Down the Crick

This house had not seen a baby
in such a long time. Through the hot
moony nights the sounds of birds &
floorboards amid the succulent squawks,
squeaks, midnight milk-beckonings.
During the day mama carried her through
the stunned garden, in a bonnet & one
of my grandmother's old napkins like a skirt.
The baby sanctified everything: leaf-filled
fishpond, gate made from cupboard doors,
Heavenly Hots cooked in the morning.
While she napped her papa took a rusty pan
from the cellar & as if he'd been here
his whole life left for the creek. Slipping
his hands down into the cold holes
underneath the stones, where other men
had been before but not for a long time.
He came back with ruined boots ("Didja
find gold, honey?") & a pan full of water,
so that he could show us the movement
of the finest grit, ambulations of iron filings
settling according to their weight. There!
he says, & points to a scintilla of a scintilla,
one gilt mote, which we can hardly see
but persuade him to eat for breakfast.

You Look Sharp, But Who's That With You

Lavern Cuneo, my main angel & lefthandman, has just turned
a noble 80. Who would believe it, looking at this crumpled &
hand-colored photo, of him at 8 or so, next to his own uncle,
a workworn Antone Costa, and surrounded by squirrely white
goats. They're standing against the old rock wall behind Rosie's
cottage, which is where he grew up.

Keen fencefixer, cowherd, & gentle wrangler of feral cats, Vern
shows up every morning to make sure I know what I'm doing.
When we're through convening he says, "Well - I don't know
nothing else." And I say "Nope, neither do I." Spry as a calf &
sharp as a new tack. Just don't ask him about the keys locked
in the running truck, he's still sorting that out.

the 100 backyard dash

(Oh, would that it were wet...)

Like an old-time country doctor, Papa Lou vaulted to town
late tuesday night, ready to perform major surgery with only
a few tools and a notepad. By dawn he had grasped the
galvanized innards of the house, peered into its lead guts
& rust-clogged valves. The click of a sprinkler head could
be heard, like an omen, from the early morning ground.

He left 30 hours later, hands dyed blue from pipe glue &
knees embossed with Calaveritas grass. In his wake the word
hero floats through the parched streets, and Nana's spirit
is smiling. Basically, he fixed a whole mess of things, & what
he couldn't fix he jerryrigged in the authentic local style.
His diagnosis, though, made us flinch. We are going to have
to call in the experts, the men with the big tools.

But for now a green garden hose bypasses the ancient, invisible,
totally essential but totally corroded line of pipe that has long lain
buried in the foot of dirt beneath our quivering old floorboards.
I'm imagining it like the tube of muscle underneath the tongue;
it makes you nervous to even think about it.

One thing though. While he was here he drank only raw milk.