MEDICINE BAG
MEDICENE BAG
SILVER DAGGER
Don’t sing
love songs, you’ll wake my mother,
She’s lying
here, just by my side,
And in her
hand, a silver dagger,
She says
I’ll be no man’s bride.
They are Christians and coal miners, and those that don’t die
from gas explosions down in the shafts will eventually succumb to black lung.
It is hellish labor even if you have chosen it and find pride in it among your
peers and don’t consider it a sentence. The work is so hellish that miners
escape captivity and servitude; oppression will not follow them down below and
without rebelling against God they have gained the rebel’s crossing to the
other side of death but lack his rancor.
They are familiar with the grave and the stone heart of matter. Then who is the girl whose mother sleeps
beside her with a silver dagger? Who is
singing love songs to her? Pooled like
mist in these hollows are songs like this, chaste and nightmarish. The
They reached our
village in the afternoon and marched right through. First, the jeeps and
motorcycles arrived carrying the officers, then the infantry with their
howitzers and cannons pulled behind trucks and the tanks. We knew they were
coming. A week before our own soldiers had straggled through, looking like old
men or worse, like bodies dug up from the grave. They staggered like drunks.
The few who had come from our village were pulled from the stream by their families;
otherwise they would have continued walking to nowhere. It was coincidence they
had come this way. They did not really remember us or care to. They were
finished and already were forgetting the world. They were hard to feed, just
broth for a month, and they would throw it up and never asked for anything.
Others who we thought were dead and who may have considered themselves to be,
turned up after the war. They had taken different roads from the front and
could not tell us how they had spent the missing years. One day, after
liberation, the world changed again. They had bolted like forest creatures from
a fire and lived in panic for five years. Now, the fire had burned out, the sun
was replanted in the skies and they were back.
But, they had forgotten how to live under kinder skies. They drank themselves
to death, living with us as they must have while they were gone, in filth and
rags and stupor. They were too afraid to stay sober and the fear was needless
now, but what else was left? Maybe they
knew better. They had become prophets.
Here is the
question we put to each other when we were boys: You are in the woods. Ahead of you is a bear, behind you a wolf,
and coming from one side is a lion and on your left is a coiled snake. Which
way do you choose?
They passed
through our village on the way to the city and left behind only a small
garrison. The road ran right through the center of our village and they meant
to insure it remained open. That was our misfortune because if we had built in
another place they would have ignored us. In this way we became a colony. It
was not so bad. We did not resist and
suffered no worse punishment than the requisitioning of a share of our crops.
In some ways life improved. We had to treat them courteously, which forced the
whole village to be more gracious to each other. Before they came we cheated
and stole from each other when we could and grudges had been harbored for
generations. They were less corrupt than we. For the first time everyone was
treated equally. That is not the entire
definition of justice, but it is one part we had always lacked. After the war
it was revealed that most of us had been in the resistance. Millions and
millions of us. Perhaps it was enough to resent them to consider your self a
partisan, but in my whole country I never heard of more than a few dozen louts
who actually discomfited them. I was destined to do much worse to our colonies
in Asia and
They chose our orchard and that is how I discovered them. It
was spring; the pears and apples in bloom would catch any lover’s eyes. I think they were newly in love. At the time
I found their eagerness funny and wondrous, but with a half century of life
between us their near frenzy speaks of the first weeks of an affair before any
part of who we are intervenes. She was from the village, I recognized her,
maybe the baker’s daughter or the grocer’s, but she was from another
generation, an adult already, possibly already twenty, and I only knew her by
sight. Certainly, until that spring I never thought of her as beautiful or
thought of her much at all, and could not suspect that by the time I reached
her age she would be the only woman left beautiful for me after my years as a
soldier for the republic.
