dad died he left her with just enough to buy a piece of heaven way, way up Figueroa Mountain Road from my school, which is already a ways outside of the small town of Los Olivos, north of Santa Barbara. Betty and T and their son, Levi, and half the time Betty's two older children, Cassie and Sam, lived in canvas tents up there during the year they were building their cob house. I stayed overnight once that first year and the wind was so hot and the canvas so loud when it flapped that I did not sleep but sit, hugging my legs on the makeshift deck, smelling sage, feeling heat on my skin in starlight so strong I could read leaves on the pepper tree. The canvas flapped all night long.

I went to a boarding school described as a "hippie commune" by New York friends who hear me tell of it, but my parents lived close enough to give me a lift to Aikido three times a week. The good times in the car make me grateful for this: either insightful talks about politics with Mom or goofy chats about words with Dad. The other times I spent Aikido class recovering from my father's latest rage attack. One of these times Tautahcho stopped supervising locks and throws long enough to do work on my back, digging into pressure points. I felt dark ooze in the pink slabs of muscle sink around the place T touched, contracting so that they could then relax. I sobbed. One of these times T said only this, in a kind and quiet voice: Ming just needs to be nurtured.

I stayed for a few days here and there on the mountain one summer. When I woke up on the mountain I joined T, Betty and whoever else was passing through for the sunrise ceremony in which we sang, blessed each other with smoke from burning sage, and asked for the protection and well-being of our loved ones from the mountain's spirit. When they said they would think of me while I was in rural Russia, what they turned out to mean was asking each and every morning, "please take care of Ming," while I was gone. Muhu means "owl" in Chumash. Tautahcho's last name is Muhuawit. The nonprofit office I worked for while in Russia had the owl as its mascot. I brought T back owls made of wood I found in marketplaces in Ecuador, drew him one for Christmas. He gave me a journal, blue with pagodas embroidered on it.

One day I filled in a trench, reddish dirt raining onto long white pipe. I stopped with coarse shovel in hand to watch sky appear in fleeting patches. A cat rubbed my legs and I picked her up. She kneaded into my shoulders, purring and smelling dusty. I was refamiliarizing myself with the nature of dirt after my first year not at a ranch school, breaking clods with the dull blade of the shovel edge, tossing powder into the ditch where it ran down sides of pipe like water, scraping gravel level. I was glad Tautahcho wasn't around today to see my body awkward, fledgling, and soft-handed once more, struggling with more dust than Eliot's puny handful. Fingers used to typing, feet to sidewalk.

Levi staged his own graduation ceremony recognizing completion of a repeated year of first grade, and his parents played along. Betty drew a poster for him, but it's T who bought the party poppers from Longs Drugs and strawberry pie with card saying Congradulations (with a d) to my baby boy, Love dad, and looked through his son's scrapbook from the year, stopped at the new year's resolution to read better, "and you do," the spry old man said, hugging the child on his lap, clearly glad.

Betty and Leann and I go for a walk after supper among thistles and thin air swelling with heat, earth covered in sprawling brambles and fluttering insects and heady sage. Animals aren't babies anymore. Snakes crack through dry oat weed, late sunlight honeying the hose water and the horses. Fields white as the sun sets. T makes sexual jokes over fresh cilantro and tortillas. We are all sunburned, everyone but T, whose skin always looks like smooth chocolate, probably because he eats so much of it. (That is the Muhu Dojo motto: conserve energy to eat chocolate.) I open the gate to the snaking dirt driveway. The moon looks like God's thumbnail. Insects whir like busy gears in some grand botanic clock.

I asked a therapist about self-defense at the end of my freshman year of high school. Cowering, be-braced, I wanted to be more confident in my own body. She knew Tautahcho. At home I called, nervous. His voice was even and friendly, but the first time I saw him he looked darkly over at me trembling at the edge of the mats and told me to sit in seiza, not like a lazy person. Years later I look back and realize he was yanking my chain. At the time, I bought it.

