The Joshua Tree

by Robert Cabot

  First published in Great Britain in 1991

  This revised second edition published 2011

  This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 1970,1988 by Robert Cabot

  Designed by Harry Ford

  Cover designed by James and Ruth McCrea

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780747509431

  eISBN 9781408837542

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  Robert Cabot

  Robert Cabot has known the American West since the 1930’s. While writing The Joshua Tree he lived in the Mohave Desert and central and northern California. Born in Boston in 1924, Cabot served as a sergeant in North Africa and Europe in World War II, has an A.B. from Harvard and an LL.B from Yale, and has had several careers: lawyer/economist, diplomat, co-founder of an intentional spiritual community, sponsor and participant in many innovative projects in such fields as citizen diplomacy and the environment, novelist, and free-lance writer. He has worked in many parts of the world and now lives with his wife and three of his six children on Whidbey Island, near Seattle.

  To Bill Keys

  Contents

  Foreword

  The Joshua Tree

  I, Joshua tree

  I, old Will

  I, Lily

  Me, Will Spear: little Jerry Dan once – windmills on the Volga, bottles dancing bright on the Elbe

  Me, Lily; touch your heaven, little Lily

  Rooted, the sky

  You, young Willy, cut loose

  Presences

  Innocences, Lily, in your heart

  Holding; the ancient home, the earth

  Willy; Spider Woman, give Earth’s Treasure

  The earth holds this lightly, waiting

  Lily of the Valley, so slowly turning from you

  Desert voices

  Stem of grass: Willy’s shaman rope

  Willy – the weaving threads – Lily

  Sad flowers, Lily; the passion dance

  They’d roll no more

  Me, Willy, I’d roll on, more

  Gold in red rock, Willy, your Desert Lady

  Elements, Lily; the slaying and the sowing

  Voices of the wilderness, speak to Lily

  Speak to all

  Your treasure, Will

  The Joshua flower from your Lily

  A sharp scythe and the sun on your neck, old Will

  Wild willow honey, Lily to Will

  She’ll move on light in my valley; Leev Mail Here Pleas

  I, Joshua tree; earth to sky

  Author’s Note

  Foreword

  When I first saw the manuscript of The Joshua Tree twenty years ago, I wrote:

  “There are few genuine prose-poets around these days, and fewer still with anything to say. Cabot’s first book is a fantastic exception. He is a poet and a damned good one, and he has words for us of love, and hope.

  “He also has a warning, a gentle one, which is heard in the beating and the dying hearts of men, women, and beasts—and the Joshua Tree. I don’t know when I have read such evocative and truly lovely writing, nor heard a man speak so truly of the curse that lies upon us all.”

  Much time has passed since The Joshua Tree first moved me. Throughout the world, animate creation is in worse jeopardy than ever before. But there is a bright spot. There are those amongst us who recognize the extraordinary danger to which our world is currently exposed and they are evoking a response from people of goodwill which may just possibly be our salvation.

  The message which Robert Cabot gives us in The Joshua Tree is as fresh and vital as ever it was. Now that the book is being reissued, I am convinced that it will fill an enormous need and be as moving to the people of today as it was to those of an earlier generation.

  Farley Mowat

  Port Hope, Ontario

  March 5, 1988

  The Joshua Tree

  Paiute Pinenut Prayer

  When we come to a pinenut place

  We talk to the ground, the mountain, everything.

  We ask to feel good, strong;

  We ask for cool breezes that we may sleep at night.

  The pinenuts belong to the mountain.

  We ask the mountain that we may have of its pinenuts.

  We would eat.

  I, Joshua tree

  Sigh, the wind of time.

  Cycles, wheels – the sand blows thin over my roots. This is my time, passive, there is no end. My flower, my honey, gentle moth strokes, my seed.

  Reaching down, cool, moist; reaching up, breathing, suckling the sun. Out, balancing on the sand, wrapped in hot blue. Air that flows through me, I cut the air with pointed blades. Blunted on joints and limbs, sighing in hollows, air with the dust-puffs from the raindrops, with desert scents, the sage, the piñon, the freshness of hot granite lichens.

  To be. Rooted. Bending, a leaf torn; returning, the seasons. Accepting. Tear at me, burn me, ice me over, gnaw, burrow; I flower again. Bees trembling white petals, oriole swinging in the spikes, woodpecker hollowing, nesting wood-rat and lizard.

  We are the desert. We are its dust, its scent, its stone and sand and washed soil, its echoes and motion and life, the gold of its veins, the flower of its flesh. We drink in its earth, we stretch in its air, its sun, we spread our seed. We are.

  You are of the desert too, old Will. You learned, you leave your engines now to melt into the sand, you have silenced them and have left their scarrings to grow over, your hungers are stilled. You accept now and give back as did the dark ones, the soft feet, before you.

