when that wind comes
oldest queen
don’t you know just where we’ll be
down with Red Dirt, Deep Deuce way
feel much better.
Twistin’ twistin’ twistin’ the night away.
III
WHERE WE HAVE BEEN
for my father
TAXONOMY
Mornings made delirious, scrambling into thread
out from dreaming, wrangling ways past delusion
into streets unpaved, unproven, unmet. It was hard-
over, no sunnyside—easy—and the only yolk—seated sky—
rose streaming over the lot of us quickened in some
strain no corona could bear resting, lean. Then
the mesa sat standing wayside, case some giants made
their way back into meantime, met us here, met us.
We were tabooed, shunned, mocked and on our mettle
most any pierce of day. Principal struck blows to show we
deserved no mercy. It was splintering. Holes bored blisters
each smacking wave. We were deserving. Wave after wave
first grade took the test out from me. Never did spill again,
no matter the syndrome. We were anything but beggars,
so we scraped by, held up. We flung ourselves into every
angle, withheld our curve. Split loose from whatever held on.
Motown made our mercy. Only soothe in western rooms
rounded in radio waves gleaning out the insides of maternal
mind. Unkind charge firing synapse beyond reasoning goals.
She moved through it like lightning, charging each wave
with serious challenge, but nothing made it bearable and
hands down was just a game call brag. Only hands down we
laid was on ball courts. Home front was daily challenge, there
was nothing certain other than each day just like the last.
Lest they moved you, sent you off to foster somewhere no
one warned might reckon. Sent you streaming. Gave you up
like paper. Tossed, crumpled, straightened up, and smoothed
out flat. That was that. It was nothing you’d remember, but
we do. Still taste that strangeness surrounding ones who go
between, move through other worlds while in this one. No
one lives like we do, least it seems so, always on the mind.
Why? Never time to question and still don’t know. Only thing
we know we are different and not like you and even though
we try three times harder it never works out right. No,
nothing takes the sting of it, or scent either. We look off,
sound off, give off a presence everyone else knows stay away
and they do, so far from us we walk sideways vanishing
points return to horizons soaking us in, distinguishing us.
Mettle in our mouths as well, steely, and steal we did, still
do, no one’s got more lift than us, no one’s got more hunger.
How about the time they made us breakfast, real one, over
that pancake house off of 40, remember? Dad’s Christmas
to us right before seeing her in The Pavilion, little dish of
butter looks like ice cream to kids like us. Made the eggs
slide over easy just like he did before the madness. Man this
is rough country, get that straight. Mettle this!
SUDDEN WHERE
Talon-plucked speckled trout from bitterroot bed, splish
dream through cloud swells, turbulence imagining comfort
on the way to forever. It’s the shake of it, the sudden where, like
tossing suitcases into corners lent for foster kids untangling
claws still extended. Not the best of us, no, not near what we
once were, still only children, we scraped by, skinning knees
on borrowed bikes, traded at the B & D. Cousin tamed since
no one else had time to tender. Was a working world, cast
out toothbrush hanging wherever a hook held still enough.
Nine lives by nine, cut, torn, blasted to bits all around us.
Walls sometimes plastered with brain noodle. In some
fascination-led Western, so & so. Was it our baseball coach
showed us conceal? Marched us in Sears & Roebuck, night
before her wedding, wanted something scanty little girls could
ease outside without losing dimes, much less dollars. No, coins
better spent at any skating drive-in joint. Teens hanging over
Mustang glass, blinking easy, leaving all intendeds, puffs,
smoke, bottled-down splash to sink secure, like fishing, like
something some winged friend would come down this way for.
She was good to us, even when we couldn’t be to one another.
Save the lifting, her heft carried us through. Far more than Siebert
pranks, stealing plums when uncle carefully turned his head a-shy.
Only a baby then, that was way back. No, here we were nine, or so,
just old enough to flee the ’napper in filthy white pickup, come to
carry us home, his, maybe never come back, but we ran, yes, ran,
right round corners, alleyways, fields crossed the way to coach
who threw down, challenging the perv, ’til he fled from what he knew.
Next year they had me up in Leoti, riding killer horses, crow on
shoulders, toughened up like Clint might be, I was the High Plains
Drifter at ten. Least that town thought so. A Woodlands girl here emboldened.
Never right for roping. Just running all through time. Split sometimes,
just to joke it. Before laughter was real. Back when hard was
a given, a gist for gimmicking while winding backroads with
the curved spine of kids who stayed hungry. What was food? Mac ’n’ cheese,
plums when one could steal some, peanut butter stirred with a spoon, oily,
tasty. Now & then someone took us fishing. Maybe bluegill, maybe crappie,
maybe we’d find something magnificent, give it up to make somebody happy.
