Photo by Ken Lund
Stupid mind, turning away from music and saying there is no music.
North Carolina in January, snow on the river, my teacher is saying,
It’s like walking on a tightrope, my teacher is saying, Don’t look down.
*
From Tucson take 19 south to Arivaca. Turn on Ruby Road.
The February sun is white behind John, who’s Quaker and who
invited Annie and me out for milkshakes when he heard. He’s saying,
Everyone dies, and I say, This is different, meaning the geopolitical facts
whereby some people have to leave home and other people can stay,
and the only way to cross is through the desert. He says, Different how?
and I say, He was killed, and Annie puts her head on my neck as
though I am her lover.
*
Pass Ruby, the ghost town, the pilings from the mine.
At the training they’d explained: a typical sign of heat sickness is
confusion. Sometimes the skin becomes sensitive, the softest cloth an
irritant. Sometimes people are found with their clothes next to them,
folded neatly.
*
Park on the road just in from waypoint 1186, or on Ruby Road, at 1177,
near mile marker 12. Hike south.
We’re hanging silver stars and tinsel from the roof of the shelter, since
it’s Advent, we’re making cupcakes, drinking Coke, when Jorge comes
in, Jorge who keeps crossing and then showing up again, who wears a
shark-tooth necklace he got when he lived in LA. This time his face is
gray and his hands are shaking. I sit across from him, and he tells me
about the teenaged girl they found in what used to be a river, how he sat
all night by her, how he walked all the way back here in the morning.
Waypoint 3831 is what you want to aim for.
*
Maybe it’s time to give him over into the care of god, my friend says
on the phone. She’s an RN, tall and thin, and once she played “Swing
Low, Sweet Chariot” on the piano in Mexico while the rest of us tried to
translate chariot. I try to picture care of god—
and I think of the tea the woman with small ears had served on the
card table by the chair where I’m sitting the year I turn nineteen.
Through the window, liquor stores and the cathedral, on the wall
photographs of Jerusalem, the woman with small ears facing the corner,
her blouse hung on the back of the desk chair, her white back bending,
her arms with the scars like milk on them falling to pull the black
dress I’d brought over her head, so she’s deaf for a minute in it—
At the gate in the fence, cross the fence and head downhill, and cross
the small canyon. On the far side of the canyon head uphill for the
trail—
Or Kevin saying, You don’t have to watch—
Or El Paso in the evening, a storm coming up or leaving, the sky dark
and the wind in everything where I am walking by the storefronts
along the border close to the bridge to Juárez and one storefront is blue,
white lettering on the front that says Estrella, light coming out of
everything like it’s taking care of you, and I go into a market across the
street to buy pears and fish I’ll eat in the hotel for dinner, and
coming out the sky is already darker, the blue of the building across
the street already a different color.
*
After 3831 go down the steep hill to 3855. This is the part that’s hard to
go down. Take the trail that runs above the wash, to the spot where
the trails fork, Annie saying, I feel numb, I’m saying, Don’t forget to
come back.
Then rain in the morning, rain in the weeks after that.
Margaree Little’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Bloom and Beloit Poetry Journal. She is a recent graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and has worked as an assistant editor in the program’s archival collection of craft lectures. Originally from Rhode Island, she lives in Tucson, Arizona.