He had use of a motorcycle that even had a sidecar that must
have seemed to him created especially for young lovers, just waiting to seat a
girl with blowing hair, and that to me was the most perfect machine I had ever
seen, what a stallion would be if I were a highwayman instead of a farmer’s son
who has seen horses broken to the plow. I could hear it farting and grinding
through the countryside long before his arrival. Back then the provinces were
so close to silence that an hour could not elapse without passing into its
realm. Only wind through the leaves, a creek that was hushed by a small rise,
or the twittering of a bird made a border to cross, and the roads being lazy
and winding and my knowing them like the simple pattern of veins on the back of
my nine years old hand, I could head them off and would wait hidden to see them
pass, he in his wonderful uniform with its surplus of rich green and his
goggles, and the girl from the village in his supple leather touring jacket and
comically, gloriously, his leather skull cap snapped below her chin, her blond
mane tossing about from beneath it. Was it the goggles with their look of an
old aviator, the open carriage, their immersion in the elements of wind and
speed, but I know I felt without ever having experienced it, the altitude and
lesser divinity of travel, its omniscient, privileged view. These first lovers,
defiant and daring, risking everything to heighten its savor; all those that
came later would seem a prescriptive analgesic for lies.
He had maneuvered the motorcycle off the dirt road that ran
between our orchard and that of the neighboring farm. Like clothes drying, the
leather jacket and skullcap and the goggles were dangling from the handlebars.
They had not allowed themselves the time to arrange the rest of their clothes;
they were pressed down around them in the matted grass like a nest. A swallow
might pick this spot; he would be the one to see the orchard as they must have,
in full flight banking along the curving roads, plunging into dells and
climbing up sharply on a rise, a field of blossoms laying there below you, or a
heaven of blossoms placed suddenly overhead. Silence, a pall of silence had
been lowered around them. What it must be to make love, to sheer it off or tune
it from the world, whatever it is that we suppose ourselves to be funneling
into time, whatever it is, it was there encircling them and they did not look
ridiculous. It was as if they were held reflected in the lens of a great eye.
My memories of them are all I have to remind me of what a
soul must be. When I first arrived in
There are no faces left in my country past the age of five,
and frankly, we find children’s captivation with events alarming. In
The young officer on the motorcycle, I have seen so many
since then employed in the actions of the world. I know who daydreams among a
crew paving a road, and who is suffering at an office desk. The young officer
was a reluctant soldier, really hardly a soldier at all. He would have been
content in cafes between studies. I saw him during the great adventure of his
life. He was never to be better than he was that summer. If he survived to any
degree, his only chance would have been to return to old habits, to join in
some tepid industry of paper. He would never be young again or own a
motorcycle, and it is doubtful that he ever pursued a cleaning lady or farm
girl again; these were accidents of a history both larger and smaller than his
life. If only the occupation had abandoned him there forever when he still
could see the sublime absurdity of a clerk on a motorcycle making love beneath
flowering limbs, or when he might see the absurdity of anything that would come
later. Had the girl lived, she would
have been paraded through the streets with her head shaved. Of course, we had
all cooperated with the colonialists but we had only been able to eek survival
from it, a semblance of it anyway, while some seemed to have managed to live.
Most were only capable of morality, and this was not a consequence of the war
but of having outlived desire. They
could not bear those who had not despaired of life. But, she was killed by the
liberators and was spared the spite of her neighbors. The Americans killed her.
The village took satisfaction from that. It was justice served. Some soldiers
took her for a mistress and for some reason or another ended up killing her. It
is difficult for a soldier to believe in tenderness.
I wondered at the time why he told me this story. I was
hitching through
Some years later I went to work at a wine store in
He was long and thin, but soft boned, without marrow, and
left his long arms dangling, a shape and mix of antimonies-passive but
alert-that would ensure not a whit above sustenance in a city of warrens; a figure
in the background, unnoticed by brighter lives. But, he had his grudges, stuff
left unchallenged and forgotten by quicker souls, like the canard about cats
being the secret ingredient in chicken cattitore. I grew up in the flotsam from
the Second World War. A French teacher in my high school who had migrated from
He was a fifty-five year old clerk in a wine store pulling
down about one hundred forty a week, no wife or children. But, luck had thrown
him a bone. He’d had a chance to live like the godfather of the godfathers.