One day Tautahcho saw a doodle I had drawn on my hand of a moon and a branch and drew a symbol on my other hand that told the story of the Chumash people's beginning. Every mark told a part of the story. It looked like a sun, spiked and layered.

One day the land was parched but it was just foggy and so T leaned outside the dojo window and howled and yipped. Sure enough, minutes later, it poured. In Southern California. In July. The rain just needed to be called.

Things I am good at:

With practice: Shiko-ho, the kneeling walk we use to traverse the mats without standing. When Tautahcho was feeling particular, he had us circle the mats four or five times instead of two. If the dojo had a partition, like it did during the years it was in the barn, he sent us in a pretzel loop that amused him and tired us.

Immediately: the bokken, the wooden practice sword. The first time Tauch ever bowed to me as I left the mats was after the session in which he surveyed me working with the sword for the first time and after twenty minutes said that I was a samurai. It is only this life that it is your first time, he said. One day he took down a sword with me and we did a two-man move round and round, up, out, sliding back, raise, pivot.

T uses the bokken of an old classmate of his, one who was amazing at sword work and who since suffered an injury that that turned him into a vegetable. T says that on some level his friend gets to practice too.

On the mountain, Tautahcho made a leather bag. He cut the laces, told me that enlightenment meant being kind, Jesus and Buddha were the same spirit, and Jesus ("JC") died an old man in India—his "death" was really a breathing technique to stop his own heart that he learned on his travels. The house was small and made of adobe. Earthen mugs hung from nails on the rafters. Tautahcho's gnarled fingers worked with precision as he told me about Vietnam, partying in Saigon, working on the black market. I felt future and past blooming out of our bodies as fog moved, deliberate and bright, wrapping around the cob cottage: spider webs too small for our eyes, accustomed as they were to the conditions of the present, to see.

The morning before I met with the coyote I took the San Marcos Pass through rust-colored mountains to Santa Barbara for an MRI to check on the last four years of progress my unhappy spine had made. I had lived my first couple of months on a snow-covered campus and so paid attention to the green grasses and 80 degree weather of California January. I also knew to pay attention to the great fortune of health care because I had started to learn about that, too, in introductory social science courses. I remembered a promise I made to someone that I would never take the Pass because of how dangerous it can be and thought briefly of getting into an accident. I imagined my car teetering on the edge of the red cliff and me somehow go-go-gadgetting myself out the window as the car crashed down.

If the kids really realized what they have here on the mountain, T said emphatically of Betty's wayward teenagers that day as he knotted together strips of leather, they'd never leave.

Classic rock knows to come on when I drive up the Mountain, and owls know to fly over me when I drive down it.

One thing that tickles T is the assertion I made some years back that I was born in the wrong decade, the one without a living Hendrix. He likes that kind of music too, listens to it out of a purple radio as he nails things together on his afternoons off.

One night Cassie was home from her father's and she and I fell to talking. She invited me on a walk. The moon was bright, the mountains silent. Once we crawled under the gate and Cassie produced two cigarettes I mentioned what I knew about Tauthcho giving his pot-smoking nephew twelve hours to get his stuff off of the mountain. Betty, one sunny day outside the only good coffee shop in the Santa Ynez Valley, told me how naïve she felt when she found out what T's nephew had been doing under their noses, how anyone who liked to "relax" was free to do so off of the mountain but never on, out of respect for T and how much he had overcome.

Grass on the air, no one on the road. Shit, said Cassie, T used to be the biggest coke dealer in Santa Barbara.

Somewhere in the mountains children assembled alongside the elders. In front of them stood a group of junkies. There was chanting, and the elders blew on cups of plain water, and the water took on color. The junkies drank this, and spent the next couple of days unable to move from their cots, vomiting, shitting uncontrollably, crying. What did the children do? Someone asked. Cleaned up after us, man, said T. That was the most important part. Humbles you. Get all the disease and bad energy of drugs and alcohol out, and here is a child mopping up your puke. No ego after that.

