Loose Sugar

The Arroyo

The Arroyo —The perspective of lines or innocence— I love other bodies. They always seemed to know the secret before I did . . . My mother has come outside to hang up towels: Cannon. I’m in my nada body, I’m about ten dragging magnets through sand in the arroyo to collect garnets from iron filings . . . For others, it’s “the ditch” or “the wash” or “drainage ditch”— she’s the thin expert at hanging out daily life. Squinting, I see she’s either a 1 or a 0 who never makes a mistake outdoors . . . pink towels, shorts, sock sock / sock sock . . . The sun is the mistake that works. The dragging then the filings then picking out garnets with tweezers in the 100 degree heat of the arroyo— She calls my name; it brightens; it’s years before my period: chrome glint of the abandoned fender; the doll’s head softens near the jar. These garnets have backward facets. The present tense saddens them. Before the flash flood I can make it to the end of the arroyo where the hollow chalk couple has been shown having sex on a rock. If knowing alternates with seeing, 13 dragging magnets through the sand thinking of them is the place where I am not. Childhood is one of our low points. When I cough, the doves fly away . . . She hangs up clothes her single, her nada humming, when she turns sideways she is gone. Pinch bird-beak clothespins. She uses my whole name to call me in—) A power comes up, it’s in between the voices, it says you can stop making sense . . . The hollow chalk couple— oh when I see them I will touch their penis; it is the small blue tombstone turned sideways. Touching it is the invention of the new. Touching the signs next to them—fuck dick (heart heart heart) is the both invention. Sex and more exciting than doing it without talking— I looked for the one who sought me without measure and the waters broke away . . . Waited for one who called but she had gone in. I called my love much later the same when I was not him. The doll has become soft when left for about twenty minutes; white *s take over the eyes; our garnets on wax paper like menstrual blood. Floods will come over the earth but the hollow’s better; winds replace 14 the chalk couple with sand; the hawk sweeps and is gone; coyote; various night viceroys with yellow eyes; Hollow body fills later (in legs with) specks of time, boys with wandering and orderly hands; laughter; such as— oh D. oh P., oh L., oh P., and oh A. I loved other bodies. Even those I did not love (those of this generation, we all . . . ) Cruel lovers and kind, when stoned in the south and beaches between . . . And the faceless chalk couple haunts me now: taught: touch language with the north hand, flesh with the right; even three decades later, in danger of sort of, the new disease and terror of backward, convinced one self is not the way to live because we are lived through— not to fail what was left blank— I gather the little jars of the elements, to show her; within pure joy exists a kind of hollow, the inverse river, the opposite water— 15 ...