So Live

What is liberation?

Is it in food?
Protein
Lipid
Carbohydrate
Eating?

What is liberation?

Is it in a word?
The shelves of books
The playwright’s pen
Soundtrack recording
Music?

What is liberation?

Has it got a place?
Has it got a sound?
Has it got a movement?

What is liberation?

Is it only in living?
Passion
Spirit
Art
Is it Pasolini’s murder?

What is liberation?

Is it the coming of a season?
The falling of leaves
The burst of flowers
Drying grass
Frost?

What is liberation?

Is it in a city of millions?
The frowns of friends
Wondrous strange window displays
Highrise graffiti
Gridlock?

What is liberation?

Is it in a small town?
The faces of strangers
Familiar storefronts
Sidewalk graffiti
Traffic?

What is liberation?
Is liberation what is?
What is liberation?
Is liberation what is?
What is liberation?

Whose chains are these?
My courageous world’s
My culture’s hand
The family’s arm
Mine?

What is liberation?
When all cry
When all suffer
When all starve
When all die?

What is liberation?
When every god speaks
When every god lies
When every god laughs
At freedom.

Fantasma

Photo: Diego Fernandes

I wrote this while listening to Anita Baker.

My dream of you floats

In that place between places

Where I am so comfortable,

So capable, so balanced.

Every note is always perfect,

Every brushstoke carries

The painting to completion.

I am a passenger

Inside the warmth of you,

Your embrace.

Under your touch

Paradise waits around

A turn in the road

Across a rainy sea,

Over there,

Just beyond a kiss.

After Sundown

Waiting for evening

For after sundown

For dark lights

Star lights

Some strong sense of passing

Waiting.

Watching the sun cross over

Watching the sun pass by

Watching the sun fall

Fall closer to you

And where you dream

Remembering smells

Of you on your pillow

After sundown

Remembering to remember

Forgetting to forget

After sundown

Somewhere out east

Behind me

Under night shadow

Such scenes ache

To hold on to time

Rhythms hard shaking

Of mine as yours

And nothing mine

All

After sundown

But waiting hurts

Morning sun burns

That steam of shadow

Till after sundown.

The Antique Store

This short story was originally written as an assignment for a writing class. Its genesis was a cross-country road trip taken by two of my sisters, a roommate and myself. It has gone through many versions and has never been accepted by a publisher except a tiny community newspaper that went out of business before it could be printed. With exceptions, I have received mostly favorable feedback. I still like it.

Tucumcari, when we visited it had an aura of Bagdad Cafe about it and, while it has an "active" side, I describe what I saw. The tumbleweed, the grass growing in the street and the antique store were really there. As for the rest, well, New Mexico is a Land of Enchantment.



* * *

Late afternoon is falling like a party ribbon across eastern New Mexico. The vivid color, sprayed onto the landscape by an overzealous sky, works no comfort on my malaise. A shoulder shrug, the sunset and its brilliant color give up trying to amuse me. A gusty wind is blowing from the east, a tired god trying to blow the flaming sun out. A tumbleweed hurries westward toward some unknown destination; little flurries of dust follow, trying to keep up. I wait, a lone traveler, for denouement, that I may take my final ride into the sunset. We are, the wind, the tumbleweed, and I, clichés of the western desert.

But where are the villains, where are the Indians? The only Indian I had seen was a small boy with holes in the knees of his pants and a blue and green striped t-shirt, all generously dusted with the red and yellow desert dirt. He had been sitting outside the only building having an automobile parked in front, making, or attempting to make, some sort of play guitar from a cereal box, surveying stake and a box of rubber bands. When I stopped to watch his effort, he collected his nascent guitar pieces and vanished into a space between two buildings. The budding Stradivarius did not wish to be a tourist sideshow.

I am walking through Tucumcari, New Mexico, watching shadows stretch and waiting for climax so I can make my way into the sunset, but no one else is on the street. Tough desert grass and thistle have elbowed through the cracked pavement. Tucumcari’s main street is the back of a diseased hermit. Tucumcari is a leper. It lies dying in the desert, not from its disease, but neglect.

Tucumcari and other towns, like San Jon and Glenrio, found a kind of ecstasy in the great prosperity following World War II. These desert shrines astride Route 66 were visited by thousands of pilgrims making their way between Los Angeles and the District of Columbia. An end to their corpulent summer came when interstate 40 freed the way for non-stop travel from coast to coast. The travelers left Tucumcari and her sisters and old route 66 abandoned to the desert. So now, even the tumbleweed is trying to escape.

