Natural Takeover of Small Things

Undelivered Postcards to Lydia

19 Undelivered Postcards to Lydia I don’t want to see you now or ever in monsoon pesadilla anchored to plasma tendrils & radiation, tumble-weed stricken between old Socorro & injected skins of the San Joaquin. I never wanted these things for you— la pisca on a never-ending vine, stretching the horizon, to a sagging army barrack in Korea, your father blowing Woody Guthrie in harmonic shrapnel sandwiches, discharged for government cheese and bad piñones, while the bouganvillea eavesdrops on the windowsill, pretending not to listen. I am here now, on the shadow side of the Rocky Mountains, weighted by papers, contemplating the soft tooth of a wolf spider hunkered in the sycamore, perched on the banks of a rivulet, until I can no longer decipher the beats of my own breath, from the intoxication of unnamed insects sexing in the fragrant willow. Lydia, I have heard that there are cemeteries in Socorro where headstones are kept clean by iguanas with tiny fingers, whose tongues are immune to the scorpion’s sting. Socorro! 20 Where you found your sister in a methamphetamine dream, later to hallucinate ghetto birds in Bakersfield boneyards. Socorro! Where neutron bombs blossom over the Sandia Mountains, and molecules are still recovering from the eternal blush of deafening red. Socorro! What have I left out? Boyle Heights? Dinuba? A left breast? The Great Horned Owl hunkered in the sycamore? What does it matter? In the end they will say, Lydia. Who throws lamps at her children and tames them with broomsticks. Lydia who wails for barefoot babies with dirty faces. Little Lydia with her brother’s jeans. Lydia of Deming, New Mexico. Lydia of Romo. Of East Los Angeles. And of the gardens in the suburbs. They will say Lydia who dropped out. Lydia who married the gangster. Lydia with the white face and thin lips, who swears by astrology but doesn’t tell God. Lydia with the harvested lymph nodes. Lydia bowing in the groves. Lydia in an open field of alfalfa. Lydia whose eyes turn auburn in sunlight. Lydia who mothers other people’s children. Lydia with a gift of listening. Lydia with a gift for you. They will say Lydia was my mother. That Lydia, the woman who was paranoid about the end. Lydia who had a book 21 written in her head. Lydia whose son took the kids and fled. Lydia with biceps like warm dough. Lydia who kept Birds-of-Paradise on the kitchen table. Lydia who delighted in old avocados in bread. Lydia whose epitaph will read: Just don’t forget me. There goes Lydia they will say, I was lucky to have been held by her. ...