Jaybird

for Jaybird

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse

Not shaking the grass.

---Ezra Pound

Letters, Arizona Daily Sun, December 20:
Dear stranger who returned my wallet, I’m in a down-town restaurant thinking about how this diner, in the nearly ten years I’ve lived in Flagstaff, has served everybody: tourists, folks off the Rezzes, visitors up from the Southern sprawl, ragged wanderers in off the cold streets; me and my dead friend, Jaybird. I’m thinking about this bone-cold time of the year, of endings and beginnings. I’m thinking of Jaybird, of his lonesome death and how his life was far from lonesome.
Where’s the wallet come in? I lost it the night of Jaybird’s memorial service. A bunch of us told stories in a smoky room. People spoke of their sorrow that his death had been just a cold fact in the local paper. I decided to write my piece of his story instead of saying it. When I went to my truck to get money for Jaybird’s memorial stone, my wallet was gone. Dark parking lot, shaky neighborhood, oh well. I came home, called the cops, waited and thought about Jaybird’s story.
I knew him briefly. In that short time, he did nothing but give. He heard I was working on a novel about Viet Nam vets and he found guys who wanted their stories told. He listened when I needed to talk about my own small inner war. He heard I was spiritually lonely and showed me a photo he had takien that he believed showed the presence of God. He carried it with him for months and when our paths weren’t crossing, gave it to a friend to give to me. All of that, but most of all, he told his story with absolute honesty.
His story? The truth? Prison. Drugs. Booze. Serious physical damage. Pain beyond what most of us will every face.
His story? Truth? A recovering life of compassion and williness. Sobriety. Teaching himself to read and write---in his 40’s. Tears and belly laughter. Pain endured and transformed. Wisdom given. He would love that I am passing this on.
Stranger, you were kin to Jaybird when you called and said you’d found my wallet and wouldn’t tell me your name. I wanted to send you a thank-you. Flagstaff and Jaybird and my imperfect recovery have taught me that.
So, I’ll give half of what I would have given you to Victim Witness and half for Jaybird’s memorial stone. Thank you stranger. Thank you Jay.

I wrote Jaybird’s memorial letter in 1994. That Christmas friends and I went to a Laughlin casino. I played twenty dollars in nickles, twenty dollars in quarters and twenty dollars in dollars. When the money was gone, we went to the lavishly insipid buffet; my Cockney friend repaired to the bar; my other friend and I walked along the river. Everything seemed bejewelled and perfectly shabby and poignant.
Christmas morning, I bought bad coffee and sat on by the river. I listened to Alvin and the Chipmunks sing Jingle Bells over the casino outdoor speakers. It was still dark. I watched airplane lights race across the opposite shore, lift slowly and ascend. The dark began to soften above the far mountains. I knew I was the happiest I had been in years.
That was the beginning of my affair with slot machines. It gave me greater ease and fun than any lover I have every known. At first, my friends and went twice a year; then once a month; and then, I went alone---once, twice, three, four times a month. I tried to quit even though I didn’t want to. I loved the game, the casinos, the workers. I found stories there I would have found nowhere else.
Jaybird’s ghost has been watching over me. He might have carried me through the loss ot the Flagstaff I loved so dearly and to a hard-scrabble California town. His ghost must have sat beside me a week ago when I put my hand up in a little room of brave people and said, “I’m Mary and I’m a compulsive gambler.”
Jay, thanks again. I will pass it on.

3 Work

3 White

Mojave sunset
I study the persimmon sand

a tiny jawbone
a downy plume the length of my thumb

there is no quartz
no plastic shard

but when I look up
the moon is a sliver of lace agate.


3 Cinnabar

mercurial

apricot to molten above the western mountains

fooprints (mine)

what burns imperfectly

all of that
there is no need for more

And still I find more in the desert in which some believe there is Nothing: the words My Mission printed carefully in pencil at the top of a sheet of notebook paper; a poem in a child’s scrawl:

the lepercon

It is somthing
green. And it’s
somthing not
mean. His
face is not green. he
is not a
king. He lives
In green.

It starts with
an L and
it ends with
N

There is a tattered scrap of a large print bible in which I find unintended inspiration:
hail
“Sun stand thou
and thou Moon in the vau
And the sun stood still, and
until the nation took
their enemies. Is this not written

What I am not finding in this generous desert is work. I am not alone in this nor in the fury a gas pump has begun to inspire..

A friend calls while I am walking in the rose-gold light. She speaks of the necessity of doing her part of the greater work in partnership with the elements; in partnership with Water, Earth, Air and Fire. I stop in the blue shade of a Joshua Tree and listen. The gibbous moon hangs above the southeastern mountain range.
“Metallurgy,” she says. “Permaculture.” I move out of the shade onto an old mining road. I remember teaching the 2004 Desert Writers Workshop and what emerged:

Metallurgy

Three women sit at the end of the long table in a cabin south of Moab. There has been an early October snow. The light is dove gray. There is a fire in the woodstove.
The women have known each other less than a week. They are writers. One of them has taught. The other students and teachers have gone to their rooms, or in to town to unwind from four days of intense work.
The room is so quiet they can hear the fire popping in the stove and the sound of wet rain on the big windows. A woman says something. Another responds. And then, as though they have moved toward the moment from the instant they each decided to stay at the table, each woman tells the others that she was sexually violated when she was a little girl. Their voices are calm as they speak of finally remembering, of puking and howling and, only a week ago, one of them watching in horror as a new date set his hand on her child’s thigh.
“Three out of three,” I say. “One hundred per cent.”
I think of my solitary walk before dinner. The western sky had boiled with clouds. Their light was sulfurous, brilliant as the edge of a new-honed blade. I had imagined a hot spring below the clouds, its waters dangerous and beautiful, its mineral steam billowing up.
I had imagined sky and earth were foundry and forge. For making weapons, weapons made for cutting through. I imagined that to die by one of these blades would be painless. Death would be finished as soon as begun. I wondered why my mind roiled as the sulfur-yellow clouds did. Why violence simmered beneath my spirit.
I look into the bright and ferocious eyes of the two other women. Sky blue. Cloud gray. I am surprised that I do not express fury.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I am so sorry.”
This is the nature of true metallurgy. This is the nature of women’s work.

Metallurgy. Taking one’s place in the perfect pattern of Water, Earth, Air and Fire. Not fixing, but mending so that there is always the hair-line wound that admits the light.
The surrendered will always have our work.