The Joshua Tree

by Robert Cabot

  to

  me

  wed

  to

  The hives to carry tomorrow must be closed, now that it’s dark and all the bees are in, and screened so they won’t suffocate. And the grub lined up and packed in a pannier, our duffel, bedrolls, and tarp packed in another to balance, with extra horseshoes and nails, bells and hobbles, some oats to keep them close to camp, hive tools, extra combs to be cached up there, smoker and greasy waste, the rifle and ammunition.

  the

  How can you sleep, the way the night sings: crickets, your friendly owl, coyotes out on the desert, the moon spinning and spinning?

  undivided

  Whole

  The earth presses up against the sky, you have no weight between them, you dance naked in the ring of a snake with his tail in his mouth.

  Tiptoe clattering, you are awake, pulling on this and that with sisters rolling over to grumble, and it doesn’t really matter that much. Almost you fall back into the sheets.

  my

  Moon

  Splash water from the pump, milk and honey, pack saddled tightened, heaving on the hives, three to a horse, upset buzzing in the dark. Oh but it’s black! The moon’s no good. One bulb near the hitching rail but you do it mostly by feel, with the leather slippery and stiff in the cold, morning pisses splattering in the dust. And you’re still asleep as Stella flinches to the saddle blanket and rolls her eye and acts offended when you know she’s dying to go.

  mother

  You climb on, sit there dumbly, all pulled together to hold out the cold. Shadows become shapes. From the saddle you can see the desert hills against a lesser darkness. Pa hands you the lead rope of the least experienced packhorse. Lost Horse Canyon. Stella jigs sideways – none of that for the packhorses. Easy walk. He looses the other ten, ties their leads with a slip knot back onto their diamond hitches, drives them after me – strain around, count them in the dawn, don’t get far ahead, slow till they’re all in line.

  Owls fly down into the brush, the stars are going one by one.

  Sun

  A million birds are singing, a million cicadas come to life as the sun touches pink on Eagle Peak, spreads down, quite suddenly reaches orange in through your Levi jacket, shivers the warmth.

  father

  Your’re leading, hours now. He hasn’t said a single word, just, “Lost Horse Canyon” and sometimes hissing “Assalà!” when a packhorse strays, reaches for grass forgetting its muzzle. And hummed snatches of “La Donna è Mobile” when the heating air carries it up the canyon. How could he love you more, how could you love him more? He forgives you everything – your impatience with the bees, and how you can’t abide being orderly and organized, and how you ride Ma so because she just can’t understand, and how you fly into their bed at any hour and maybe bring your sisters too.

  Pa’s beautiful hands, strong, containing. To quiet my sobs, to shut off difficults, protecting, warming.

  light

  Dive into his bed when the others have gone, deep under the covers, curled like a baby pink mouse by the cold, his hands to hold me. Moving, warm circles on my back and thighs, the nightie bunching. So gentle and generous – to cure his little Lily. The sun shines hot through the sheets, my honey hair where it lies across my arm – like our ancient ancestors, Pa would say, shaking his black hair with his funny wry look – dark honey.

  means

  I hide from mirrors – would it be another me? – yet curled in here I see – I don’t, I don’t! – my silly pointed things and the black ringlets below. Tight, tight close my eyes: all’s a shining white. His hand comes to hide me there, to comfort me, to explain the mysteries – his low voice – and it hurts too but he says it’s all right and I love him so.

  He takes my hand to him: soft, a great nubbly hard. “Like horses,” giggle with relief, his voice so far and strange. He moves away, and why is he trembling so?

  Touch him, kiss his shoulder, tell him my last-night’s dream.

  And you have nothing nothing nothing to forgive him for.

  Yet you weep.

  shadow

  Cry on, Lily. The mountains and the sky see your tears. They hear your heart, they are your heart. Let earth and air drink your tears. He left you – how can you forgive? – Ma, you, the girls, and Luis to help with the bees. How could he leave you? To drain the last tear, heedless of the last breath, the long unstirring dying pain. He killed you, stabbed to the heart of your warm dark unimaginable sweetness – his two-edged uncapping knife, steel-hard, sweet with new honey from slicing the comb.

  shadow

  means

  And it would be you they’d send, you whom he always loved best, you who hate him so, who see him as the black monster of your dreams, stabbing, stabbing at him. The bus, lurching and stinking and imprisoning. Fort Badly, where she lives, where they say he’s staying with the Servadios, she with her clicking orphan high heels – and he bought them for her, I know it, I know it – her head tossing, her nose held high and her mouth stretched as if she had bird shit on her upper lip (it was you, Pa, who told us that, from Grandpa, talking of the girls of Palermo, how could you?), her low-class airs. You to beg him to come home, you to hear his anger, his reasons: Ma driving him to it; just taking pity on an orphan; no one will tell him what he can’t do. So proud and sure and strong. And he doesn’t even kiss you. You weep and hate him and crush your face to his shirt.