  I feel the slow halting pressures as you pass into my thin shade. When you are gone my roots will sprout again through the sand, I shall feel the multiplication, the new life.

  Your weight stretches over, stirring, breathing; quiet.

  The piñon sings beside us, splinters the sun, dusts yellow. Our roots entwine.

  Another joins you, as you joined the silent ones before they left. The dancing step, the presence. Your Lily.

  The others, the danger. The shifting of the moon, the dirtying of the sun, the stink these new ones bring. Show them, O friend. The balance, the essential balance.

  The moth, my gentle lover; without him I should die.

  You breathe my breath, I yours, Will.

  My black bones, peeled layers: your shelter, your warmth, nourish the earth.

  My hollows: honey.

  My silence to soak your noises. The silent conversation.

  In the drought, one flower, my lily to you.

  I, old Will

  dyas

  Old Will, old Willy. My mattress fits me – a wife, a lizard in the sunny sand – with my old saddle frame under the head. Curled, my knees bent to ease the beating pains. My walking sticks in the afternoon dust beside me, one splinted like a bone: snapped in a ground-squirrel hole carryi
ng copybooks from the school cabin. Half-sun under the piñon and the Joshua tree, old friends, the dry rustling and the sighing.

  I listen –

  my

  Inner

  Voice

  There’s kick left, though, a lot of kick. When I’ve rested a bit, when the bees go ’way, buzzing in my ears, itching so fearful under my cap, under my pate. When the banks untie that money (worked, always, a day’s work; most, they don’t know what it means now). I’ll be going: this once-promised land to another promised land, like to follow again the wild bees to their honey. East, east, east, back and beyond across the steppes of Russia, four thousand miles in the Rand-McNally Atlas, from Volga windmills and the white beards and the clots of fresh cream and the starched kindergarten collars.

  may

  the setting

  So they twist the moon from its orbit; so my mountains dry and the wild hay grows no more; so the mountain quail have left and the valley quail come, getting their water from the mistletoe berries, and that neither’s not enough and their eggs are sterile this year and they cry now as never before, out in the sage. So they drove me to prison once more, a last time: their taunts and thievings, stole my cattle . . . O my wife, my Mana, left alone . . . so they take my land and close my mines and send the revenooers out. So their smog comes closer, in from L. A. now, a hundred and twenty miles, flowing over the San Gorgonio, you’d see it this year on the high Mohave Springs desert where the grass was like the golden Caspian and the antelope ranged in thousands. So they prepare for Armageddon and their blasts explode double from the sky and we are beaten in our desert like ore in a stamp mill. So they drag their sub-homes here behind them, foul and trample the desert and steal away those bits about me, rusting; so they scorn my gift of all this for a museum (no money, but they blast at the moon) – I’ll sell it, bit by bit, an auction, and it will be lost, but it will take me out there, the banks cannot hold me then.

  be

  the rising

  And to India where they have no Christian soldiers and they know about the soul and love, and to the promised land. Virgin for a thousand miles. I’ve read about it, I have it in my albums. Colin, he’ll take me, like he said. North of the Gobi where the dinosaur eggs hatched: lay out there and hatch, make a dinosaur. Lots of things grew more then, there, when the earth stood straight up and down on end and there was no night.

  Another gopher, Walter cat, good, wildcat half-blood—tufted ears, the hoarse purr—I’ll trap no more rats for you under the Joshua tree.

  my

  They’ll not keep me in and there’s always another Jericho. Where Joshua stood looking down from the hills, his spear stretched out in his fist, and demanded all their blood. And the Mormons came and they saw these cabbage trees with their arms out to the valley and they called them the Joshua trees – the promised land, the slaughter, the chosen people.

  Cosmic Tree

  cross

  on the

  immortal

  path

  The innocent tree, protector. Where the yellow-black oriole nests. Where the giant sloth stood twenty feet tall to feed on the new growth until he was brought down by Indian spears and made into jerky forever. Where the yucca moth puts her eggs in the flower and brings them pollen and fertilizes the peaceful lily tree. Where the desert rat finds the spiked leaves with their spiny fringes to protect his nest amongst the fallen trucks. Where the yucca borers and the ants tunnel and she petrifies her wood to protect herself. Where the hawk rests and the buzzard retreats, the night lizard lives under the bark. Where the woodpecker and the flicker dig insects from the trunk, the red-tailed hawk nests in his creosote twigs, the Chemehuevi found fibers for their sandals and the red root to decorate their baskets.

  It gives life, it does not take.

  Canaan. Spear’s Ranch.