Off to my left, an electric bulb is glowing inside one of the few shops left to Tucumcari. The sun is not completely set but the shadows are almost strong enough to overwhelm the single bare bulb. It is in an antique shop situated at the corner of two overgrown streets. My attempt to enter is met by a muffled voice requesting me to come back tomorrow. Trying to ascertain if return is warranted, I press my face against the glass of the door. A face appears abruptly and repeats, “come back tomorrow.” Then a window shade, hand lettered, CLOSED, is pulled down and once again I am alone in Tucumcari. So I will return and the showdown will be tomorrow. High noon.

* * *

Cold morning in the desert was the same as it had been for thousands of years, probably. The sun spread its light across the Staked Plain like the breaking of a dam, probably. Nocturnal animals hid in their burrows or where ever they hide during the burn of day, probably. I do not know.

I dream on the shoulder of a naked giant. He crouches on a cliff above an inland sea. Near the rocks beneath us, Tucumcari swirls at the periphery of a maelstrom. Pieces keep breaking off the town and disappearing into the center. The giant begins to stand and from his shoulder I fall into the very center of the whirlpool. I am pulled beneath the surface and I can see the giant smile as his body transforms into the land and sky of New Mexico. I know by his smile he meant for me to fall. The only sound is the rushing of the wind.

* * *

It is noon. I am walking the deserted streets of Tucumcari. Gusts of wind and my feet scraping on broken pavements are the only sounds. It is noon, the sun, balanced on my head, is a giant olla overflowing with heat and light. I find myself on the Street of the Indian Boy, and he is again working on his project, only now, he has retreated to one of the covered wooden sidewalks. He is sitting cross-legged on a bench, trying to will the pieces together. Seeing me evidently embarrasses him, and once again he disappears between the buildings, this time leaving the pieces of his industry.

I can hear the music of a piano. The tune is ragtime, Scott Joplin, but it sounds slow. It is not distorted; rather, it sounds as if someone with perfect rhythm is playing at a deliberately reduced speed, the pace of a walking horse. I feel lighter stepping into the shade of a covered porch. Tucumcari can now support the weight of the sun. I am walking in time with the music, with my ears following the scent of each note to its source. The music is coming from the antique store.

My senses are peaking in the same stomach-surging inevitability of the sex act or an automobile crash. Slight nausea and the heightened awareness of an adrenaline surge are forcing my sensory antenna to full extension. Every fractional second fills with minute detail. An ancient hunter is ready for the kill; the gunfighter is ready for the draw.

In my peripheral vision I watch my image waver and flicker in the warped window glass of the antique store. I see through the sets of windows at the store’s corner to mountains beyond Tucumcari. Between that unknown territory and myself are black silhouettes within the store. One of the silhouettes is a head, the head of a woman moving within.

In an act of supreme nonchalance and vanity, I stop and check my reflected image. As I turn to face the window, a piece of broken glass in the street glints brightly in sunlight dazzling my eyes, a stage light. I find my audience in the glass. I take a small bow. Thank you, you are wonderful. Without conscious decision my focus shifts: my image, window display, black silhouettes within, twice filtered sky and desert beyond, my image.

My focus flicks from my reflection to an object, almost lost in the careful clutter of a fussy window display, an antique store memory startling like a flashbulb explosion. I am wading the river of Tucumcari’s history and in this slowly dwindling stream a bit of my own past is floating. As I look into the heart of my reflection in this antique store window, a private and exotic rhythm beats.

* * *

She is singing. A sea gull weeps about the sad power of love, the tragedy of nostalgia, of capture in the rough hands of the fate-song. She sings in a voice husky from cigarettes and age.

She is my cousin from the old country.

Her husband died many years before, but she still wears the black of widowhood. Around her square thin shoulders a soft black shawl is wound. Against her breast she fondles and caresses, with long fingers, a small guitar-like instrument. It has twelve strings and, in her affectionate hands, a sound like a small stream, tumbling and splashing down a European hillside. My seven-year-old mind is amazed so many sounds can come from only four fingers and thumb.

She is my cousin from the old country. She stills speaks with a strong accent, even though she immigrated to California as a fifteen-year-old bride and now she is an old woman. Her once jet-black hair is now silvery like weathered wood. She came to marry her cousin, twenty years her senior and a man she had never met. She became a farmer’s wife. She learned to do all the things someone married to the earth must do; she bore her husband’s children, she cleaned, she sewed, she knit, she killed and cleaned rabbits and chickens, and when her husband could not do it, she plowed.