Far from us, anyways, we thought we were. Thought we were unbreakable,
tried so many times to snuff ourselves—each other—blunders were our closest
friends. Kept us from soaring over cloud dreams, swimming in deep water,
skimming surfaces in grasslands without a notion when we’d make it back
to the piney mountains calling us home. That was fostering. Sudden where.
Being left to airs, to talons lifting, sometimes tearing scales as they raised us.
STRIKING CHORDS
French braiding her hair for the first time,
my place in Cundiyo, up on Rio Santa Cruz,
so far into our thirties our favs were classic past,
we glimpsed into sistering like four-year-olds
wondering what else was lost to us, our world
augmented with pianist’s blues.
Mom hammering peddles, ivories, hard
melodies punctuating some strange prelude.
Coffee and cigarettes, her basic falter
as she tickled peculiar parallels between
ceilings, curiosities, tumbled upside
down with illogical clues.
Kept us held there, caught up in wonder
for something unreal, unseen, she knew.
When wanderlust set in, we left one another,
striking wide world, each alone, unproven tunes,
harbor melancholy underneath long
hair left loose to pull us through.
Now gathering chords,
arpeggio, we two.
MEASURING UP
It wasn’t socks missing from his feet,
not elbow cloth unraveled unilaterally,
not equal
displacement of chin and brow,
nor the eye that sat a bit lower on the right,
it was his knuckle that made me weep,
clove corners gone wayside, like miniscule meat
hooks clawed away bits of him each shift he made,
invisible a timeliness unfurled. It was his muscle
torn through, festering, the prosthetic hand, finger-
width dismay all across his attempted grin, left
there just like that, for anyone to see—it was his mercy.
In the end we’re rarely beautiful, mostly placed
away from compromising situations into poses
offsetting what has become of us in some gawker’s
unnerving eyes. Yet, he was, is, still here in mine,
and I’m human because of it. Maybe only. Maybe.
THEN
Black Blizzard—hundreds of thousands of years to create the topsoil. Red from Oklahoma, Texas gray, brown Nebraska. The animals sensed it coming before the people. Chickens went to the coop and stayed there. The animals ran unsensibly, unreasonably. Clouds of dust made human figures in the wind. Could be an hour, or minutes to arrive. People fastened wires to the house to follow back—you could be blown away. Visibility no more than a few feet. Massive dusters. Some for days—during school hours—ten years of this. Silt on everything. Families daily digging out. Every surface in the house coated. Dust in food before it could be eaten, still eaten, field dirt with the food. Covering windows and doors with cloth, sheets, paste—air thickened, dimmed. Cloth to face felt awful—suffocating—dust, pneumonia took children. Radiation dry heat transfer, Kansas mercury 121. Insects seeking moisture, shade, centipedes, had to shake out shoes, sheets. Swarms—grasshoppers, gophers, birds gone from the dust, nothing to eat them. Jackrabbits multiplying, badgers, coyotes gone. Ten thousand took part in a rabbit drive. Thirty-five thousand jacks caught in a pen. They clubbed them to kill them, men killing them, rabbits screaming, while static electricity, from friction, took lives, sparked everywhere. Plain sand charged metal, blue flames, ball lightning, same safety wires lined to find houses—cars charged up with static, knocked people out, livestock ran in circles, lungs filled with dust—dead—only water 100 feet below, Sears & Roebuck sold windmill kits to fix up. Dad, ten. People ate tumbleweeds, then.
AGAINST THE BARREL
It was here against the barn, against the barrel, Dad, as a boy, tipped forward
leaning into something double-cocked to split-ease his pain.
Sam upon him daily, riding ridicule, hanging wooden signs upon his shoulders:
“Cheap Indian Labor For Sale.”
He was not for sale. This, at nine, he knew.
Here, he’d thought of his sister, Rose, Rose, Sam had tried to trade
for a boot hook, in the days when boot hooks were cheap, common.
Contemplating reason he might let go—
Here
he considered the changeling, Sam, all the siblings certain he was
placed within their nest as though a brother. Here, against the barrel steel,
he
deliberated his fury, his grasp, leaned
a little further into openness there, split shot
sequencing—
Luckily Lucy, his hero-sister, came around this corner,
cried to him, “Don’t, ’cause I won’t stop you, so they’ll just blame me.”
She knew his passion, knew his wrongings, knew decision—not.
