Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (42 page)

Put out your tongue:
I taste of salt. Salt and sage
and silt—
dry am I, dry as delving.

 

My fingers come up
through the dead sacrament-dirt;
my spine humps along the San Joaquin—
remember me here, where water was
before Los Angeles scowled through,
hills blasted black
by the electric hairs of my forearms.

Pull the skin from my back and there is gold there,
a second skeleton,
carapace smeared to glitter in the skull-white sun.
There is a girl sitting there,
between the nugget-vertebrae,
who came all the way from Boston
when her daddy hollered Archimedes’ old refrain—
Eureka, baby, eureka, little lamb,
I’ll have you a golden horse
and a golden brother
and golden ribbons for your golden hair,
just you pack up your mama and come on over Colorado,
not so far, not so.

 

They flooded out her daddy’s valley
when she was seventeen
and skinny as a fork.
Crouched down she was,
rooting potatoes out of the ground,
brushing beetles from her apron,
and the wind sounded like an old Boston train.

 

I am waiting for you to stop in your thrum,
for you to pause and look towards Nevada:
I am holding back the waters
with the blue muscles of my calves,
waiting for you.

 

All the way down to the sea,
one of these mornings bright as windows,
I’ll come running like a girl
chasing golden apples.

 

Look here: my fingernails show through
the lace and dried orange blossoms of a dress
I never wore.

 

You can see them up on the ridgeline like a fence
severed by earthquake:
yellow and ridged, screw-spiraled, broken,
brown moons muddy and dim.

 

The roots of the Sierras are blue and white:
the colors of stamped letters, posted,
flapping over the desert like rag-winged vultures,
gluey nose pointed east. All around the peaks
the clack of telegraphs echo
like woodpeckers:

 

 

Look here: my horns spike up sulfurous through
a veil like mist on the fence-posts. My tail rips the lace;
thumps black on the floor of an empty silver mine.
Never was a canary in the dark
with a yellow like my eyes. Sitting
in the cat-slit pupil with her bill of sale
stuffed in her mouth—

 

 

It was the seventh babe killed her,
and I sat up in her bloody bed,
orange blossoms dead on the pillow,
the clacking of brass-knockered codes
so loud in my ears
I flew down to the mine,
deeper than delving,
just for silence.

 

It is cold down here,
what silver is left
gnarls and jangles.
I put my hands up through the mountains
like old gloves with their fingers torn,
and wait.

 

Strawberries and nickels
and the sun high as God’s hat.
My old callused feet stamp down
the green vines and leaves of Fresno,
my throat of bone whistling still
for water.

 

My wings are tangled in grapevine
and orange-bark,
pearwood and raw almonds,
green skin prickles my shoulder blades,
lime-flesh and rice-reeds,
soybean pods and oh,
the dead-leaved corn. I can hardly fly
these days.

 

But I burrow, and stamp,
and how the radishes go up in my path.

 

Between the wings rides Maria,
born in Guadalajara with strong flat feet,
fishy little mouth scooped clean
by her father with fingers like St. Stephen.
This was before the war, of course.
Her black hair flies coarse as broom-bramble,
bags of oranges belted at her waist,
singing while I dance, riding me like her own
sweat-flanked horse.

 

She saved her nickels, and picked her berries,
bent over,
bent over,
bent over in the fields till her back was bowed
into the shape of an apple-sack,
and nothing in her but white seeds and sunburn.
She curled up into me,
dry as an old peapod,
and how we ride now,
biding our time,
over the dust and cows,
over all her nickels in a neat bank-row.

 

Watch our furrows, how we draw them,
careful as surveyors,
careful as corn-rows.

 

My hair runs underneath the rivers,
gold peeling from my scalp. I remember
the taste of a thousand rusted pans
pulling out ore like fingernails at the quick.

 

I lie everywhere;
I point at the sea.

 

All along my torso are broken mines,
like buttons on a dress. The state built
a highway through them,
a gray rod to straighten my back. The driller-shacks
shudder dusty and brown,
slung with wind-axes and bone-bowls:
my stomach dreams of the ghosts of gold.
They suck at my skin,
hoping for a last gurgle of metal,
tipping in for the final bracelet and brick—
there must be something left in me,
there must be something—why do I not give it to them
selfish creature, wretched mossy beast?

 

Underneath the deepest drill
hunches Annabella, the miner’s wife,
who sifted more gold
than her coarse-coated man,
so deft and delicate were her fingers
round that old, beaten pan. He brought her
from St. Louis, already pregnant—and manners
make no comment there—already heavy with gold.
She smelled of the Mississippi
and steam-fat oatmeal cakes,
even after the oxen died, and with blood in her hair,
she crossed half of Wyoming on foot.

 

But the boulders loved her,
watched her every day from a high blue perch.
They wriggled at her, her yellow dress
gone brown with creek-silt, her bustle
and wire hoops collapsed on the grass.
While she knelt with gold in her knuckles,
they snapped to attention,
slid laughing to the creek-bed—she doesn’t blame
the poor things, even now.
Her babies left cabbages and peppermints
at the creek for years after.

 

I felt the highway roll smooth and hot
over my ox-drenched head,
and the only gold I allowed to ooze up from my scalp
were the broken dashes marking lanes
like borders on an old map
showing a river like a great hand flattening the page.

 

But I confess:
I am an old wretched beast, and my tail,
waiting in the spangled dust,
is made of quartz-shot boulders
clapped in moss.