We were all kneeling when T told us this. What did T puke? A loooot of alcohol. The fan was blowing. We quieted down, considering. Stretching time was mostly silent, but when T starts telling a story he gets on a roll pretty fast. We liked that, because some of the stretches were tame, like this one, done in sitting position, the kote-gashi lock we do on ourselves to ready our wrists in case someone does it to us.

Betty takes Levi and me, Choco the Labrador, and the cats, who heel, on a walk. Her slim body and ripe rump move easily in blue jeans. She points out flowers and names them, sits on a rock with her son in her lap, calling the cats, and when Pok the horse moves out from the group it's her he follows and leans against, her yellow hair he noses. Later I am scooping lightly veined cantaloupe with a spoon and she calls me from behind the house, looking up at a sound, a hum, a hidden nest of bees. She wonders aloud how deep in its trunk the tree harbors the bees, lays a tan hand on the bark, puts her ear alongside it to listen. I feel a shock: this is why the present moment is important. I am the only one to see her sun-touched hair falling around graceful profile, wide-open eyes like fresh water, her body at a slant with the tree, wholly listening.

I don't remember which of these presents is the one wherein Betty tells me about how T sometimes would wake up like lightning and grab her as if she were an enemy before they passed some years together in the same bed. It is the same conversation in which she says, by way of explanation, that he saw people blown up in Vietnam. The conversation in which she tells me the true story about someone being killed on their own front deck by a bullet fired up into the air miles away is a different one, one we have leaning against the counter of the house with the oak tree outside the barn. One we have when I run into the kitchen and into her arms, crying, unable to sit there quietly and stretch because my father kicked me out of the car on the way to class after shouting and driving too fast for long minutes.

One of these present moments is one where T himself tells me about missile silos he's seen here in the mountains of California manned by guys whose job it is to mime blow-up time: open the red button box, stick their finger close to the red button, withdraw, close. Once every hour. He said you should see those guys, all sleepy and stuff.

From the Mountain (formally Spirit Pine Ranch) I can see the ranch on which my school is situated (Midland) and the ranch on which my childhood was situated (Highfield). A love triangle of my life, the lands from which, over years, love seeped into me, into my bones and innards, into my crowded head and crowded fear. The dogs pant and weave their paths together, rolling in thin pale dirt, sage sweet and thick on the air. Moths flutter among mustard weed and under hanging moss of thick-trunked oaks. Banks frozen into the shape of mudslides despite months without rain, and of course the prolific oat weed, bending. Countless more chipper throats in treetops. Goats murmur, leaning into my massage, their knobby spines secreting oil thickened with dust, the young ones with no more than stubs for horns.

When I went away, I visited the Mountain every time I came home. Each time I parked, as always, on Figueroa Mountain, the road leading past Midland and, upward miles later, past Spirit Pine, so I could walk in. Walk in and breathed out whatever I accumulated elsewhere, elses where purity is less obvious, less omnipresent. I breathed out hungover mornings and frightening looks from strange men in cities far from here, breathe out imagining it all dissolving into the swept landscape. Red rock, yucca. Here I am, again. Slate, gopher holes.

Every time I returned, something new: the first floor of Cassie's cob house built, a garden taking shape, a trough repaired.

One visit: at first it seems deserted and that is just as well. I cuddle with the sweet new dog, Byron, and look around, think thank you universe once again for delivering me from the deep to the Mountain. I wonder if maybe I should knock on the door. Then I hear Levi cough from his bedroom, think maybe they're all napping.

I hear the sound of a garden tool being used, wander around the side of the house and see someone toiling away by the "stool shed." The person is blonde. I think maybe Betty. But it is a slim dirt-covered man. I say hello. We introduce. He is Michael. Come to do work and live close to nature, as do many friends of Betty and T, as have I. He is a carpenter and earning his keep. I find, and have tea and soup with, Betty. The soup is amazing, just what I wanted. Betty is always cooking just what I want. One day it is burritos.

One day in early summer there were strings and strings of sage hanging in scraggly grins to dry in bunches. Betty gave me some to take to school. Even now it lies in a jeweled dish in my dorm room, and I burn it when I need to.

