Monday, June 29, 2009

Ladies and Gentlemen, Euphonia.


My cousin found her clinging to a grating over a rushing river of lime water at the power sub-station where he works. He brought her to Bruces' School for Wayward Chicks. We named her Euphonia. As you will recall if you've ever had swallows nest on your porch, she sounds like a chronically squeaky hinge. Grasshopper is the only oil.



Puck thought she was something to eat, of course.
I found out that the Spanish word for roadrunner, paisano, means "fellow countryman."
He killed his first lizard yesterday, dancing, puffing his feathers, and throwing his wings out like a matador. He considered himself a very mighty bird after this, something in the order of a St. George, and climbed high into the oak tree at dusk. He refused to come down, and so roosted outside for the first time.
Sadly, this morning one of those shitty mutts that hang around here caught him by the tail and pulled all his feathers out but two. He was getting too chummy with those mongrels. It's a good lesson. Nonetheless I gathered up his feathers, soft and tipped with blood, and avenged him.

Thursday, June 25, 2009



One month old tomorrow. He has the sunset behind his eyes.

A Thousand Ducks


For a while I was seeing a Chinese doctor, a lady from Beijing. Once, she asked about my family. I told her I am the eldest of four sisters.
"Four sisters!" she exclaimed. "No brothers?"
"Nope," I said.
"Oh, how happy! How lucky that is!" She couldn't get over it. "In China, they say, 'Two girls together sound like ten ducks,' so I think your house must be like a hundred ducks!"

The other night I was re-reading "A Room of One's Own." I was struck by Woolf's attention to our literary grandmothers. Without their words, we might not be writing ourselves. I don't usually think of literature in terms of its race-class-gender sources. Though I like literary criticism and traffic rather freely in theory, literature itself is different. There is something cheap about reading literature with an agenda; my own primary criteria are craftsmanship, creativity, and wisdom. Having said that, I think it is worthwhile to extrapolate from our literary heritage those authors who are our direct predecessors, in my case, women, and to put them together in a room of their own, to converse. Women writers are in a different lineage, lively, unique, and (as Woolf says) a bit warped, without any danger of running out of new things to say, neither isolated from the male literary heritage nor of it. There aren't that many (canonical) great women authors, comparatively, so the ones we do have merit special attention, and of those, many are not to my taste. These, though, are the ones whose voices I hear in my own mind -- close, urgent, and strangely familiar.

These are my grandmothers.

Gabriela Mistral
Flannery O'Connor
Zora Neale Hurston
Emily Bronte
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Julian of Norwich
Sandra Cisneros
Virginia Woolf
Simone de Beauvoir
Lady Murasaki Shikibu
Muriel Spark
Colette

Who are yours?

Friday, June 19, 2009

Darling cuculid!




Despite his mixed parentage, Puck is growing into a remarkably well-adjusted fellow. He has become affectionate, kindling a capacious maternal instinct I was heretofore unaware of. (I can't control my impulse to call him, "widdle Puckles" and bury my nose in his feathers, for example). Last night he climbed into my hands and then flew up onto my shoulder, where he gripped my flesh with his zygodactylic claws and checked my ears for mites. Oh, la. Puck wuv.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Sheer Stella 2009

As I said, I have taken a shine to perfume reviews. They are decadent, pretentious, and shockingly overblown. Nevertheless. I recommend this one as a paragon of the genre.

http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/scent-notes-sheer-stella-2009-by-stella-mccartney/

Excerpt: "It was a pale, dark beauty, a peony and rose that seemed in its initial moments a Romantic Keatsian figurine, a willowy girl smelling of dark flowers with the lovely tinge of blossoms just beginning to wilt..."

I know; it's cheesy. But I can't live on hot reptile blood alone. I need a touch of the fancy.

Monday, June 15, 2009

The Lords of Life

Yesterday morning I saw an anole on the trunk of a chinaberry tree. She saw me before I saw her, and she followed me with her eyes, not unkindly, not suspiciously. I put the bead between the sights, and the sights around her head. I pulled the trigger. She curled up as though I'd thrown her into fire. The front half of her head and one eye were gone; her clever feet still clung to the tree. She flashed black.

I took her by the tail and carried her to the table where Puck waited in his nest. I laid the body down. It marched slowly in a tight, perfect circle. I separated her parts, all of which continued their movements alone, out of step. Puck gobbled it all.

I prowl around with a gun again, like I did when I was nine, and I learn the needfulness of death again, which I knew before and forgot. The amount of death which goes into making even one life is vast. And what about me? How much death has gone into my life? In a moral universe, this can make you a little crazy. When I lived in an urban situation, all I consumed arrived abstracted and stylized to suit my taste; the red of any meat was stage blood, packaged in black styrofoam for class, and as long as I went vegetarian, I could forget that anything anywhere ever has to die.