I asked her once if she would show me how to kill and clean a rabbit, an activity she accomplished when I wasn’t present or by turning her back so I could not watch.

“No,” she said, “it is the work of women.”

And plucking chickens?

“That too.”

What is men’s work? She shrugged, “it is the work that men do.” But what is it that they do; I was insistent.

“If a man is a farmer, he plows; if he is a soldier, he shoots a gun; if he is a priest, he prays.”

Can a man play the guitar?

She thought a moment, then nodded. Sometimes, she said men love too much to play the guitar; that was bad. She would not teach me to play.

I would then try to trick her into admitting that a man hunting alone in the woods must know how to clean a rabbit, to pluck a bird.

No, she would shake her head, he would bring it home for his wife to clean.

But what if he did? It was my best seven-year-old manner.

“He should not do that,” she would state mildly, her green eyes not seeming to look at me, but through. Then she would light a cigarette, and holding it like a pipe, blow smoke in my face. Go away, she would demand, next time we will play cards.

But would she play the little guitar too? Yes, yes. Now go away.

Our meetings were brief and few. But always she managed to tell me something. Always she played the guitar, always an introduction to some new thing. Coffee with chicory, it’s bitter, I complained.

“Life is bitter, don’t waste it, drink it.”

Apricots straight from a tree, the sun still hot inside them, these are very sweet.

“Life is sweet, eat quickly or you will lose the juice.”

Teach me the guitar, I begged, then remembering my manners, please.

“Do you see how the guitar is shaped like a woman?” I nodded. “It is better to hold a woman shaped like a woman.”

One day she sang a song about a woman who suffered a disease. The woman in the song knew the disease would kill her. What disease does she have, I asked. (An elderly aunt had just died of cancer.)

“Nostalgia,” my cousin replied.

“What is nostalgia?” It sounded very bad.

“Love,” was the flatly stated answer. “Love like a lemon tree.”

I didn’t understand.

“Always you think love is something it is not.”

“Can you die of love?” the eight-year-old me asked incredulously.

For a moment, the lights in her eyes got bigger, then her husky voice said, “yes. Yes, boy. You can die of love.”

“When I am gone,” she smiled suddenly, “you may have the little guitar.”

* * *

Somehow, I am inside the antique store. I am asking about the music. The ragtime music is coming from a player piano. Why does it sound so slow?

Materializing from shadows that denied corners to the room an elderly woman, the shop owner, tells me the roll was made by a process that recorded the artist playing the piano by some arcane mechanical transcription. Some machines could actually record dynamics; you would need a special player. This particular piano was not capable of that. If I cared to check the roll when it was finished, she tells me patiently, I can actually find out who played for this particular cut.

Faded print on the edge of the stiff paper reveals that the artist performing on this specific roll was an S. Joplin; the tune was also written by S. Joplin. 1904. I am listening to Scott Joplin play his own music. His ghost fingers, fluttering over a keyboard in a western desert town, are winging their easy, graceful way across more than one hundred years.

My mind is still rolling in the mundane miracle of Scott Joplin’s piano playing, but I ask casually, how much she wants for the little guitar in the window. I look at the owner as I slip the piano roll into its box; I fit another into the piano. She is an older woman with iron-grey hair pulled tightly back and fastened in a neat chignon at the nape of her neck. There are heavy grooves above the mouth and around the eyes. It is not an old face, I think, it is an aged face, like cheese or wine. At present it is also a puzzled face.

“The guitar?” she looks toward the window. Perhaps she is puzzled by the abrupt change of focus.

“Yes, the one with the colored inlay around the sound hole; has a scratch on the neck?”

* * *

My cousin handed me the instrument, and I looked up at her slowly. “Are you going away?” I mumbled.

“I told you, when I was gone, you may have the guitar.”

“But you didn’t teach me to play; are you coming back?”

Her face seemed at a great height above me.

“God will teach you to play. That is how I learned.”

I threw the instrument from me and ran to sit in the family car. It was summer and the closed automobile must have been furnace hot, but I shivered. I was lost in an Antarctic storm. Someone had turned the summer heat off and opened a winter door to the polar winds.

The car door jerked open and the strong arm of maternal law yanked me from my freezer chest, and in the next moment a stinging blow landed on my cheek. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” The knifelike voice cut into an already deep wound. “Do you have any idea how much that instrument is worth? It came around the Horn. You had absolutely no right to throw it like that. I don’t know shy she wanted to give it to you anyway, you’d probably just break it; as it is, you put a huge scratch in the handle. Did you hear what I said, young man? That instrument is valuable, it came around the Horn!”

