2 poems
Zzyzx
When you turn four, Preston, you will be as old as the sun and the earth and as old as Heaven. In the kitchen, I am lying on a rug next to the sliding glass door. I am holding a rabbit against my chest and one arm is behind my head. The words inside are a voice. You spoke of this one thing that is freedom.
Preston, when you turn four, you will see a sphere rising from the front courtyard, as you are awake in the room which was your father’s, and first was mine, where my sister too slept in her crib. The sphere will rise with its light in every direction. The ferns will each one come into its shadow, and the palm frond will become a mouth. The angel will be the whale’s middle. Its belly will go out the front gate. It will open and close the gate quietly. The key is to be thinking of these things at the same time.
What is felt in this room is God’s mother.
When you are four, the light will begin in the cement and travel up the stucco wall. Some of the light is violet. Some of it blue. Some of it is yellow. There are no ghosts.
Look Preston, the cloud is coming down in the form of frost. It is like a sponge. When the moment comes, I want you to go as quietly as you can. Get to the fountain at the edge of the west loop, to the bridge which goes across the loop and into the plaza. You used to play there. Go into the little movie theatre. Get to a row in the middle and lay on the floor. If you are small enough, pull your knees all the way beneath the seat, go as far down as you can.
From the whale’s belly is also a light that is green. To breathe you need only shut your eyes.
The sun is rising. The wetlands have burned. The water has
burned. The doves which made their nest in the entryway, there did the shore begin its exchange.
You can see through the courtyard into the family’s home. If you stand very still with your hands empty, there is the feeling.
Preston, when you turn four, we are going to go on an airplane, all of us together. You will sit in
the window seat and the sky and even mountains will be beneath you. You will be in the clouds.
Remember those clouds.
Preston, you will find yourself in Mr. MGregor’s garden. He will come at you with a shovel and a spade, he will come at you with the sound and smell of diamonds, he will remind you of a neighbor, but this man will have gone too far inside his house, so that his pain comes out a star.
Keep the scent of mud in your nose and in your belly. This will make you invisible to the men who cannot read sky. If you become thirsty, think of a time-scale. If you are hungry think of the door. Remember to look up. You know the way. Remember, everything is a circle.
The Air Field
To be rooted and unrooted as a tidepool, to spread into the world.
Dear God,
Desert Inn is opening a hole into you. A bird is hollering from a man’s shoulder, as the man is making his way around the earth. The bird sounds like a white macaw. Across the pool, there is a black cat on the wall, ascending the stairs to your apartment and lying around on your bed and beneath your desk, a big fly coming in through the window, the sun rising.
Everyone is going someplace.
Remember the olive tree which sang these songs, dressed as a noble savage wreath. Remember the blades of grass reflected the moon and those lights, another cat inside, slapping its tail.
Dear God,
The horses seem to have switched in advance of the switchboard—the ground is not what you thought!
Dear God,
nearness has come for you at last.
Look at that, someone said, the hole is becoming wide. The ground is opening like a bowl. Into the bowl goes the rubber tree, and the air. In goes a yellow ball.
In goes the world’s largest crystal sphere. God has become so dense, and he is sitting up in the
back room.
Dear God,
First put the stone on your head. Open your hands and face, palms up. Now move the light around
around
around
Do you feel it through the air?
Dear God,
I am in the white shell.
Dear God,
The shell goes all the way to Ellis Island, and once you get there the island will have become a woman’s breast; there will the oceans give way to forest, and there will words give way to sound and finally voice, and will the pain become a blanket, will it become an hourglass pulling, its sand become crystal, its mind become crystal, the web getting its rocks off with the windows shut, the frontier exploding.
Above the children’s table, so many jars of curry. The children were dead leaves blowing across the cement. No running! The boys would shout at them, No running in the pool! But the children were dead leaves and all they could do was run. And when they finally ended up in the pool they would float for a while and then they would sink down to the bottom, becoming the sound of the gate spread around like an electric fence.
The operators watched the hole grow open for one hour, and then IT became them. It took their eyes and their batons and used them to open itself faster, so that everything around went inside. In went the dead animals. Their blood and skin became the wind.
We’re losing the animals, someone said.
In went the black cat, and the stones stacked outside.
Language became the opening with the rest of them. It became the feeling in your hands when the stone is on your head and your hands are a bowl. An echo around the rim.
Outside, you think you see an animal, like a beaver or a raccoon, but you don’t see any tail and it seems to be running upwards on its hind feet. It reminds you of a sloth or a wild hog. The animal is running from beneath Manhattan, and it runs across the interstate and disappears behind a row of restaurants, but to you it looks like the animal runs into the window of a saloon; you see it run across the tables, and vanish into the far wall.
Shannon Salter lives in Las Vegas, where she received her MFA from UNLV. Her poems and stories have appeared in journals such as The Bitter Oleander and Denver Quarterly. Her great love is the Mojave Desert.