Selections from World of Made and Unmade

The third time my mother fell she stopped saying she wanted to die.

Saying you want to dieis one thing, she pointed out but dying is quite another.

And then she went to bed.

Outside her window the trees of her orchard are heavy with their load of ripening pecans.

The shadow of the Organ Mountains creeps across the land, and the blue heron stands on the shore of the shrunken Rio Grande.

Wichita, Chickasaw, Wichita, Shoshoni: her every tree, her every row.

In the hills above Rincon a woman is leaving jugs of fresh water outside the Rincon Water Works

before locking the metal doors. Rincon, where the Rio Grande turns back on itself— like the crook of an arm

before heading south to become Rio Bravo del Norte. Rincon, a stop for water on the journey north.

And when there was nothing left for her to do but die, I brought my mother home with me.

I put her in the stone cabin by the vineyard, cabin of her X and now dead husband, my father,

cabin he called “the fortress” in those years his mother came to live there. Came to die.

We are lying in the big bed and she says are things between us good? —Yes, Mom, things between us

are good. Don’t you think? I say

No.

—No? You don’t think things between us are good?

No.

—No? Then tell me, Mom, tell me and we’ll talk about it. No.

—No? You won’t tell me?

No.

In animal darkness, before the first day of harvest, I walk up the vineyard’s main avenue—

thumbnail moon, and the floodlight from the big barn. Clanks and shouts.

The squat stone structures of the homestead vanish, its layers of ghosts flicker and go out. The black dog Leo follows me—

almost invisible when I look back: he floats—a low-lying, uncomplaining black cloud. Day by day, I hum—

to the dog and the moon and the vineyard, I guess—let me see you more clearly.

Love is a ticket, whatever love is. And to where I could not say.

I bring breakfast, balancing the tray across the gravel to her cabin: the evil eye. I bring fresh sheets:

the evil eye. I mortar-and-pestle the methadone: Big Evil Eye.

I pull morphine into the syringe.

I would like a nurse, my mother says who can tell the differencebetween a living body and a dead one.

Turns out Leo is one lying thieving son-of-a-bitch pooch—

coming into my office with a spot of paper towel stuck to his lip

just before Silvia comes in to ask about her missing sandwich.

We take the bright spots we need, Silvia and Leo and I.

Then the laundry room floods— then we wring out the sheets.

This year I have disappeared from the harvest routine—

the pickers throwing their trays under the vines, grape hooks flying, the heavy bunches flying—

pickers running to the running tractors with trays held high above their heads and the arc of dark fruit

falling heavily into the half-ton bins.

The hornets swarming in the diesel-filled air.

The hornets swarm in the diesel-filled air.

Wagons of grapes bump along behind the tractor, the tractor speeds to the concrete loading slab.

Joel backs and fills, slowly places each bin on the truck with intense precision—the makeshift tines

of our “forklift” slipped onto the bucket of the backhoe.

From my mother’s cabin I hear the exhausted crews come in, stream down the vineyard road—

their shouts distant and nearing. And when they pass the cabin— Viva los Estados Unidos.

    How will you spend your courage?     Her life asks my life.

    No courage spent of     bloodshot/gunshot/taproot/eye—

    How will you make your way?

    Then, respond to the day     some other way than blind—

From my mother’s cabin I hear them— Viva los Estados Unidos.

This year I haven’t picked figs or taken them sun-warm to the...