Sometime after D-Day he and his tank crew got separated from their battalion
and wound up on a farm in
The driver in
A busload of people stinking from fear heading into the night?
Or, a host of angels carrying you off to the comets? Which do you chose?
THE WATER IS WIDE
There is
ship out in the water, loaded deep as deep can be,
but not so
deep as the love I’m in, I know not if I sink or swim
The melodies for these ballads are first noted emerging in
The water licking at my ankles, this is the way it happens
when the sea disgorges you and lays you on the shore after a shipwreck. The sea
is spent after the turmoil of last night, gently glazing the beach with its
tired respiration. For some reason it chose to cradle me and has deposited me
on the doorstep of this continent, a sleeping foundling. My first sight on
waking is my own forearms and hands, close and remarkable; it takes a moment to
recognize what they are. Shadows are still long. The shadows are cast by
decorated fishing boats drawn up on shore and resting on their keels, and by a
flock of seagulls that seem to be waiting for duty on board. The light is a pale solution from the first
pecking of morning. A fragrance of lemons, and looking up I see the village so
steeply raked it could be built for birds or to house the different voices in a
choir. The balcony of one house will look down on the roof of another, and
hanging overhead, his nearest neighbor, nearer even than the dwelling abutting
his on the side, will look down on his flapping clotheslines, flying like the
pennants of ships in a harbor lifting and then floundering in the swells.
I climb into the town, sand between my toes, the seagulls
edging grouchily away from my route, then the narrow roadway of cobblestones
nearly as steep and doglegged as a fire escape riveted to a wall. Down to the
sea come the fishermen their nets slung across their shoulders, pocketing the
descent in their stout thighs, short men with a game spring in their stride,
glancing my way with easy curiosity and an occasional nod. “Hoopa, hoopa,
hoopa”, they say to me when backing up the road to let me pass. I stumble into
a last group, and they laugh as they continue down and rejoin the ribbon of
lanterns winding to the beach.
No one seems to have bothered closing his wooden shutters
last night. The sun has baked the paint from them; they hang akimbo from rusted
hinges, and flowers are growing in clay pots on the listing balconies. Squares
large enough to hold a table or two or just a few chairs pushed against a wall
and a lemon or olive tree are pried into every open space. I will never find a
park or statue or town hall; history has skirted this little town that can only
be reached by sea, perhaps by shipwreck. When the moon waxes the old men sit
outside with mandolins, and those who do not play sing in hoarse whispers to
the old crones who cluck their tongues or snort but sit nearby smoking small
pipes and watching the smoke drift into the night.
I will be able to stay here, about half way up the road,
where I find two old ladies smoking and sipping tarry Turkish coffee. They
appraise me with a shrug, my bare feet and briny clothes, pat a chair beside
them and before I am seated one has gone through a doorway to soon return with
a cup for me. They dress in widows black, crucifixes hang from their buttoned
collars and black hairs coil from large moles, and yet patience for vendetta
gives them a humorous spirit; they have lived to see justice done, beauty
wither, happiness turn to grief. God everywhere accumulates his verdicts from
the stuff he has created. The old men croak out love songs and they are the
ones who distill the local aperitif from lemons. When the moon fills from the
bottom a girl can be glimpsed combing her hair in a window, her breasts lifting
with each stroke. A raspy voice cannot foster her for long, but she looks back
for a second with as much longing as is given before she fades.
I am in time to help prepare sardines with olives. The
crone’s gnarled hands are surprisingly supple, even tender, basting the little fish
in salt and oil and placing them in a crock-pot to cure. I fetch things from
around the kitchen to assist her. I like this room, its stocky wooden tables,
the grave iron stove, the fall of solid light through the window and the flat
note of heavy crockery on wood and marble. My room will have windows that look
out on a lemon tree and a nightingale will sometimes sing in its branches. What
history has never touched the days and nights have sunk into deeply, staining
them to the core and brimming inside. I will work in the terraced vineyards
above the town, and when I rest from the work I will look down on the village
clinging to the cliffs and then to the ocean that a thousand feet below climbs
into the sky where the fishermen have gone to net the moon and have yet to
return.