Of the coyote day I have nothing to say but what I wrote about it, nothing to remember but what I wrote about it. I cannot tell now as I read the letter I sent to friends and family whether I would remember the things I wrote in the letter if I had not written the letter, if I would remember, for instance, the car a wild animal, swerving of its own accord, if I would remember the lonely sound of my scream as the windshield acquiesced to a branch in the dark and erupted into a cobweb of fractures.

I wrote all this down, and so from that I glean that it happened, I wrote all this down and so it happens again. A couple of hours after I kiss the earth outside of Tautahcho's house, I swerve in my father's car to avoid hitting a large coyote and the car spins out of control, runs off the road, flips at least once, maybe three times, and lands upside down in the median in between a large culvert and a large tree. When I see the huge branch of oak lit by headlights come crashing towards me I think now I will know what it is to be injured or how it is to die. I think the car is an animal, and I cannot get out, cannot stop the car, cannot stop screaming.

The radio is still playing the Beatles when the rest has quieted. "I know this love of mine/ Will never die" as I squirm, upside down, out of my seat belt and crawl through the window, all of the side windows blown out. I am the only one in the car and on that stretch of Highway 101 that night. The singular sound of my footsteps as I jog across the road, unscratched, fills the air along with the light of an almost-full moon.

Earlier, on the way back from Santa Barbara, I took the highway to see the ocean spread out at the foot of a flushed rose sunset. Mountains cozied up to the coastline, pale rocky faces striped with dark vegetation. Before going home, I visited Tautahcho and his family on the Mountain. We stood and witnessed the very last of the day together, red light stretching along the horizon, eating yams cooked in the adobe oven and making plans for me to stay with them over the summer to practice Aikido and help them build their house. Stars were out by the time I left, winking over sagebrush, and I was so taken with sudden reverence at this beautiful patch of the planet and the loving people on it that, after checking that no one could see me, I literally knelt and kissed the red dirt.

Not much time passed between then and this moment, coyote scampering, scared and pale, out in front of the car: my own scream when the car seems to lose its mind, coyote's bright green eyes locking with mine (isn't hit), dewy grasses against my arm as the car rolls, that Beatles song hanging in the air the first moment I would be dead: "Bright are the stars that shine…"

"Even now," I wrote, "I startle myself awake at the urgent memory of the coyote, of myself breathing "thank you" to a nearly round moon as the oaks stand in silent testimony. I wait for my bruises to fade. I live a life I might not have lived, and it is not a life in which I choose to be ashamed or apologetic of wonder, of the power of reverence of land and people to protect me."

My parents were grateful that they knew I was all right before seeing the car, upside-down, smashed, windows blown out, oil leaking onto long grass whitened by moonlight. I write of beauty to strain out the huge pain of alarm, the huge movement I could not control, the huge sound. I try to choose what remains.

I called T the next day and left a message about the accident. I knew he knows about coyotes. He called up immediately and called me sweetie. I said Tauch, what does it mean? He said the coyote was running from your right to your left, close to your turnoff on 101? Yes. It was running south, towards the darkness. Let the darkness in. Don't run, don't fear it. But you know what, Ming? Mostly, he wants you to slow down. Take time. Look around. He was telling you to slow down.

Awkward corporeal grace occupying us like a virus, our shoulders like violins.

We live lives we might not have lived, even when we cannot hear the singing, cannot hear the screaming.

Sage secretes spice across a purpling sky, critter voices a low hum. Tautahcho tells me that to walk the earth is to soak its love and energy through your feet, to walk in forests is to consult your elders. The intense heat and dust of summer, the slick head of a baby goat bulging out of its groaning mother. The night, the stars, the hay, the barn. This I know: the land loves me back.

My father spent the whole next day with me, bought me my favorite chocolate cupcakes and sat with me while I ate them, said he would have made an anthology of my writing for all the world to see.

The moments are rare, when you truly feel something before it is gone, before you don't have it anymore. When I fly home I will again walk over dirt, I will again kiss. Planet and people both.

I think if my core were visible it would look like sun-drenched oak trees. Red rock, yucca.