Beasts and Violins

This Southwestern State

52 This Southwestern State Saying goodbye to a ghost is more final than saying goodbye to a lover. Even the dead return, but a ghost once loved, departing will never return. —Jack Spicer, After Lorca The alien lightning that visited me in Bisbee, collected like pulsating night clouds at the summits of the Mule Mountains. It didn’t bring any hard sound, only this beckoning. And the flashes seemed to go on longer, lacking thunder break. As if silence stretches a thing’s term. I watched them from the front room, attempting sleep with couch cushions on the rug with my ringless wife, needing only a top-sheet against the monsoon season’s heat. The steel screen door was kept locked on account of actual aliens. They shifted through Tombstone Canyon streets, stashed in dumpsters and chicken coops. Naco and the rest of Old Mexico were just a short desert run away. I always get paranoid when I cross that border. Feel like everybody down there is in on a secret. Old Mexico is less a location than a waylay station, but I am hardly authority on that stuff. I helped a Border Patrol agent jump his rig once, stuck way up in the Huachucas. He told me he mostly stands in the bushes 53 and tries to look like a cactus in his green uniform until somebody happens along. I happened along. But I wish I were authority on this weather. How it could be so silent and so near —glowing with ocotillo and rock. What produces this? This ghost frequency I’d discovered strictly before midnight in summer. With my sorrow and inability to write so well concealed. I’d have it back. It was a time. ...