“It’s a neck, not a handle!” my boy soprano shrieked.

Another blow landed and I was promised a long stay in the automobile I had just been pulled from. My father would hear about this.

My grandmother arrived to second my mother’s low opinion of me and ask had she seen what I had done to the guitar-that-had-come-around-the-horn-that-was-incredibly-valuable wasn’t-another-in-the-world; his father really ought to talk to him; a long talk.

My cousin came slowly across the grass leaning on a black cane, her hair flashing in the summer sun like broken glass.

“I will talk to him,” she made it a demand.

My demons were banished to hell. The tormentors departed into the small house.

She looked at me a long time. Did I remember the shape of the guitar? What was it? What would happen if I had thrown a real woman like that? Did I know her neck would have been broken? She told me a story of a fisherman, who took his guitar to sea, and frustrated with what he called its bad temper, he had tossed it overboard and when he returned home, his wife drowned in the tide waiting for him.

“You mean she drowned because he threw his guitar in the water?” I asked in disbelief.

My cousin just shrugged.

* * *

“It’s not really in very good shape,” the storeowner pulled the guitar from its resting place. “The strings are gut and need to be replaced.” She held the instrument out to me. Without reaching for it, I asked the price again.

* * *

My cousin again offered me the guitar, but my anger at her leaving returned, and I climbed back into the car. She nodded slowly at me through the window then turned and disappeared into her house.

The last I saw of my cousin was the skirt of her long widow-black dress dragging up the shallow front steps, the light flashing on shiny material as it flicked over each tread, a silent valediction.

Later, I repented and asked my parents if I could have the guitar after all, but one or another of numerous relatives had taken, or sold it, along with the rest of my cousin’s belongings, and nostalgia became my disease.

* * *

“Why don’t you make me an offer?” the owner smiles, a coquette, and pretends to play the guitar. The southwest trader has found an item a customer cannot do without. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

I laughed, almost hysterically. Yes. Oh, yes.

“Thirty bucks,” I say, not hoping she will accept.

“Thirty bucks!!” she is rattled for moment, then begins an arduous few minutes of haggling in which we return to my original thirty dollars, and, because she says I am such a great haggler, takes off an additional five.

Handing her the money, she looks vaguely disturbed and offers to wrap it in some paper. My decline of the offer seems to bother her, so I quickly leave the antique store’s darkness for the heavy sun of the eroded empty street. Scott Joplin’s ‘Easy Winners’ follows me out the door.

Wandering through the streets, I talk and caress the voluptuous curves of the instrument. When I find a half rotten bench, I sit, still talking to the guitar. I tell about intervening years; I waltz and pirouette it on my lap.

I grow gradually less voluble and just begin examining its surface. It must have sat for a long while in the window of the antique store because my fingers are grimy from its accumulated dust. The guitar’s once glossy finish is entirely gone and the underlying wood looks grey and tired. The strings are so old and dry the sound they make is harsh and cracked, a voice hoarse with age. It is not an instrument that should ever be played again, or at least, only in pretend, like the storeowner had done.

A small paper sticker is attached to the back of the instrument near the rounded bottom, a tag with the price written in faded ink. Five dollars. I laugh and cry thinking about the price of modern medicine.

I am still laughing when the Indian boy comes out from between the buildings. Seeing me, he starts to return between them, but turns when I call.

I hold out the guitar. He smiles.

END

The Tilt of the Board

I think an amazing and simple concept has escaped our culture. We have complicated most processes to such an extent that it is difficult to find serenity. I wonder if this is one of those thoughts that people have been having for centuries and either can do, or will do nothing about it. So many other activities and daily events are so like this in character. Habitual living. I was recalling earlier today how I first became attracted to surfing.

I was visiting my Aunt Mary who lived at the time in Campbell, a suburb of San Jose, California. It was during the school Easter break and during the week my aunt planned lots of activities to keep myself and her four sons busy; she was, by trade, a teacher and I am not sure she did anything without planning but everything seemed completely spontaneous. One morning she packed her four sons and myself along with, I think, one of her friends and maybe the friend’s sons, altogether into a bright yellow-orange Volkswagen Van and drove us over the mountains to one of the beaches near Santa Cruz. I remember one of my cousins asking her if we were going to the “cement ship”.

