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| White tipped Lupine, Kings River |
Settling into seventy five, he glanced at almond orchards,
the rows between evenly spaced trees slanting south,
south-east, or east as his eyes shifted focus. The trunks
of the nearest trees floated, the orchard dropping to earth
exactly as his car passed, like a net falling short of him.
Another dry river. A night heron, crooked thumb, jutted
from a dead limb in the river bed. He thought of loose hands,
worn out, single gloves plucked from melon boxes
and clothes-pinned to the conveyor. The case sealer
crushed slow hands that struggled to pull jammed
boxes clear. Anorexia's calm fingers inserted coins
into the slot, pressed a button, and scooped up
a soda, just before she turned, slid boxes
to one side, and rested a .45 against her husband's head,
a hand splattered with mud as it slapped
the gun away. Her husband had abandoned her
near town, and she'd trudged twenty miles through the fields
to the compound. They used to bet about who would kill
whom at the "Okie Flat" packing shed. Frank once smoked
after the conveyor broke down again while others loaded
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| Goldfields and Baby Blue Eyes By Native American Trail |
dead in a car by the road, dents in his skull the size
of a police baton, the case "inconclusive." Steve murdered
Anorexia, cutting her up like a grape stalk and burying her
in his big red toolbox. Everyone silently suspected something
was wrong when he hadn't shown for work on Sunday--
time and a half. Nor would Fifi do the shuffle for the ladies
while waiting his turn to shower in that outhouse
with a shower nozzle. Fifi had been released
from the "vocational institute" before he was beaten
and raped repeatedly. Driving by the last gas station
for miles, he imagined the land without people, the canals
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| Native American Village Site: Confluence of Kings River and Big Creek |
extending from the mountains to north of Tulare,
subsiding into networks of marshes and shallow lakes,
webbed by teeming sloughs and channels, a refuge
from dunes and alkali sinks for birds along the flyway.
Once, while he pissed, so drunk he could hardly stand,
he teetered above the body of a great egret,
its neck a question mark, the wings extended
in the dirt. He was done as an activist after losing
his job at the big box store for chewing gum
and not coming in on his days off--he knew it
as he neared houses of cardboard thrown together,
just as he recalled again the ash tree
in the compound, a tree dreamed
in childhood that revealed a fate no one
wanted to believe, the trunks
of loaded fruit trees blending
into one as the sun raced
on the horizon, the last light logged
on the walls of the shed.
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