What It’s Like to Love on Highway 99

I.

Most traces of you  

had disappeared from the back roads of Lodi

by the time I arrived:

the reverberations of your hooting laughter

in the rafters of the oak trees, the glint

of your father’s new truck, the slight shadows

made by the brim of your hat, the web

draped over the landscape by your

wandering gaze. I rolled down my

windows. Even the scent of your worn

fabrics had floated down to the dust.

There I was, with a blue farmhouse

to my left, and a map that told me

you should be to my right, where I could see

only vineyards. Most traces of you

had disappeared from the back roads of Lodi

by the time I arrived. That grace of yours

was the only exception: it clung

to the gravel roads bathing in the strokes

of early evening sunlight. There is a vividness

to the places you pass through. A rising

to everything you touch, like a child on tiptoe.

As though the grass and the stones and

the people were just waking up.

And so when I couldn’t find you,

I turned onto a road that led straight

into the vineyards. That’s when I heard

music tumbling toward me in that

lively backyard way of California’s

when it’s still early summer.

I parked in the middle of that vineyard

and I walked toward those lifting sounds

of yours.

II.

Even at 3 AM (or perhaps especially

at 3 AM), you have a musical gait,

a way of walking like every step

is part of a conversation with the ground.

You have a way of loving strangers

from a respectful distance. There’s always

enough time to speak to the woman sweeping

the floor in Taco Bell, to the security guards

shivering in the cold, to the dining hall staff.

The ones who know you always tell me

how lucky I am. Most of the time,

I’m tired, aching for bed, but I stop

and wait for you and hope your love

for humans in contagious, that some of it

will rub off on me.

III.

What I remember from the night I met you

is the glimmer of downtown L.A., the way

everyone’s body kept angling toward you,

the way you rolled up your jeans to dip

your feet in the hot tub. I remembered

something as soon as we started talking.

What mattered was not so much what

I had remembered (I still don’t know exactly),

but the certainty with which I had remembered it.

Maybe part of it was the place we share.

I thought of that later, after the concert in Lodi,

when your mom and sister burst into the kitchen

in bathing suits, wrapped in towels, having just

emerged from a neighbor’s swimming pool. I thought

of that too when I first saw your father’s murals,

and when he showed me his workshop

in the garage. Something about the intimate

way he paints the fruit, the fields of central

and northern California—

that’s when I understood how deeply rooted

you are in this place.

IV.

As transplants, we both know that

L.A. has a way with February,

a hush-hush trade.

Every year it swears to enough

bluster to pass as winter, in exchange

for one or two impossible afternoons:

bright air from the San Gabriels,

a light breeze, and a gentle,

explosive warmth. Every year

on those days I feel like I’m keeping

a secret for the city. The night after a day

like that last year we got Chinese takeout

sometime around midnight. We’d been

listening to a comedy album on the way over.

Outside the restaurant were a wild-eyed

woman and her daughter. They stopped you

and asked for some change. You talked

to them for a little while, they looked hungry.

The woman told us they were running

from people who wanted to turn her daughter

into a model. While she talked, I looked

at her daughter, whose face I couldn’t read.

Her expression was more stoic

than that of any 11-year-old I had ever met.

There was something unbearably sad

about the two women. You listened

and bought them dinner. On the way home,

you looked serious, something unusual,

and you didn’t turn the comedy back on. You

asked me whether you had done the right thing.

I felt you had and told you so. To myself,

I admitted that I probably wouldn’t have

stopped to talk in the first place, and that knowledge

frightened me. All I could think of was your

unconditional love for people. I thought

of the other side of your part of the valley—

all the foreclosure, bankruptcy, corruption,

homelessness, violence—pain that didn’t flood

my part of the valley in the way it did yours.

I thought of your fierce defenses of your city,

of the roots of the trees in the orchards

in your father’s paintings and your childhood,

of the first time you laid down your saxophone

to dance me through the last song,

in the middle of those vineyards in Lodi.