The idea of a cement ship intrigued me. How could a ship be made of cement? Was it a real ship? How did it float? All questions a teacher was well equipped to handle. These questions occupied at least part of the drive over treacherous Highway 17, and when she wasn’t concentrating so much on driving, answers came easily forth. But Highway 17 takes a lot of concentration and I have always had a need to watch the road with the driver, so I don’t really recall what her answers were, but we did arrive in Santa Cruz and found our way to the correct beach.

After finding our spot on the sand and laying out towels, arranging picnic equipment and setting up a small beach umbrella, my cousins took me to see the cement ship. It had been a real ship and apparently then fell on hard times and became permanently moored, or rather, grounded. It had been deteriorating for many years but certainly still looked like a ship and for boys our ages had a certain romantic excitement about it.

As the morning wore on, we swam a little then walked back to our “spot” on the beach and ate our lunch. That meal was memorable because my cousins ate differently than my family even at picnics. They came from the anglo side of the family and ate hotdogs and burgers with mustard and catsup, american cheese and maybe a slice of pickle. They drank lemonade, coca-cola or rootbeer. My family had vast quantities of sour-dough bread, canned sardines or oysters as an appetizer, oven-roasted chicken cooked in or with wine and herbs, or fire cooked sausages, or firey choriço cooked with pinto beans. Dessert might be ice cream made by my grandfather or figs or apricots off my grandmother's trees. To drink there was usually red wine for the adults and ginger beer for the children. On this occasion the food was what my cousins would call “normal” picnic food, consisting of sandwiches, potato chips, lemonade and apples.

As I finished my lunch I remember eating the last of a small bag of potato chips, not unheard of fare in my family but certainly rare, and then biting into an apple. The taste sensation was of seawater! So much so that I thought somehow that seawater had gotten on the apple. Not so. I found more potato chips and ran an experiment. I drank whatever was nearby and crunched my purloined chips then bit into the apple again. Seawater! Not particularly pleasant but worth the experiment.

My Aunt told us all mildly to wait an hour before we went back in the water after we had eaten. I remember wondering if we would still be there an hour later or if everyone would have gotten tired of waiting and gone home. But we spent an hour or so running in and out of the surf, playing wave tag and chasing each other up and down the beach. It was during this post-lunch waiting period that I spent watching some people surf, an activity of which, up to that point, I hadn’t paid any attention at all.

Some older boys, related I think, to my Aunt’s friend, had driven themselves down and had brought their surfboards. When they seemed to be more interested in talking to some girls in two-piece bathing suits than surfing, I asked, or maybe begged to borrow a board from one of the boys. The boy that owned the board told me I could use it if I could lift it and if I was careful. Assuring him that I would be very careful, I pushed and pulled it, and even managed to balance it precariously on my head for a short while but eventually got it down to the water and out beyond the crowded shore break to where there were far fewer people and hardly any wave action at all. “Outside” surfers would say. I was laying prone on the board and enjoying a relative isolation from all the people noise and the heat of the sand.

I knew nothing of the sea except my enjoyment of it. I really wasn’t much of a swimmer although I had taken a YMCA swimming course. I was probably eleven. I didn’t know how to surf. I didn’t even think of trying. I was floating on a big blue and white surfboard and using it kind of like a pool chair. I was enjoying the gentle rocking motion and the warmth of the Santa Cruz’s spring sun. I was also floating on that blue and white board further and further out into the wide blue Pacific.

I remember thinking at the time there was really nothing to keep me from floating outward into the coastal current and all the way down to Mexico. I had, at the time, recently read a story of a Chumash boy in a dugout or bark or some kind of canoe, paddling between, or out to, or from, the Channel Islands and fearing being caught in the California Current. I thought it might rather be fun to be able to move along in the ocean and not need to paddle.

I do not remember if someone called me or another person on a surfboard came by, or I just got the notion to go back in, but in I started, thinking I’d have to paddle myself all the way back to the beach. The waves moving toward the beach were quite small and slow moving and as far out as I was, it was going to prove to be, and more importantly, looked, like a long, long paddle. My naïveté was a lucky thing for me, as I had no clear realization of the depth of water I was in, or that the momentary calm of Monterey Bay was an asset to an ignorant pre-teen without much ability as a swimmer.

The surfboard, one of the old balsa-wood construction types, was like a diving platform for someone my size. It was quite stable. It also paddled like a diving platform for someone my size. I think I even stood up on it to look around. My lack of knowledge, regarding how to place oneself on a surfboard, made standing up a perilous adventure. So I paddled and I paddled and I paddled; my skinny arms flailing along the rails like a three-horsepower outboard pushing the Queen Mary. Then I would rest for a while and again start paddling. Rest and then paddle. Rest and paddle. It became a horrid exercise in repetition and perhaps because of the distance, seeming futility.