SEA-FARING
A pal of mine was recently visiting with a cousin of his in
They drive out to the site. A
pick-up truck is parked there with a fifteen-foot trailer coupled behind,
loaded with two by fours, planks, and plywood sheets. The contractor pops into
the house which is already clad in sheer wall and shingled, and collects some
tool belts, a nail gun and magazines of nails, throws them into the back of his
SUV, and asks my friend if he can drive a truck. He can; he owned one for ten years. Fine, he won’t have to do any backing, and he
gives him the keys to the pick-up with the trailer hooked in back, and
straight-faced, this guy is used to being a foreman, tells him to follow after him.
This project was a last minute inspiration. Big guy, wide in the middle but no look of
going soft, energy to burn, an idle hour making him antsy, and here they are
about ten miles from dinner-nothing is close by in Oklahoma City-the sun
already set. Big guy, excess of wit and
restive muscle, make s a left out of the site onto the two-lane highway,
kicking up rooster tails of mud. My
friend waddles after him towing this Gibson gal bustle of a trailer. All he can see way up ahead are two red
taillights, and then he sees them turn off the blacktop, and when he arrives at
a one lane strip of asphalt, he turns off after them.
The pavement is cracked and potholed, and he limps along, while,
naturally, the SUV with its hob-nailed snow tires, eager for contest and
tussle, has disappeared. My friend
doesn’t remember this road, but he figures it’s a shortcut and he will soon
come on something familiar. Anyway, he
has no choice but to continue. He could
never turn this trailer around on the narrow road.
He crosses a wooden bridge, aiming the pick-up so its tires will run
along the two planks that are laid for runners across its ties. On the other side the road has turned to
dirt, and he sees tall grass instead of harvested fields filled with corn
stubble. He sees a white farmhouse with
a lit window, and in the yellow light cast on a deep porch, he sees the
silhouette of a triangular dinner clangor.
He sees the glow from a puffed pipe on the porch. Large trees tower over the house; he
recognized their graceful crowns to be those of elms. He wonders why they haven’t dropped their
leaves yet. A horrific creature is
caught for a moment in the headlights, then with devilish grace, rushes across
the road and plunges into the grass.
What was it? Big, thick beast
with high shoulders and slouching haunches, huge, unsightly head, possibly
tusks, a sense of intelligence in it, maybe how it broke out of the headlights,
maybe its having seen him first and finished its appraisal while he was still
startled. He thinks of a werewolf, that
amalgamation of forms and the unholy agility in the ugly beast. His description fits nothing else but a razor
back boar, his cousin’s husband will tell him later. No one has seen one anywhere around here for
decades. Where could he have been? Nothing else my friend adds to his story
helps them pinpoint the road he took.
He comes to a gas station with a diner attached to it. He pulls in to ask directions. He hasn’t seen pumps like this since he was a
kid. Glass faces with the little
fan-like gizmo that will turn when they’re working, and the gallon counters
that turn on wheels like a slot machine, or like slot machines once did. And the signs for soft drinks are archaic,
too. This place must have been out of
business for years, although it doesn’t look run down. He doesn’t need gas; he wants
directions. He goes into the diner. It’s shinny and bright, glaring after the dim
road. The waitress is wearing an apron
over her blue uniform; she must have set her hair at home with those big,
cylindrical curlers he remembers his mom using when he was a kid, the look is
unmistakable. She tells him if he just
follows the road he’ll fall onto the highway he’s looking for. Make a left and it will take him home.
He sits down at the counter for a cup of coffee. On the counter in front of the stool next to
his, a half empty mug is still giving off wisps of steam. A newspaper is opened to a back page and
folded and tucked in such a way as to spotlight an article. Of course, he’s going to read it; it’s what
you do when you’re sipping coffee.