Now I am always on the hunt for Puck's next meal, and I remember what I thought of as my own childish brutality in a different light. I remember that I got a gun for my ninth birthday, and after safety instructions, my father's only rule was that whatever I killed I would have to eat. Life is sacred, and must not be wasted, but death itself is no enemy of life.

When I was a kid, my parents warned us to "look out" for dangerous animals, especially snakes. But I rarely looked for animals with the intensity and attention I now do. I creep around in the brush. I turn over a stone, collect some grubs. I stand up and search the branches. My eyes meet those of a long, golden snake just above my head, observing. It shivers when it knows that I see it, too, and slowly withdraws, backwards, slipping its coils over itself in loose knots, and then it's gone. My hands are shaking. I turn around to leave, and nearly run into a second snake who watches me from behind. They have watched me all this time, and I think that all my "looking out" did nothing; it was by their forbearance that I made it to adulthood at all.

Back at the picnic table, our little roadrunner is bursting with feathers like slow fireworks. My grandpa tells us a story. Years ago, one of his neighbors asked him a favor. Kill every roadrunner he saw, and bring them back to him. He believed that roadrunner meat cured cancer. Did it? we ask. He doesn't know. The man eventually died anyway.

The next day, I find a spiky brown mesquite lizard. I duck under a branch and stand up inches from its back. It is already watching me, cautious but confident in its own strength. It has a spiny brow and golden eyes. I killed one just like it when my dad was working on the rig. I wanted the electric blue skin of its belly. But when I cut the skin away, the blue faded to gray, so I threw the whole thing to my peacock, who choked it down spines, guilt, and all. We both wait, perfectly still. There is a black crystal where its tail was. A close call. We watch each other for a long time. He is so close to me that I have to step back to raise the gun.

At first I buried the heads of these creatures at the corner of the house with some vague prayer. Now I break up the skulls, remove the teeth, and feed them to Puck with the rest. I am conflicted about this. Whose rules do I follow, mine or theirs, the human way, bowing to a constructed sacred, or their way, which is all entirely sacred, or not sacred at all? Could I be in that order even if I wanted to? Am I already in that order without knowing it? I love these creatures. They are beautiful and full of power. I try to thank them, or ask their permission, but one gets caught midway, somewhere between the need to honor the sacred and the absurdity of apology in a sinless realm. A snake would not apologize for biting me, nor would I think to ask for it.

If there is a sin, maybe it would be waste. But I de-legged a grasshopper, set it on the table, and before I could open the cage to feed it to Puck, a spider had pounced on it and dragged it away. I feel hot, breathless.

This world is so intimate. My coming to each living creature to take its life is so intimate. I am the cause. I am not the end. I am an alchemist, but the magic is in the matter. It is like making love, and my heart trembles the same. I love them each as I love myself, knowing that there are no records kept against me but this one which I carry in my person, deep as the place I carry my life, rooted near the box where I keep the parts to make new life, and the record reads death, theirs now, my own later. I love them because I will meet them again in some mysterious form they will have taken, and they will have the honor of coming for me, sudden, unrecognizable, and ready with a crushing love.

At night my mother calls. The tenth rattlesnake shot, this one under the front steps of the house. A terrible stench erupted after the shot. They dragged it out with a hoe; the snake in its death throes squeezed from the blast-wound a putrid, crushed jackrabbit. Death nested in death like a matryoska doll. I tell them again and again to get out of there. My cousin brings home a kitten whose mother was killed by a dog. He bottlefeeds it. All the grandchildren staying over sleep together on a pallet in the living room, and the kitten sleeps there with us, mewing softly every few hours. In the morning it's stiff, the fur already matted. We bury it. The dogs dig it up. We bury it again. Another of my cousins rescues a tiny killdee from one of the dogs. It cries that call for the ocean. It sprints on its wave-running legs, and collapses. Blood drops from its beak. My grandma receives a phone call. One of our distant relatives, a twelve-year-old boy, was killed when a four-wheeler turned over on him.

All these deaths crowding closer... and how many deaths did I see in all the time I lived in the city? In two years, three: two pigeons, the other our cat Gideon. It is a lying world, a contrivance. I see more death in a day here.

I believe in God more than ever, God in the snake. You can look out all you want, but you might as well look for, because she is already there, and by her forbearance you live. You don't see her unless you look for her, and even though you look, you are afraid to see, and when you see, your heart jumps and you are at a loss, because she was always waiting for you. God is dangerous. Trust supposes a good thing will happen for your benefit, or a bad thing will happen, but still for your benefit. No one imagines trusting a snake; it is sacred; the benefit will come, because there is no waste, but the records are not kept. No one knows to whom the benefit will go. The snake floats above me in the tree, its wise, perturbed face cradled in the air, rocking, tipping me this way and that where I stand.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

You're what happens when two substances collide, and by all accounts you really should have diiii-ied.

