It Rained: haibun

 

 

 

 

I remember those crazy shads. Nemesis brand, as I recall. Everybody had a pair on. Secret agent wrap around style, they kept the dust out of your eyes and wouldn't fall off.  I wore them all that summer, 16 hours a day in 100 degree heat, and it only rained once. Don't know if them pipe liners, or, the Latinos started the fashion. They out numbered us white boys 10 to 1, but we spoke English, took and gave orders.

Not me. I was the fuckin' new guy, the nigger of the outfit, and, potential whipping boy. To my good fortune, I stuck with the Mexicans and Hondurans mostly, steel or poly pipe, depending what work was. My preference, too. They were nicer people than the drunked up cowboys. Being outsiders, they were more tolerant of my lack of knowledge. You do get teased, at best, along with the job description. It's the same with any trade. Nice to know what they're saying about you, too, so you pick up the language little by little.




drought and dead weeds--
  in every road sign
  a bullet hole




Not like my chosen profession. That was life or death, and I'm Jack Black, mother fucker. There, I'd worked with hundreds of new "emigres" on thousands of spaces in a Metropolitan numbering a million for a multi-billion dollar industry of fraud, no less, at the behest of our elected leaders.  But don't rescue the schedule, however far behind, they might tell you to take your tools and go home. Until, finally, when it all crashed, we all did.

My stance was anybody that worked as hard I did was all right. For that matter, here in one of the last American boom towns, there were people present from every corner of the Earth, all of them on a last chance effort to seek redemption.  As for me, in this oil patch set among prairie, my comeuppance was a meal of tamales wrapped in fresh corn leaf created by someone's loving spouse just before dawn, its sauce tempered sweetly with crisp green chilies emitting fire ... la familia producion l'amour. Auqi, no es tardes, amigo, de nada, primo, de nada.




pheasant chicks
in columns march
into the grass





Nope, this was a humbling experience. You see, there's just nowhere to hide on that plain. You might have to stand on a rock to get a cell signal. Ain't no trees ... but glory to God, there is wheat. Waving amber and sunlit on end, from it, you can observe the wind criss-cross the prairie from miles away. Pray, you might escape that splendor, for at night it becomes an Ocean, phosphorescence visible in the seed. You could chart a course by the moon or the stars where they meet the horizon, always ahead, your headlights egging you on, your destiny, perhaps, to just let go the wheel.




an Angus calf all caught up --
a few loose strands of wire





Somewhere in deepest, darkest Central America, there's a video taken on a cell phone in a place five cultural nightmares laid end to end and a little dictatorship away. It's protagonist is a laconic, gangling man, tan as bark but for the raccoon lightness around his eyes, reeling like some mad, shape shifting kami chasing some lads around and over the riven earth, snorting and stomping, pretending to be a bull. They made me do it, and not so reluctantly I agreed. So little children would laugh. All little children share that laughter, yes?

Then came the day I hit that deer, fiddling with my wipers in the convoy and a split second lost. I could have missed him, an immature buck, I'm quick because I have to be, yet it was so close ... the Honduran boys finished the poor fella off with a penknife, his blood soaked up by the dust along side that perfectly straight road.

And later, leaning against the wind carrying the earth's contents to the sky, they feasted on its haunches, lit by the waning sun just before midnight on the only day it rained.




red sky at night -
curlews choose flight
over Black Tail Dam