We spun circles up and around our love of

that valley. The hem of my skirt wavered

and each blade of grass seemed to bless my ankles.

After a Weekend of Braiding My Hair Like Frida Kahlo

te vas a españolizar

he joked, but the p smacked

slightly

like the spitting of men

when they are afraid.

as a going-away gift,

one friend gave me a mix CD

(which he named deTOOunPOCO)

and said with a smile,

pa’ que no se te olvide Latinoamérica.

that old threat of treason again.

that old half-joke again.

there are people who love me so much

they still regard me suspiciously,

as though it were possible

to cheat on a place.

as though there were a limit

to the number of cities

I can claim as my own.

as though I did not spend this weekend

scouring convenience stores for ribbons and flowers

with a manic love.

since crossing to the colonizing country

I’ve heard, but you’re actually American

and you act American and what place

do you really identify with and eres

mexicana, no seas tan americana,

but mostly

I’m passing again, indifference.

who knew I could pull off

ambiguous and mestiza

in the plaza where the Inquisition had its headquarters?

tourists from northern Spain

ask me for directions. on the street,

no one says puta. no one is surprised

when I open my mouth. I want

someone to react when I say México.

No one does. The empire

was vast. the name of that place

is not evocative here the way

the name of this place

is electrical there. no one ever

understands how much is being

destroyed in their name,

with their language. is it really any surprise

that I crossed an ocean

to dance something impure

in the country that thought it could invent purity?

Sevillanas

Never mind the heat spell, querida,

she said when I arrived on the 10 o’clock bus.

There were still tangles in my hair and sweat

stream deltas at the nape of my neck when I

noticed the chemical reaction happening on

my skin, the way her river soil dampness was

blending with the travel odor on my wrists

and on my clavicle. How a city will smell

on you is not something you can predict.

I felt dizzy. She grasped both my hands

and we started walking, following the

train tracks. As she glanced around in her

distracted way, I noticed her cleavage

glistening under the street lamps. The

cathedral glowed. People here are

boisterous and suffused with self-

important warmth, intoxicating for a

girl coming from somewhere haunted,

a place that had seen her off with a

deafening hailstorm and a downpour that

had seeped into her corners. The beers and

the tinto de verano and that piña colada-like

concoction on a mostly empty stomach helped,

of course, and the sevillanas that spilled out of

wine glasses and doorways, brightly lit bars in

Barrio Santa Cruz. You don’t get this back home,

she said once, flashing me a triumphant smile.

Her laughter dove, resurfaced with the posture

of a suspension bridge, and she wore a silver

bracelet that clung to the delicate shape of her

wrist. Toward me she behaved as an indulgent

aunt would, she humored me when I wanted to

snack on roasted almonds, nap by Guadalquivir

all day, and the time I ate pork cheek and then

felt sure I had been drugged, although she did

reproach me the day I double-fisted ice cream

cones in a plaza somewhere in Alfalfa where

seven-year-olds on rollerskates were testing

out what it is to be unkind. Despite her good

breeding, she couldn’t help but judge other

women’s figures. Just imagine yourself in the

bata de cola, she’d say, as if that were the

cure for a lack of self-restraint. I found that I

could not slip away from that city of extroverts,

unnoticed. At night the big river is like a well,

and I knew that’s where all of her sadness lives,

meanwhile. Holding its breath for someone like

me. Everything about her was contagious. Yes,

even her sevillanas, which I dutifully tried to

resist, and those dark ripples in the water, which

followed me home. I’m always wondering where

the things I’ve known and lost go, but those nights

and afterward I just wondered where the things

I’ve never known and lost go, in a city like that,

where everyone called me querida, what can I

bring you, even her name rhymes with marvel, a

city unfit for girls with ghosts inhabiting their bones.

Silver Bowls

She whitewashed the air on Wednesday

as only she could. From here it felt

crisp and indigo, like the silver bowls

she used to have me polish on warm

afternoons. Outside it was that paradox

of bright and cold, we were one day away

from a full moon and some part of me

did not believe she was gone or maybe

did not believe that she could ever be gone.