  SERRANO PALMS STAGE 1921

  LEEV MAIL HERE PLEAS

  I retouched it with green paint left over, for posterity. Another rusted bit made from a Banning biscuit box, brought here to my collection, beyond the pile of ore-car rails where the black sage grows, where the apples and peaches and lettuce once grew, where the arrastra still stands with its cartwheel and mule harness on the end of the sweep, its stone circle where the rocks dragged, crushed the ore before I got my first stamp mill. My promised land.

  lie softly,

  Robin

  little son

  It’ll be cool, Lily girl, draw it up on the pulley. Dug that well deeper nineteen oh nine. The Missis planted the bamboo – never could get rid of it since. Pardon that I don’t help you. Knees, the knees.

  Sit down here, girl. There’s shade some. A heavy load for a girl, that pack, a long way. Colin, he sat there, first time, dust white on his eyebrows, pack stuck to him where the sweat had dried. Walking away from something, Mexico to Canady he’d do. Maybe nineteen and sixty-four, three four years back. Come up on old Will here in the shade, shade like you’d not find down on the Sonora.

  You learn it from him, Lily girl, this traipsing off alone?

  Alone, like I’d never had time like that. Only looking for cattle or gold, and I’d get the Missis on a horse to follow the wild bees to their honey in the hollow piñons and oaks and Joshuas.

  Sit down, be with Will.

  I, Lily

  I listen,

  Lily girl, little Lily.

  Enough, though, to make the milk crate creak, little Lily – my bottoms are so tired, where the muscles run under, climbing muscles. Bottoms that fit so cool in my Colin’s warm strong hands – here old Will all cracked and gnarled.

  Blessings from my thighs, calves – I’d hike the desert again just for that.

  I

  draw

  it

  in

  deep

  White House Evaporated Milk.

  I’d die, I’d cry, I’d shudder right through to my toes for Colin’s milk that dries flaky in the morning on my belly – poor Will, he can only touch a little, I suppose, but it’s all relative, relative.

  Oh! but my heart explodes. Does Will know, can he know?

  my

  Treasure

  Colors explode, sharp shadows – a black window shattered by the desert sun, jagged blacks, jittering whites and yellows, greens. The scarlet flower of the beaver-tail cactus, it burns inside, in my tummy. Spiked leaves blue-green pick at my nerves. Plop! a lizard gray on my pack, stunned, scuttles – fell from the piñon – a twitching bit of tail left, scratching o’s in the dust: I will not think of the first trout, me only seven, that cried cruel! cruel! and writhed o’s in the four-leafed clover.

  No! because I cannot stop singing, and because my skin, because I have found my skin, dry, hot, the dust and salt, feel it crying to be free again under the shirt, under the soft old faded (finally, finally – Clorox) jeans. Would I have thought of it? Colin hiked naked for a month, he told me. Kind of sexy at first, and then I’m an animal. Boots and a hat, the pack that rides on my hips and straps just at the dark hair and makes my belly stuff out, hat with the leather thong and the slider Colin made so it won’t blow off down some canyon. But nothing hiding, nothing between me and the desert sun, and they bobbed sexily and then they were me like everything else. Tightened skin, hot, cool, feeling the air. (Grumbling organs with limbs and a head, that’s clothing.) Unity, one me, I’m all me.

  And the tender air, love me, we embrace.

  Air

  the

  I shall just sit here for a bit, just: “Knees?” and: “Willow Hole dried up, you told me ’bout, found it; coyote wells too.”

  Male

  And he’ll know. Cicada silence, long, long; no, you don’t measure it, you let it rest till it’s ready to wake up by itself. (Always they want to talk, even if the words are beautiful, and the bells on their elbows and their flowers, and the music can lift you right to the snowy edge of the volcano, crush you.) And when it wakes (can I wait, oh! can I?) maybe he’ll “Yuh.”

  come

  u
p me

  Then, quietly; no, all in a rush, I’ll tell him. Oh! my bighorn, my wild wild desert ram, your proud free eye, and mine. I could have touched you with my nolina-stalk walking-stick, I could have leaped to your back, and your muscles so smooth, so male, your cock and your dark bag (how much my Colin has taught me, how beautiful!) so strong. Your great horns curling back and full around – stone roots to the cliffs. To see them lowered, thrust up, up, thrusting head strained, exploding, dissolving in white light.

  up me

  You sprang so swift to the boulder, scorning the scrubby oak and yucca, alert, the wonder, the pride, naked we were one. The eternity of curiosity, the never-ending moment where we met and understood.

  And you scaled the cliff in an instant and stood in the sky, looked down on me, invited me. And you wheeled and were gone with the hawks.

  Aries, my

  Creator

  You took me with you. I rode with you, hanging to your horns, elbows flying, heels tight against your thighs. Up, away, springing over the pink rock, the burning sand, the black sage, leaping the cholla silver in the early sun. Forgive me that first fear; you will know now I am you and shall never leave you. You are my trip, through the flowers, through the ringing of the bells, to the sun.