The Old Mule

Salinas / Puerta Cruz - in many parts

Anything would help. We pulled through a big rain to find this sorry motel. Clothes wet through, underwear hanging. God damn, I thought, every time we get on a roll something fucks up.

-

Mexico has some sordid towns and the one we pulled in to had that smell to it. An aura. The market had rotten fruit, salted fish and prurience in the back stalls. Music thumped and my stomach churned. Bad water. A man was selling pistols to a covey of kids and I asked him where the bus station was. South, amigo, he told me, and he pointed to the dirt.

He was right. The cramped station was accessible by bum-ridden stairs. We toiled down to survey a massive puzzle of fares and road routes. Chicken buses departed ten per minute and none seemed to be coming in. The carcass of a burned fifty-seater marked the station’s exit. Suerte, dice. We stood in line.

-

Look, we love this country. It’s just that things were not going right. The coffee group was a cover up for a Colombian drug running outfit, and I was not in the mood to spend the next several Saturdays in a Tijuana prison. All those drug guys have fancy sunglasses, but their wives are ugly and they never live past forty.

We were looking more long term, so we headed up to the beach place, a thousand turns out of the mountains and then a straight shot north. There was a perfect dune, some fish huts and an ocean like you might see in a children’s book.  We were lifted up, and set back down – perfect waves. A nice place for everything to unravel.

-

We were swinging in the hammock half naked when a tuba voiced man barreled down on us with some raucous Spanish. Some net boat had sunk, and it seems the contents had floated up near our palapa. Black-plastic buoyies bobbed around in the sea, unmoored from their stash. Each was marked with some gringo script like “Mexican Horsepower” or some other feeble shit. This whiskey-breath man wanted us to explain our proximity, and I knew denial would not suffice. She hit him square with the toothed end of a palm frond and took off for the turtle sanctuary one bay over. I tracked behind her, wondering what the plan was.

We ran with breasts a-fly and I don’t think it mattered because the whole coast was deserted. This was just one of those places you end up and have no real reason why, and tracing back your steps makes the whole thing seem crazier. Vermillion flycatchers twittered on some marsh reeds and it hit me that we needed that miscreant’s car.

By sundown we had packed his suburban with a couple loads of sea loot and turned that beast back toward the mountains. A light breeze lit up from the coast, and I rolled up a tobacco fag. It was our turn to bargain.

To be continued...

Space

The hour has darkened. The sky hangs above, as ever, in a steel powdered ease. There is a downslope to this hill – a vertical axis tilted on its side, and my bearings are still leading me south. The crime of minutes passed is in their utter gone-ness, the way we say goodbye and should have looked harder, held longer and spoken from the spirit.

This is the year of the miner. All about us are sunken caves, hollowed owl eyes and the frigid stone of a fifty-mile shaft. There is little to drive us deeper but the prospect of another end, a back way out. How do we maintain dignity amid such fire? The air here is thin, a flame could never last. 

The chance of memory illuminates our every search. It is simple to look outward, on a water dock, and gaze through our history of well-placed planets. I find my toes overhanging…back up, and can breathe.

Sharon Olds / W.

The ever-living Sharon Olds...

--

And this (these), before bed.

Much is changing now, restless motion. There is a fine tune in the air, but too -  the pain of everyday movents. In such times, there is little left but the travel.

This is really great:

"Flying Lesson" by Julia Kasdorf from Eve's Striptease

Flying Lesson

Over a tray of spent plates, I confessed
to the college president my plans to go East,
to New York, which I'd not really seen,
though it seemed the right place
for a sophomore as sullen and restless
as I had become on that merciless
Midwestern plain. He slowly stroked
a thick cup and described the nights
when, a theology teacher in Boston, he'd fly
a tiny plane alone out over the ocean,
each time pressing farther into the dark
until the last moment, when he'd turn
toward the coast's bright spine, how he loved
the way the city glittered beneath him
as he glided gracefully toward it,
engine gasping, fuel needle dead on empty,
the way sweat dampened the back of his neck
when he climbed from the cockpit, giddy.
Buttoned up in my cardigan, young, willing
to lose everything, how could I see generosity
or warning? But now that I'm out here,
his advice comes so clear: fling yourself
farther, and a bit farther each time,
but darling, don't drop.