"The tongue going inward, scraping the walls of memory."¹

by Michael Stephens

I park the car and cross the road to the small wash
that turns promptly left and courses alongside the road
behind this low cliffed hill. It's cloudy and cold.
I walk back into the desert. Turn up the right side of the wash,
climb up the hill, notice the dying barrel cactus, find more later.

I'm thinking about the dry panning someone did in the wash,
the rocks dug out at each bend and the heavy rocks pried apart
that were once islands in this sand, jutting serene between mother
and father. Wondering if this someone is still around, still a threat.
I've begun to read the signs, without thinking I'm back into the desert,
reading, watching, hearing. Seeing that the termites are on the surface of the hill.

These tracks are old, days, weeks; there are smudges, undefinable,
small birds, lizards, insects, the wind; each thing has moved over these signs
and yet they are clear, and the digging seems fresh. Odd, so old yet so clear.
And I realize that there has been little rain on this hill this year.
I get to the top of the low hill, look northwest toward Red Mountain,
look across the green mesquite hiding the Salt River in the low valley
as it curls lazy toward the city beyond the hills to my left. It is quiet here.
No bird, no mammal, a few insects off a bit and nothing else.

The sun shows across the valley, slight lines of light on the foothills
and there are patches of blue in the grays above, no breeze.
And I finally hear again the sound behind that silence. I hear
what I've come here for. And I consider how we may pave the world over
but we will never tame her. Our fears are as pale and cold as this afternoon.
I hear coyotés off, far off, yet it is too early for them. Yet I hear them,
here, on a small hill outside of town, here where the barrel cactus are dying
for want of water, and the termites forage above ground. Here where
the sound that is not heard waits, always waits. Welcomes me back.
I see a sparrow flit through a mesquite across the wash, and hear the sounds
of something fourlegged meandering somewhere upstream, out of sight.

 



¹Michael Stephens, The Dramaturgy of Style - Voice in Short Fiction,
  Southern Illinois University Press, 1988