At 13, your father climbed the steps to your room,
and his fingers stroked between your thighs
and warmed your blood.
Outside, the leaf skinned snake slithered in a royal silt grain
to warm itself in the stored sun's heat.
For two years, your father drew his dull life like a knife
from a sheath and found happiness in the wound,
and you vowed never to be vulnerable again
after you left home.
And in the painful afterglow of sex after he left your room,
you stayed awake learning cunning
from coyotes that prowled scrap wood corrals, learning
endurance from the windmills grunting pipes
and creaking fan blades, and you dreamed in the darkness
the night train that snaked across the prairie pulled you
onto its rattling boxcars toward California.
And while he read scripture one evening from his black Bible,
you told him you were carrying a back seat baby.
And his calloused hands gripped the armrest.
His haggard face whitened, and his silence
carved stone doors in the air.
You walked through slowly closing the doors on him.
Cruising out of Willard with Danny in a brand new Black
Ford, your heart gave its first wing
spread and sword in your body that now felt like a nest,
and you thought of me planted in the soft pearl of your body.
And knew I would become field prey.
A few days after I was born you filed for divorce,
left me at grandma's door, and ran away to California
with your lover.
This act of abandonment was God's will and left
no scent, no view, no mark others might find.
My image of you fell in to my life.
It fell across my life like a massive branch sparkling
with snow frost that filled the air with the space of lights
glowing in the darkness each night,
and I was never told where you were at and not
until your return years later when I was a man
did the snow crust melt on that branch and your hands
drift up like yellow flowers I plucked and touched.
And your face flowed by like a mask I wore.
Time had spun a white veil around the dream you were,
and now your words were moths eating through the white veil
as you told me of the frayed skirt life father
had given you.
Each day of your absence had become aged stone between us,
mother, unbudgeted for decades, and now in the ruins
the chills, scream of a baby abandoned
came to us from a distant adobe shack
and drowned our voices out.
And we never spoke to each other again until several years
after our meeting, a telephone call came around midnight.
Your mother's been shot, and she was not going
to make it through the night.
Swollen mass of bruised flesh mangled and human thing,
tubed and monitored on the bed, wrapped in gauze
and soaked in blood.
Unplug the machine I told the doctor.
Unplug it.
Polishing her nails in the kitchen,
her husband fired four shots into her beautiful face
because he felt she was going to leave him
because she would no longer live in his make believe world.
And each bullet opened another door of her life
to interminable darkness she walked in over meat scraps
and bone fragments deep into her own being
that one moment of life still left deeper
until the bullets sounded like a boutique shop doorbell
hurling her past shelves of rocks like scrub brush
farmland she grew up on in the llano
into the warm arms of grandmother, a woman walking
her by the fireplace where she closed her eyes
and finally slept in peace.
I found her diary on her dresser and read it.
I want to die.
I have no one in this world.
I want to die written hundreds of times.
Her daughter, my stepsister, rushed in, ripped the diary
from my hands and burned it in the fireplace,
but I had already read how the family had lived months
without talking to each other, how mother had spiraled
into love affairs with younger men her daughter had
been in love with.
How mother wanted to destroy a marriage
and find someone who could give her one kind word, one
small gift of concern, one small appreciation,
and on the refrigerator written in lipstick he had scrawled,
you will never leave me.
You will never go out on me again,
and then he took his own life.
A long time ago, he thought he had saved you
from your own Chicano culture, your own Chicano language,
and drove you from the dust and the tumbleweeds
of Santa Fe across the llano to the grassy valleys
of California.
And he placed your photograph on his fireplace mantle,
a trophy of a young woman saved from her own people,
and he thought of life as a Wild West film and himself
a quiet, resourceful cowboy.
And when you pull the plug on the TV, when
you seized your destiny again and shattered his trophy,
lonely and desolate night poured through the windows
of your house the misery of dim street
lamps in the neighborhood, lit your faces.
And you realize both standing there that you are old.
You both had been living a false dream,
and your throats coughed with sickness.
And your voice is strained with a tragedy
that you had lived nothing but a fairy tale
then he shot you himself.