It was unbearably hot if you ask my mother

but I didn't know that.

 

We arrived in a swirl of red dust and the scent of shortleaf pine

and now my clothes were stiff, my hair water-combed into sticks

and smelling of riverbelly and bees with sun under their wings.

 

What I knew was that we were sleeping out by a real fire

on a riverbank at night and there was no bed, an amazement.

 

My father dragged our canoe out of the water,

tilted it on its side, and strung a tarp from the canoe

in a slant to the brown riversand. Beneath was a quilt.

My mother said I could be in the middle, but I wanted the edge—

we were sleeping by a river, under a canoe, next to stars,

sharp as little knives. I needed to see

the moon's violet bowl, to be brand new at the edge and end

of the world, with time a green flux singing and falling

around me in silk strings; to hear the clicking

of fancies and phantasms amid a river-wind's stir of shadow.

 

If such a place were possible, I might weather

the years when something closed and sealed the hidden

banks beneath my inner breath and course.

If such a bed were made, this rich draught

might show me my own way home,

as if I knew my home, my way, my own—

one night to hold open the great heart of the world

so we can heal before we die, dancing up the clouds,

climbing the smoke from our fire to another place,

stamps on letters from far away.

At dusk

the shape of the canyon

is described by fog,

a blurred ghost

of the creek itself;

 

and the moon

is a smudge of silence

in the plum-colored sky,

its face chiseled by the

sharp-pointed

rasp of juniper.

 

Up close, the water

in the creek

gives shine

to the mica-reflection

of light,

bathes in the hard darkness

of stone.

 

On the far bank,

a gang of juncos

hunkers under willows.

Remember the first time

something wild

looked you back, in the eyes?

You can feel this for yourself:

how large forces

work on tiny lives.

Brittle is a heard thing,

the call and response of pampas grass in static air,

a sound native to drought.

 

              Quail sought shelter,

              nesting deep inside its golden blades.

 

When forage ran out,

cows chewed prickly pear. Pain became

the price of water.

 

              I fenced off this oasis

              from the race between mouth and monsoon.

 

Fostering survival

is an illusion of will. Nature leads with continuity,

finishes with sacrifice.

 

             I kneel to look.

            The grassy bowl is empty, its slopes pristine.

 

Below the barbwire,

tracks braid the sand. Four toes and a pad.

The signature of coyote.

 

             Rustling stalks

             beckoned when all other cover was gone.

 

There is balance

within the wreckage. Eggs bursting with rain

inside an arid mouth.

A grey heron glided slowly overhead

somewhere south of Bredasdorp

its S-neck smooth as ribbon candy

in the crystal dish my grandfather filled at Christmas,

grace and leisure merged into

that single arc across unbroken sky.

Did the space where it had been remember it

a moment later, or a year?

I couldn't see the heron any longer

but my mind retained the image.

If space and time collapsed

and I could be all places I have ever been

in a single moment, could I

taste the old sweetness

from my grandfather's hand?