My Crossing

by Deborah Schwartz

 

I smell the ocean from the moving truck.
One sun slant creeps through the canvas.
Images, thousands of them slip through too.
I call them fish heads. For even a severed body has eyes.

At night, while he makes his way
across the truck, I pull my girl into my chest
and smell the sea salt in her hair.

I hum into her ear, so no one else can hear
as he grunts and comes into the body
of another woman.

Chalk and foam.
Ash and a bone comb.
Cigarettes and the over ripe apple—
a tree has many reasons to give us what we need
when we walk toward it with a machete.

**********

Golden Coyote, black-backed Coyote.
Side-striped Coyote, howling in the milky hills.

We feel the homing bones of your bodies.
Like you, we are walking with an animal walk.

Red flower of sleep, wily through the cortex,
Red sunset with the squat houses behind.
Lupus grey. Sterling grey.

The tallest man in the pack is not the one to watch out for.

**********

In the morning after the red sun conquers the night sky,
I see the hills, the squat houses nestled there.

Lupus grey, sterling grey landscape,
I smell the ocean though there is no ocean.

When clouds cover the sun and calm it,
when the sky is writing the word fire

we huddle under the canvas and the truck moves forward.

**********

I am crouched between my daughter and the other woman.

Each is holding one of my hands
as we ride the Suchiate River on a raft that is like an army.

The woman’s protruding stomach is a seed,
though her mouth is as closed as a locked vault.

For within this calm river, there is another sea, one rough and full of storms.

**********

We sleep on the ground. We ride on top of the train.
A fire in the village that appears like a face.

Chalk and foam, ash and a bone comb.
Cigarettes and the over ripe apple—

a tree has many reasons to give us what we need,
when we walk toward it with a machete.

**********

As the train billows, some sleeping dogs,
wake and scare easily.

After the train,
there is the walking through the white amnesia of memory
and the walking through the milky hills.

Golden Coyote, black-backed Coyote.
Side-striped Coyote, we sense the homing bones of our own bodies.
Like you, Coyote
we walk through the desert with a canine walk.

Let sleeping dogs lie.
I don’t know what to do with the hands that are mine.

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