  You love him so. And on Twelfth-night he came back.

  light

  Dividing, sundering, when all should be one. To embrace means to unembrace, to couple to uncouple. Only death is unity. So Colin would say. But it’s best not to use the formulae, Lily. Best to let the wind blow through you, the sun burn through you, the darkness take in the light, and the light receive the dark. And anyhow you didn’t know Colin then, or anyone like him.

  “Vai su, ciuco!”

  Would a horse know he’s being called an ass? Pa’s voice touches you, you reach back. The salt pulls on your cheeks, rubbed off with the back of your wrist.

  “Ho! Lily! Right fork. There’s water there. Water ’em, and we’ll go on up to the plateau, the Landing Place.”

  cut stream

  cut love

  Stella picks her way across the slippery ledges of the dry creek bed. A marmot, a yellow-belly, whistles at you. Whinnies, they smell the water, though it’s still a quarter mile. Steep into the fir leaving the willows behind. How the world closes in, how sounds are given their own life, how thick is the air with earth! Fairy birds in every tuft of grass, a crashing in an alder thicket – a mule deer who won’t be seen. Hang to a tuft of Stella’s mane up the rise to help her balance and the slipping saddle – you’re always too gentle on the girth when she groans so. Hold her down, she wants to run it. But this is where the waterfall was from the pond above, last spring – now it’s twigs and needles and dry dry leaves. And the pond? it’s silver trunks lying in the giant ferns. Three dead firs stand guard, naked white, blackened arms into the blue, clutching the sky. But Stella goes on – you would have too, oh yes! – confidently through all that green.

  More than beech leaves splashing in the breeze, more, it’s the rustling of water. Chuckling a bit, winking, then diving underground for good, never reaching the pond bed.

  Rumps jostling, water muddied. First you, then Pa, flat down in cold moss, sucking at the icy water. Then back a bit to piss, we all do.

  “Never claim to be romantic,” Colin would say. “Romanticism never got to Southern Italy, I guess. Meno male.”

  Stars

  slide

  down

  to

  the

  Earth

  On to Landing Place, little Lily. Were you born there, Lily, there where a great round sky-ship set down: Japs spying in a balloon, or the blimp from Moffett missing forever, or Martians, or God? Same winter, ’forty-two. Left a gouge, they say and lots of scuff marks, but it was gone when they’d climbed up those hours on snowshoes to see, not
hing else – except maybe you? Seems like it must be so. Fate and reunion await you there, and it’s only Colin you can tell. Only children dream, the others say, and who, but the flowers, would be children?

  Your high plateau. Where flowers tilt up to the top of the world, stretching out from the fir and the ponderosa pine and the cedar. Here you will set up the hives. Here your lovely Tocca Italians will drink of the blue sage, the only patch in these mountains; a clear white honey so stiff you can tip a jar upside down and it won’t run and it won’t candy even in the snow. The specialty honey, Touch o’ Heaven, twice the price, flavored too with the wild flowers: the snow-brush if it has not already passed, the ground sage, chokecherries, the wild peppermint.

  And here in August your bees will turn to the honeydew of the white fir, the droplets from the scale lice sucking the sap so wastefully that, when they’ve had their fill and their young and the ants that tend them so fondly and will build little houses for them of mud and will carry them from bud to bud and tend their eggs, still there will be hundreds of pounds for the bees. A brown honey, for the bakeries . . . J & M, Will, what’s that for?

  Honey

  the

  divine

  rebirth

  While there’s sun and warmth, with the hives set on rocks, firm against the mountain winds, you’ll open them, let the workers have a look around, orient themselves, learn where their hives are, each with its bee color so they won’t stray into the wrong hives: zinc white and lead white for the bees see ultra-violet, then blue, yellow, and black; they don’t know greens and reds and any-old whites. And you’ll set the traps – oh! stay away, little skunks, you clever ones who will come to a hive at night when the bees are all in and will scratch on it till the guards start out in alarm and in defense, and will calmly eat them all, finish the best part of the worker population, they say. Honeydewers in the Trinity Alps put up electric fences against the bears, or give them lead poisoning with the thirty ’ought six, or keep dogs around. How lucky you have no bears!

  And the horses to hobble, three to bell, saddles and bridles and muzzles to hang from deadwood stubs in the ponderosas against the rats and porcupines. Firewood. Water where it flows out of the ledges at the edge of the plateau. Ground to smooth and gouge for hips and shoulders before it gets dark.