The article is about the one person in all of
But, here she was in a lengthy article left in a diner near a half empty
mug of coffee, an artist who made mosaics murals whose subjects were mostly
taken from Native American mythology and religion of the tribes that had been
sent into exile to Oklahoma. My friend’s
largest project to date had been a mural of Quetzalcoatl mounted on the wall of
a BART station in
The next day his cousin and he drove back along the highway he had
returned on last night. They could not
find the road he had taken. He left
Then there’s the story another friend tells me. He’s sixteen and his family is traveling to
Sixteen. By that age the idea of
an extended vacation with your family may not look so good. You might just as soon fly there and miss the
four or five days during which there’s no place to hide, but sometimes the
folks can hit it on the head, which is no mean feat when they have three sons
and a daughter ranging in age from sixteen to seven. For all I know the younger kids stayed in the
cabin with their fingers stuffed in their ears and wailing. They’re not part of the story. But, they hit the nail for their oldest
son.
I remember sixteen. I was in love
for the second time. I never spoke to
her and was as chivalrous as any knight or cowboy. I adored her.
The part of the year not spent in reverie was toil and quagmire.
On board my friend met an older woman.
I believe she was in her thirties.
An older woman. She would look
like a young woman to me today, to my friend as well, but more than that, if I
see her with the eyes I have today, I see boredom, a face already jaded by
calculated experience, a spoiled woman with time on her hands. And there’s my friend, sixteen, with all the
awkward, noble grace of an adolescent.
Passionate, heroic, naive, easily enrolled in a tired script.
He fell in love with her. She led
him on, using glimpses of the tragic that only a sixteen year old can believe,
in so many words ingraining in him the old refrain about ships passing in the
night.
Did he have a tryst with her, an hour in her cabin, a dance in the
lounge, a first taste of champagne?
There was a time I would have asked out of jealousy, now it doesn’t seem
important or even interesting. All that
matters, all that could last, was what he did tell me: The ship plowing through
a carpet of stars.
Our skipper had followed a bum tip he’d heard over the wireless and we’d
spent the day fruitlessly making sets that brought up heavy harvests of jelly
fish and little else, except for the final set, which came back a sad dead
weight, filled with a school of hapless rock cod who had gillnetted themselves
by their spines in the webbing of the seine.
We spent two hours unthreading them and throwing their corpses back to
the sea.
There was no point in staying.
The salmon run here was over; we had missed the gold rush in transit and
the season was closing about our ears. I
was the newest man on board and from skipper on down we were pretty much
busted, so I was drafted for the helm while the others would sleep. All I had to do was follow the lights of the
boat ahead back to
We darkened the bridge; the skipper’s bunk
was right behind the helm.
These were inland waterways, glass smooth. Because I was following the boat ahead I was
cured of a new helmsman’s tendency to weave about the course as if he’s
drunk. I had lights on which to draw a
bead and they gave me the perfection of dead reckoning.
Hour after hour for a complete watch I followed those lights through the
black, transparent water while the crew slept, and somewhere in that passage
both boats set a course through a carpet of stars.
So many songs have washed up on shore and I have tried and sometimes
succeeded in re-floating them and setting dead reckoning on the moon. There is a whaling ship and four gallant men
lost when the whale fish gave a flourish with her tail. And
I don’t measure the success of my voyages when I embark. Those times, when the beached vessels eaten
down to their bare ribs with the skeleton tracing the graceful shape of skiff,
penance or cockleshell may brake my heart, but I can’t leave shore for trying.
Instead, it is debarking again on shore before I even knew I had sailed that
tells me I have made a passage through the starry leagues.
I am a man upon the land, I am a silky
upon the sea, and it is certain I have awaken more than once and will again
with a film of brine sliding silken from my brow, and surfacing between floes
will see again in my full black eyes the starry carpet where I swim.
