Storm Flower

portrait with belt and milkweed

the author reading The Book of Images, West Marin

Tolvar –
one of those towns where the road
goes straight through and the wind
doesn’t stop for anything.

Vacant lots. Ragweed.
A refrigerator rusting in the weeds.
Beer tabs pressed flat in the dirt –
Pabst, Rainier, Lone Star –
little offerings.

We played where they told us
not to play.
Railroad tracks. Broken glass.
Fields so wide a kid
could disappear in them
and nobody would notice
for hours.

Wild oats tall as our shoulders
moving like water in the wind.
Milkweed bursting open.
Grasshoppers firing out of the ditch.
We shot cans off the fence line
with our fathers’ and uncles’ guns.

We were nobody’s worry.

Jumped freight cars to San Jose.
Made chains from beer tabs.
Roasted pigs in pits
we dug with our hands.
Lit things on fire in the vacant lots
just to see them change.
Dust in our teeth and the sky
blue enamel cracked with heat.

Our fathers came home from Vietnam
to nothing.
No parades. No thank you
for your service.
Just the weight of it
still on their backs.
The shrapnel. The distance.
A silence that had weight to it.
That sat in the chair before he did.
That was already in the room
when you walked in.

Every house had the same kitchen.
Linoleum curling at the corners.
Screen door that never closed quiet.
A radio on low
in a room nobody sat in.

And every father had a belt.

Brown leather.
Creased like a dry riverbed.
Hanging on the back of the chair
like furniture.

He beat us with the belt.
Not once. Not for something.
The way you do a thing
so many times
it becomes ordinary.
Between supper and the dishes.
Between the lawn and the laundry.
An ordinary thing
in an ordinary house
and nobody outside
called it by name.

She hung the laundry after.
The pulley squealed.
The shirts filled up with wind
like something trying to leave.

We ran after.
Always after.
Barefoot through the fields.
Wild with wind.
Foxtails in our hair
and the whole sky
opening above us
like it had nothing
to do with any of it.

The wind raised me.

Nothing gentle survived long.

Nothing disappears. It changes weapons.

A woman who wears Chanel Pirate
and and a passport thick with leaving

A woman
standing in a doorway
with a rifle.

She left everyone.
She always came back.

She makes galettes in a cast iron skillet
and gumbo from the bones of a thing
she killed herself.
She sat in a café in Paris
and missed the sound
of a screen door slamming.

Gun oil on the kitchen towel.
A jar of duck fat on the back of the stove.
A tobacco tin full of screws
in the knife drawer.

Sometimes her palms are open.
Sometimes they’re closed.

She was taught to reload
before she was taught to ask.

She carries a gun
the way other women carry lipstick.

She always sits facing the door.

Flour sack apron.
Ammunition box.
A woman who can set a table
and clear a room.

The dogs always liked her.

The wind changed
when she walked through a field.

The fields, the heat,
the long light
going copper before it went.

I can’t get to the milkweed
without the belt.
I can’t get to the sky
without the chair
he hung it on.

They’re the same memory
and I can’t
make them stop
touching.

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