  Last! please, every moment, as it rushes on you, you beg it to last. But it’s gone, so you try to grab whole groups of moments, like cooking-and-eating-and-coffee-which-Ma-won’t-let-you-have-around-the-fire. But Pa whistles “La Donna Ricca,” shifts under a branch to avoid the dew, and the black presses in on your back. There’s something waiting for you, you’ve known it all along. Out there.

  shadows

  in the

  cave

  Out of the pines with your bedroll, out where the moon sparkles in the quartz of the ledges rolling in the sage. Strip to naked you in the moon, wriggle into your roll, legs and bottom cushioned in the grasses, back against the inclining granite, warm, so warming you. And the dew cools on your face, your body finds such pleasure stirring in its womb, warming you, sliding down you and up you and lying softly on your breasts, caressing ever so lightly. Oh! that lovely flowering secret where your fingers lie, where your heart lies, where all comes together.

  No, no, but you haven’t found that yet, little Lily. Your tingles spread outward, your gaiety is for all, your heart fills every cell of your body and bursts out all over creation.

  my

  infinite

  You lie there in the crickets’ song, wanting not to sleep, knowing you won’t right through the night. Their song spins round and round you in cool golden threads, your raggedy old bedroll that you’ve banged around in all these years, it’s lamé of the ancient moonbeams, nesting you in splendor. The coyotes, peak after peak, one to another to the moon, soft, distant, to the roots of every hair on your downy body, sending the tingle in swirls; how they love you! And as the voices run ever so gently over your skin and enter into your flesh, as you raise your arms, silver in the night, out of your warmth and up into the shining sky, turning slowly like shadows of the owl’s call, your love is so strong for your own being that it flows out over the whole expanse, honey-cream, Little Mother, Great Mother.

  filled with

  All One

  You feel it all. Flowing in and in; you and all are filled and one. Up here on the outstretched slowly turning limb of the earth, here under the flood of the golden night sky. Where night joins with day, where the moon is the light of the sun. Where your bees touch heaven, join the seed and the egg, the air and the earth one, and they take the nectar of the flower of the earth, ripen it in the thin air, and give a honey as rich as the food of the gods. Where the black sage springs from the dark earth and opens its blue flower to the sun – sage, with the power to make you wise, brings down the sky. Where fawns are born and rabbits die screeching to the eagle.

  so

  nothing

  so

  all

  Here, here where They chose to touch the earth, and the earth received, and They marked the place and They left.

  The stabbing sky, the reaching enfolding earth, they are one, joined, a snake biting its tail in the great self-destroying self-creating round, beginning and end of all.

  You shiver, Lily, draw your arms back into your bed. Your hair, bleached in the moonlight, falls over your plain and peaceful face. You curl in the grass and the night flowers, open to heaven, touching.

  So, little Lily, so you were, so you are. Come up the years, come to me, slip into me. Me, the Lily that sits here licking saltines and honey from her fingers. Fill me and we’ll leave no room for the numbness so many have wanted of me.

  Lily

  hold

  the now

  Listen as the night wind stirs under the floor, rattles the stovepipe, sucks at the burning Joshua tree logs sending orange flames dancing through the chinks, scratches the piñon on the tin roofing. Smell the desert dust and the sweet pollens, the smoke backing up and puffing through the damper, the faint mustiness of his old body, not scrubbed bare to modern stinks by baths. Neglected curtains . . . “Four years now she’s been passed away; girl; and our little Robin long before; then our Juney; they’ll not be coming” . . . Curtains that stir in the currents. Walter’s tail twitches and even I can hear a mouse under the sink. The oil light glowing on his glob of gold, a thousand dollars milled out last spring from some of his high grade which still lies about in sacks. Watch, his old hands turn the pages, his lips sucked to his gums jumble the past, his eyes are the flame.

  Rooted, the sky

  The desert stars are flames: when the night wind blows through you and the coyote juggles the moon, when the cold rises from where your feet are buried in the ground, when the dew lies shining on your outstretched arms, flames that burn time. Where before and after mean nothing, where time is a spiral. Position, presence, faith. Roots, the continuum, for they hold the past, they collect the present, they bear tomorrow’s sprout.

  And now old Will he takes his warmth from the burning roots dug free for him by the winter winds.

  You, young Willy, cut loose

  Two canes, short shuffling steps, the warped linoleum. The lid slid off, hot red where the cheeks are thin over the bone. Twisted root chunks, petrified against the borer. Sparks that dive into the eyes. And the thin oil flame dazzles through the rheum, shines white on her face under the green hat, blacks out the treacherous floor – the poking cane, the hollow linoleum wave popping.

  seek

  soft

  comfort

  A buffalo hide, that a miller from the Volga and a Cornish miner wouldn’t know how to cure—soft like that Sioux girl’s skin; hard, bulging, popping when you roll on it. Roll to escape the swinging cuffing hand, flour-specked from the milling or the baking, it didn’t matter which. That was you, young Jerry Dan – was it Willy then, changed to Willy, Jerry washed clean away?

  mother

  Mother

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nbsp; Did you know you’d be popping the linoleum in eighty years, hurrying to be back by a pretty face, keeping her eyes wide round with tales of the old days and philosophies of the new?