That would just not be her style. Her style

was to love things fiercely, with the kind

of conviction that doesn’t just evaporate

on Tuesday nights in November. She

held on to things and people like they

might disappear at any moment, knowing

that they might. The moon was waxing

when she let go, there is never quite

enough. I could hear loss shivering

in her voice, often masking as cynicism,

but in the spaces between her words, there

was always warmth. I could feel it even

when I couldn’t hear it, and it made me

want to hold her with the intensity of

her own will to live, especially these last

few years, as though I could repay with my

touch all those afternoons she gave me a

million little jobs to keep my hands busy

and my mind in a daydream:

raking the lawn, setting the table,

weeding among the calla lilies and

camellias, washing the car, arranging

Pillsbury crescent rolls on a baking sheet

before dinner. With her,

there was always purpose,

and inside, a snack, the nightly news,

her fierce love, unspoken, except for when

she said to tell oblivious boys and professors

who assigned me too many papers to be nice.

Otherwise, I’ll have to go beat ’em up,

she would say with a sly smile.

Knife Blade

Before you get to the 101,

there’s a cut-off –

A road like a spliced limb,

frayed denim kitchen zipper

pointing south:

we went down fly,

not to Lakeport, but –

Bodies and roads alike are halved

as messily as overripe tomatoes.

Coloring outside the lines,

bleeding over the clean incision,

a cutting board long-scarred

like the Hollywood Freeway

and its delusions of symmetry.

(Even what is coarse

like an old pair of jeans ends in

spindly soft threads dangling

across freshly shaven thighs,

smooth fingernails digging

into a man's stubble, even Venice Beach

with its tattoo artists and grit

turns warm sand,

meddling between toes,

invading covert seams.)

Errata

Lover who lives

in the vellum of your skin,

in the soft tissues of your belly –

I am apologizing now

for different things than I did then.

I am forgiving you

for asking me to relieve you

of the weight of our failure.

I am uninhabiting my own bare feet

on the wood floor of that

crooked house on the hill.

I am no longer speaking to the jumble:

shadowy peacock woman,

floating red bikini,

recollection of a brassy voice
and of mischief laughing in your irises.

I am telling you now,
I should have known that there are losses
more painful than death.

August in Northern California

always means wildfires

and you and I went out in

four glorious days of burning.

I should have known because that last night

you watched me intently and wondered,
as if to the relics of smoke in the air,

who will you be when you come back?

I should have known then that people sometimes

vanish in their own survival.
That people are sometimes
unrecognizable in their own renewal,
and that I had never seen your rootedness.

I am sorry I did not understand that

imputation was to blame

when you insisted,
I am less now than I was before.

I am sorry for believing

that the afternoon we spent helping those men

push my car onto a log to unstick it from the curb 
and laughing in the wine shop afterward

was proof that the before-you was coming back,

that it was only a matter of waiting for her to re-surface.

I am not apologizing now, as I did then,

for refusing to make small-talk in the kitchen,

for the withdrawal that matched yours,

for the whole slow death of us.
In these silences that follow silences,
I am apologizing now for refusing to grieve
your and my losses
of that woman.

Headlight

Dinner at a greasy Thai restaurant

in San Luis Obispo, where the

streets seem too blissful

and escape is in a Shell station

just outside downtown

It is not a long drive down on the 101

cars sliding through darkness,

crossing the grapevine before ripening,

flitting across lanes to the 134,

the bone marrow quiet of driving alone at night

Stoplight at that empty intersection and realizing

the last time I felt my body

it was unfurling in a rest stop parking lot.

Corner coffee shop where the masochist predicted
my lust would turn to pain - 

Dampness on the stairs outside the house,

a rain I had just missed made me think I started losing limbs

a long, long time before the In N Out in Camarillo.

She ran into the living room

to embrace me, stood staring for a moment

at her feet in shock,

my fingers were still lingering in that

Highway 101 darkness and under her

tree lights I was still palpitating, scentless like last summer.