At some juncture during my paddling it dawned on me that I had indeed paddled way too far out and maybe I really had caught the sea current and was on my way to learning Spanish. I could not see my Aunt or her friend, or my cousins or their friends or anyone I knew or recognized, and the people on the beach looked like ants and, well, I started to panic a little.

But my panic stricken arms were tired so I took another rest and then I spotted, far far down the beach my Aunt waving her arms at me, or at least I thought she was waving at me, and my calm returned and I refocused my attention on getting to the beach. I tried all kinds of techniques; both arms at once, one arm after another, hands only, pushing myself back on the board and using feet only, holding onto the tail-kick, full legs, knees down only; I discovered that one arm after another mid-board was best, despite the size of the board and my skeletal arms.

I don’t precisely remember when it happened but I do know it was somewhere out where full-grown men were standing on the sandy bottom with just their head out of water and occasionally a toddler sitting on their shoulders, but somehow the speed of my paddling and the speed of the waves rolling by, found an equilibrium and I was being pushed by a wave with no help at all from my weary arms. I was enthralled and delighted that I had discovered a principle of grand locomotion that was better than a carnival ride, and neither I nor anyone else had to pay for a ticket and neither had I anyone telling me I wasn’t big enough or old enough.

I felt lifted and energized. And the board began picking up speed a little. Now this was living! Then abruptly and directly in the path of the board a swimmer emerged from underwater with the back of his head to me and in my fear I leaned my body to the right which I honestly thought would roll my body off the board leaving the board to continue along its path to provide the unsuspecting swimmer with new blue and white stripes. Much to my amazement on a flattening, though still steep learning curve, the board tilted with me as I clutched the rails, even though I didn’t know they were called rails, and, to my stunned amazement, turned like a roller coaster car avoiding the completely unaware swimmer and picking up even more speed!

Keeping my death grip on the rails and fearing that the board would flip, I pulled hard on the right and pushed on the left and to my relief the board slowed and in response to my pressure straightened perpendicular to the wave and began to turn slowly to the left. Making this discovery, I pushed slightly more weight to the left and sure enough, the board turned more left and began to pick up speed again. I was zooming along nicely mow. I gave some pressure to the right side and again the board slowed a little and I was heading straight into the beach.

Twenty yards, ten yards, just a few more feet and then another head popped up, this time a toddler playing in the water a few feet from the sandy beach, but this time with wisdom aforehand, I pushed on the left side of the board and yielding to my pressure, the board turned, picked up a final burst of speed, missing the child and avoiding what might have been the first beheading at sea of a two-year old by an eleven year old with a longboard. With another slight lift the board and I were pushed onto the beach where I lay for a while feeling the relief that comes from a stay of execution.

Another small wave rolling in again lifted myself and the board, us, I was thinking by this time, and pushed us a few inches further onto the sand with a hissing crunch I’ve come to know well and my first surfing adventure was over. The simplicity of sliding along on a wave made by the forces of nature, out of control and in control simultaneously, changed something about the way my mind worked. At the very least, it changed the way I perceive the world, and I knew it at the time. Then I got a confirmation.

As I lay there still on the board, feeling my panic abate and a kind of relaxed energy returning, I rested my head on my arm and stared at grains of sand here and there sparkling in Santa Cruz’s afternoon sun, a pair of bare feet walking by, flipped a small amount of sand into my face and a voice from far above said, “nice ride.”

The Big Show

Walking a dusty western lane

We heard strange music

A marching tune with heavy drums,

Floating between dust motes

Trombones and piccolos,

Accordion and calliope,

Rusty notes on the wind,

Colliding faintly

Among dry grass and star thistle,

Flickering on leaves

Of late summer green trees.

From some Time

Before grass and trees

Were trees and grass.

Hear it in the mid-day sun

Hear it in the mid-night moonlight

A parade to wary ears

Bringing impossible memory

From a faraway circus

A somewhen show

We never saw

And never will.

No Deserto Do Tempo

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007

see me stand

myself standing

by myself alone

on a desert plain

outside the time of time

standing between

a future of futures

no past passes passed

a present would wet drifting dust.

This timeless dust

denies me you

you have passed

past predicts future

future makes time

time is you

you are there

I am here.