The sailors finally landed on her stomach. Stretched out their hands against the smell of her and passed her roses out among the simple people of God they found there, whom they would write back to the queen about. Whom they would call �a people in God.� Una Gente In Dios. Whom they would call Indians. Whom would they call Indians when the tidal waves came and laid them bare to trick bones and smote shoulders? They would build their capitol, their capitol of hate and rancor and their capitol of resentments: their capitol of free slavery: their capitol of ignorant wisdom: Their Capitol of Deist Christians: their capitol of separated church and state: their capitol of slain natives: their capitol of National geographic photos: their false monkey death mucus sin chains of train smoke and smelters and they finally landed on her stomach and smelled her.
I love you more than oceans breathe. I love you as though the word �love� has been invented just to describe what it is I feel for you. I love you so much that they may as well put on my grave marker that what I did with my life was love you and put your picture and not mine. You are what I got when I asked god for �a little love� and he gave me you as though I had asked for �a little water� and he gave me all of the oceans. You are what I got when I told God I was jealous that the continents had all the oceans and I wanted something greater and there was you.
And the Church lay naked and panting near death on the remote floor of a desert valley, hair broken and nose tattered. Clothes sweaty and chest stupid. I see you still: shrinking into the distance, the waves rolling toward you like a toll booth. Scepter and spear and rifle and noose. Torch and pitchfork and gasoline and blade.
This is the reverse history of our love: dread in graves-last rites-that last lovely night of tea and jazz when you looked just like that teenager I had known so many lifetimes ago-hard hardness doctor saints burned in our room-broken window-the first broken window-the writing of this very line-the writing of this line-everything that preceded this.
I know you will say nothing or worse be angry but mother I must bring up the day that we forgot language and could not speak to each other. And then we remembered language but not the same language and we were not collingual and made war over the dim dead dinner table and the windows were taped up and the trash stunk and we could see the fireworks from our terrace. And the dog cried and the refrigerator moaned and I played my records and you wept and the end of the world will be like that: not a bang or a whimper but a gradual realization that things cannot go on like this and the earth under our feet will leave us, like an old lover or a lost daughter or my wife�s drunk mother and finally we will sigh. And the end of the world will be a hard decision of bitter tears much like when we had one dog after another put to sleep or left at a farm somewhere.
When it became quiet we wrote down in the sand every thought we had ever had from the day we were born.
When we were done we listened hard and heard the mountains ache and then the sea came in and washed away what we had written.
I was about to climb carefully around the wall when I saw her. My father hadn�t seen her and had already made it to the other side and I said �dad� and pointed to the big hairy spider. I may have been eleven years old. My father put down our fishing poles and came back to the edge of the wall.
�Old Faithful� was the name we had given the place; it was a mossy hole in a tiptoe neighborhood by a wood. It was a bright green pond that fed a stream that fed a river and then a reservoir. We would park across the lacy street from it and make our way around its girth to our spot: a gym of a collapsed viaduct that sat at the pond�s edge. Behind this, the water fell out from under the concrete surface and wove its way through the modest wood. A maze of streams became a single determined stream.
She sat on the wall. I had to place my hand where she was to balance my pirouette around the end of the wall over the short falls below. She was five to six inches wide and larger than I was small. It appeared she was sitting over a sac of eggs, her legs pulled in tightly to a suggestion of her actual size. I had recoiled swiftly when I saw her at first but then I leaned in again to satisfy my curiosity. I was frightened and backed up again.
�It�s a Black Widow...� my father said. She had markings but I can�t remember them.
�Can we leave? Let�s leave.� I didn�t enjoy going fishing very much. I enjoyed exploring the swampy forest, the many legs of the stream that turned into a river. I enjoyed spending time with my father. I loved my father�s simple jokes and constant attention. I loved his big, strong body the way I loved his record collection and his big cars and the guitars he never learned to play and his dress boots. I loved the part of him that was a man in the old-fashioned sense that�s all but gone, now, but I didn�t always trust him.
�Well, we�re not gonna leave...it�s alright.� He looked around with his brow lined until he found a small branch with leaves still growing at one end. He looked quickly at me as he walked back over to the end of the wall and tentatively approached the spider. Like a thing of stone or wood, the spider clung stoically to the wall while the fish smell of plants rotting in water climbed all over the three of us. In a moment, the spider and the stick collapsed into the falls and were gone.
I was still hesitant but I climbed around. I stood at the end of the wall staring into the dark where the water fell into the streams. Behind me I heard the whip and whir of silky fishing lines arcing high into the air and then landing in the water.
In a rain as soft as sunlight, the street laid down with it�s elbows against the curbs of the sidewalks and let the concrete stairs climb away.
I stood behind my mother holding her hand and we faced the street, from the sidewalk, all alone. Everything was quiet and still except for the rain and the Parade of Dogs.
All breeds and colors passed by. Mutts and pure-breeds and old, old dogs and young pups walked in a line through the middle of the road. Some of them glanced absently at us. The tongues of some of the dogs hung out. They all moved tirelessly and ceaselessly.
From the direction in which they were heading came the sound of breaking glass and one by one panes of glass from the buildings lining the streets began to quietly break and fall. Glass fell into the gutters, sidewalks, stairwells, yards, porches, side-streets and window-wells.
The windows shattered all the way down the street and then stopped. The rain stopped and after it stopped I noticed that my mother was weeping and holding a young white dog.
�Come on� my mother said to me and we began walking home.