Knew without her he would soon go right out of this world.
Instead, she sat with him while they pretended not to cry.
Stilled him.
So we could pass here knowing, right here in this dust, she delivered him to us.
So we could pass here thinking of our father, his boyhood shame.
So we could pass here—
pass—here—against every Sam Scratch—
Pick up the long barrel, lean in, put it back down.
DUST: DAD’S DAYS
Dust storms darkened sky so, you couldn’t
find your way around house, yard.
Crack thick as a postage stamp gave way
to dirt through walls, to black blizzard.
Dirt in food—in everything.
Damn it, the dust storms
three days at a time.
Couldn’t see.
Dirt scratched, confused.
Some people lost their minds, killed their families.
Rabbits, grasshoppers everywhere, billions came.
Billions of grasshoppers at everything.
Rabbits, hares, really.
Jackrabbits, had been in breaks by creeks.
Bad weather came, they moved to flats. Stressed
rabbits, hares, bearing six to eight young,
instead of two, three in litters.
Our fox terriers chased rabbits wildly.
The Border collies trained them to herd
them in, catch them.
Us Cherokee, all surrounded by Missouri Mormons.
Not as far out as Utah Mormons
who believed lizard language, angels.
We’d come out for the work there, freedom—
Cherokee hunkered there in the dust, missing mountain green.
Come winter, blizzard winds howled and
howled and howled and howled and howled.
Windmill was all you could make out in ground blizzards.
Everything whited out so bright, you’d think everything was nothing.
Windmill would freeze, have to heat it
with pans of hot water, unseize it.
Cattle horses drink on one side,
Prince the Percheron stallion, on the other.
Only my brother Willis could hitch Prince and Doll.
She’d walk along, he’d pull.
Dolly, an older cattle mare, would discipline Prince.
He’d defer to her, even as an adult.
No matter his size.
She was his boss.
Dust was our boss.
Sweet corn, beans, pumpkin, squash, and tomatoes.
Six rows beans, six corn, switch
back and forth annually.
People used a Go-Devil to cut back what they called weeds.
Times were thrashing beans, snapping corn—
We stripped ears of corn, threw into wagons,
corn sheller gave cobs for winter fuel.
Dry cow chips for summer fuel.
Everything operated on one-boy-power:
laundry, cob fuel, chips—wagons full.
Made good crops till 1932. ’33, the wind came, the dirt storms.
1934, gave it up, moved away,
That land should have never taken plowing
like the Whites around us gave it.
The drought killed us. Killed us. Killed us.
Shouldn’t have happened.
They’d lifted the herd sod.
Took the drumhead off the topsoil.
Loosed it until it was crumble.
Reckless. Recklessness. Recklessness.
Dust.
Dad said. Before WWII,
before they found out it was more
efficient to fly one direction over another,
they didn’t understand jet streams.
The Sonoran high
moved north, took it all.
Fall 1935-6-7-8 and on, threw a sack
around a shoulder, dragged behind,
picking left and right, we hit the cotton fields,
picking people’s crops, any left.
Tallyman recorded how much.
Flies, sweat, back ached and ached
for a penny a pound—dust.
Teenager might pick a hundred
pounds in a day, make a dollar.
Older people more efficient,
maybe make two, three dollars a day.
We were always thankful for offers, come pick,
money so hard to come by.
Good owner’d say, “Why don’t you
eat some watermelons?”
Angle his finger toward some melons
growing alongside the cotton,
raised for pickers’ pleasure
to keep us half-fit.
Dust, insects, sweat, aching back, dust, dust…
Everything dust. Everything dust.
LEFTIES
Grandpa Herb’s left elbow
took a Mauser bullet, World War I, traced
his brown forearm like a sleeve seam, red ridged track
’top skin showed when he pulled the fiddle down,
since plucked right instead of left, played
through egged mornings, Chinook dawns, pancaked right.
Scrambled, boiled, poached,
he’d crack any sort of egg you’d like.
Stood them alongside hotcakes—kept them coming,
kept them coming, so each morning break you’d rise
awakened with the scent of story,
every morning in his mapled house.
E do di, Grandpa Vaughan, long before my time,
leaded graze Dust Bowl Depression haze when
something animal, once shown itself,
miracle in time of not.
Deer, rabbit, bear—we’ve all forgotten.
His handgun thrown quickly over his right forearm,
for balance, braced, targeting down take
to feed the family, feed their hunger, feed them.
In an instant he moved, rote, familiar—
Iver Johnson 5 shot snub nose .38—
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