Words

July 2009

Day One: Minneapolis to Billings

In the beginning there were cornfields, wheat fields, turkey factories, and words. Minnesota sprawled northward before me in waves of farmland and commercialism. Miles of billboards lining both sides of the highway heralded every little colony of prefab houses and fast food: Buy an RV, Ride the Superslide at Wolf Creek Lodge, Don’t Abort Your Fetus. Images bigger than your car. Letters taller than you.

I was almost to Montana when I finally found myself alone with the earth. Here were bare rock, wild grass, gunmetal rivers. Red dirt showed on the paths cut through the sagebrush. I turned off the radio. My own mind fell silent, and I drove on.

Day 2: Billings to Mesquite

I may need to live in the desert. Not that I belong there. This land rejects humanity with scalding rock and sand and spiny brush. This is not a home-place to which one belongs but a stage on which one is stranded agape, the bare plain bounded by mountains like an amphitheatre. Here is an arena for bold endeavors. Let me stand in the glare of that naked sun, and words will come in time. They will clatter from me like stones on dry stones, hard and true, hot as though newborn from fire.

Day 4: Mesquite to Cambria by way of Las Vegas

In the midst of the desert’s stillness breaks a sudden chaos of color, sound, and the human image, like a perpetually exploding bomb. An ersatz Roman palace stands across the street from an ersatz French estate, down the street from the candy-colored Victorian townhouses, the oversized Arabian bordello, and the undersized Eiffel Tower. The city is as senseless in its evocation of human civilization as the surrounding wilderness in its rejection of it. Vegas testifies in sound and fury, and the rest is silence.

Some hours’ driving farther, out in the wastes, there are other, smaller outposts. The towns raise glowing marquees like standards against the dark mountains: CHEVRON, CONOCO, MCDONALDS, BEST WESTERN: War camps mustered on the floor of the plain, awaiting battle with what implacable force they know not. Perhaps they fight it every day, with light and speech, with habit.

In smaller camps, the signs refer not to companies but to necessities of life: GAS, FOOD, MOTEL, CASINO. Black letters painted on white-washed wood. A rusted trailer stove in and listing to one side behind a splintered shack.

August, 2009

The Farm

A pig barks, a rooster shrieks, “What I do is me. For that I came.” What grace enacts itself in curve of neck, in stance, in wing, or rhythm of hands coiling a rubber hose is native to its materials and its lease not paid with an exquisite sacrifice but claimed only and irrefutably by blood rushing through arteries and veins.

The Sun Worshippers

We watched the path of the sun. We stood on the back porch and turned right in the morning. We turned left in the evening. The birth of each day was set on the hills to the east and its departing on the hills to the west so that the house was bounded and held in place by banks of dusty, rose-colored and saffron sky.

The mornings were without dew, as though the world had not slept but only waited quietly for the return of the sun. As the sun climbed, windows were shut, shades were lowered first on the eastern sides of the barns and houses, then on the other sides. Fans were switched on. At noon the swamp coolers were turned on it the pig barn.

We made our rounds four times a day, counted every pig, sheep, duck, goose, chicken, turkey, rabbit, cow, steer, donkey, and goat. We raked straw. We filled buckets with water and scrubbed the automated water troughs. Our faces were black with dirt, our hands with dirt and the oils of animals’ skins. Our mouths were full of straw dust. The sun burned white in a sky the faded blue of old photographs and baked our skin brown and dried instantly the small cuts torn in our hands and arms.

As the sun descended, the residents were herded back indoors. Fans were shut off, blinds raised, shutters opened. Every animal was counted once again.

The cat followed us up the dirt road back to the house that was held in place by dawn and dusk, in which one who had returned early from work was baking bread in the cool of the air-conditioned kitchen. We stood on the porch to watch the sun sink. A house stood across from us on the top of a hill, and a wind turbine spun next to it. By these the light of the ebbing day was measured until both were lost in darkness.

The Stars

I woke in the night and walked outside to lie beneath the galaxies and was at high tide, the mind washed full into the body, flooding ears and nose and mouth and eyes. The mind pressed against the shores of this world as though in love with it – as though it could breach the demarcation wrought of this flesh and sink into the spaces left for it between the stars, and seep into the rocky soil, there to lie with tree roots and the bones of the earth.