The Migration of Stones

In the dream, she is a young girl with bright eyes and soft hands.  She turns and she is an old lady with grey hair and brown weathered skin.  She turns and she is a young girl standing alone in the middle of the Mohave Desert.  The dry land rolls for miles in every direction.  Small clumps of yucca shimmer in the white heat.  The air refuses to move. She is alone and she is filled with an incomprehensible sadness.  Her parents are gone.  Her sadness is deafening.  She stands alone against the heat.  In the distance, a man approaches on foot.  He is far away and it takes him a long time.  As he nears, she sees that he carries something in his hand.  She cannot make out what it is.  He closes in on her.  He is a young man; he is an old man.  He reminds her of Emilliano Santos de Jesus Parada, but it is not he.  He wears an old blue shirt.  His face is clear as water.  She is not afraid.  He carries an old burlap sugar bag. He approaches and stands in front of her.  He empties the bag and stones of every variety fall at her feet.  White chunks of quartz, black pieces of obsidian, rust colored meteorites.  She drops to her knees and frantically tries to collect the stones.  When she grabs one, two more appear and skitter away.  She is frantic. She gathers a handful and drops them in the bag. Four more appear at her feet and roll away from her.  The man in the blue shirt laughs.

“Hurry!” he whispers.  “Hurry!”

***

Patience

    In the humid darkness of the trailer, she fumbled for the pack of Chesterfield Kings. She hit the pack against her left forefinger, pulled a cigarette out with her teeth, and inhaled the dry unlit cigarette deep into her chest. This was a ritual she’d learned from watching her father smoke.

 

Honor

“I want the student who is cheating on this test to stop doing so immediately,” Miss Alvarez echoed across the Spanish classroom.

A Squirrel Story

What's a six-letter word for squirrel?" my wife yelled from the living room as I was outside tending to my traps and snares.

Why People Hate Clowns

(In 1976 I had made the move from Tucson to Phoenix to work with the Arizona Commission on the Arts as a writer in residence. I had gotten a job funded through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act {CETA} that paid me to work on my craft, the only criteria being that I had to use some of my work week working with the community.  I did poetry readings, workshops, held classes in a variety of locations, and developed a children’s program of storytelling and performance.  For the children’s performance, I created a costumed character, The Miraculous Mr. Smith and his fantastic friend, Frank Frank, the honest fish. Cleaning out my studio recently, I found my costume and with it a plethora of emotions, from the sublime to the nauseating.)

The Storytellers

He tried to remember. He pushed his hands deep into the darkness that was memory and tried to grab something, anything, and bring it to the surface. His hands groped in that black space, a blind boy walking in an empty house. He concentrated as hard as he could but the results were always the same.

Las Cruces

The Chevy ran fine, but father was broken down in the motel room. In the café next door, I ate dinner with my mother and sister. I pushed quarters into the juke box, played the theme from Bonanza over and over. In two days we’d be in Tucson. My father was dying. He would not eat dinner with us.