Karissa + Kaleigh + Krystan = one very worn-out roadrunner momma

Day three begins with the little cockatrice having consumed about six grams of raw beef, a large green male anole (drawn and quartered), and somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 grasshoppers, back legs and mandibles excised, as these would reportedly punch holes in our little man's organs. And counting...

He's now toddling, fresh feathers poking through his weird skin, head bobbing on that skinny neck, yawning his prickly mouth, and following our faces and voices with his blue-black eyes.

I am strangely, intensely in love. He is my heart: black, wrinkly, and bristling with old man hairs.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Bread and Snakes

The day I came home, there was glass shattered all over the back porch.

What happened? I asked.
Wetbacks broke in.
Wetbacks?
Yes.
How do you know they were wetbacks?
Because they stole a loaf of bread.
A loaf of bread? That's it?
Yes.
That doesn't mean they were wetbacks.
Yes it does. Anyway, our neighbors saw four wetbacks in the brush the same day.
Hm. And they only took bread?
Yeah.

The night after that happened, my mom shot the ninth monthly rattlesnake under the house. Twice. Blew it to hell, then had to drag it out of there with a hoe. The smallest one so far, she said. Only four feet. It had some greasy yellow proto-snakeling sacks in it.

I keep telling them to get off that mesquite flat, a few hundred yards from the highway to Laredo, crawling with rattlers, mice, and apparently men. Funny to move from Five Points to the country, and feel less safe.
But at least there are people out there who only steal bread. I guess they know what it's like to be stuck better than anyone. Not so different from Five Points, probably.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Yucca Anything

1 heap yucca blossoms
boiling water
ice water

Gather blossoms. Don't get stung or stabbed. The ones just opening are best. Pinch out the inward, smelly parts; these are bitter. Rinse the bugs out. Drop into boiling water for 30 seconds. Drain and dip into ice water until cool.
Add to anything: beans, breakfast tacos, tortilla soup.
Apache manna. Yum.

Parcelled Heart

What I miss:
All Betsies, OBs especially, Terese, Sally, Tyler, Lydia, Evie...
Our collective library
Our bustling, smelly, chaotic kitchen
Sitting on the filthy kitchen floor with mason jars of wine and talking
Our front porch
Sitting on the ash-encrusted front porch with mason jars of wine and talking while listening to someone play the accordion, the guitar, sing
Beer worth drinking
Five Points
Seeing someone I know on every corner
Public transportation
Biking and bike lanes
Flying through downtown as fast as humanly possible, red lights, green, who cares
The smell of rain on the mountains
Potlucks with quirky punks
Intellectual conversation
Being unable to scandalize anyone, or at least having to work very hard at it
Tempeh, miso, curry, tamari, baba ghanoush, mochi... and other such foreign luxuries
Lavish pommes de dumpster: chocolate, kumquats, biscotti, bottomless boxes of cinnamon. You know.

What I am glad to have again:
The spontaneity and general disorderliness of my family. For example. Yesterday, my mom, uncle, and the seven kids between them decided by vote of cheering to take the fishing boat to Medina Lake. Kaleigh and Jason both have dogs that they wanted to take. But there wasn't room, highlighting the fact that, actually, there wasn't room on the boat for nine people in the first place, as it is only a four person boat. We all crammed into the pick-up and helped my grandfather mob some cattle into a trailer. Then we were hot and REALLY wanted a swim. So we drove to the Baptist Encampment on the Frio. When we arrived, despite (most of us) being Baptists, they wouldn't let us in. Maybe the screaming of the children. So we drove to Garner, but they wanted six dollars a person and no one had money. Finally we arrived at Utopia City Park around five. By chance our old friends the Hailes were also there for a swim. We caught up, swam together and played diving games until the light was gone, though the water was low and full of creepy weed things shivered by huge fish. Then we all went for buttermilk pie. I suspect this sort of thing is why we are not wealthy, and why we are so much fun, which is better anyway.
Animals and their irrepressible life: cows and calves, chickens and eggs, cats and kittens, dogs and puppies, birds and their songs, horses, snakes, bees, spiders, soodies, goldfish, perch, carp, ants, dragonflies, herons, crawdads
Knowing the names of trees: cypress, pomegranate, pecan, live oak, magnolia, mesquite, palm, acacia, peach, guajilla, sinisa, butterfly, chinaberry, ficus, hackberry
Garden I don't have to work years for: squash (I ate no less than three burly forearm-sized squash yesterday), sweet corn, blackberries, watermelon, peas, tomatoes, grapes, onions, sunflowers, dewberries
Kids and old folks (in equal parts and in moderation)
My grandpa: "What are you doing, grandpa?" "Just holdin' this chair down." To one of the kids, "Goddamnit! You could tear up a steel ball with a rubber hammer!" "Sure, and a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then, too." More of these to come.