Kat Heatherington's Blog: Sometimes A Particle, page 2

for the formerly feral furdre

i remember your first purr.

small creature in from the wild,

slowly learning to trust me.

you had not purred in years,

and you were rusty, motor sputtering,

body half-tensed for flight.

but you let me stroke your chin, slowly,

and you leaned your head into my hand,

where it fit perfectly,

and blinked, slowly, your forgotten purr

rumbling to life.

now you sleep beside my pillow,

and every night, you are purring

before you even leap

onto your spot on my bed.

I stroke your soft chin

and blink back at you

until we both fall asleep.

enough

if the winter night sky

and each other

are all we’ve got

then we will have to find a way

for that to be enough.

between the cranes and the green

in late winter or early spring

between the cranes

and the green

the brown world

warms and wakens.

in a single morning,

wheeling and crying,

a hundred thousand sandhill cranes

take to the sky,

create their own north wind,

and leave behind

a warming breeze,

and skies wrung silent.

until the songbirds come.

the eternal sun gleams on bright

brown cottonwood skeletons

pulling up sap from deep roots,

beginning to think about spring.

an echo

i am an echo

a pause

an expectation.

i am changed and changing.

a seed, a star, soil,

the space between stars.

i am dna, history,

a particular education,

a set of leanings, a fire.

i am often in motion.

every day echoes everything

i have ever been.

deep in cold soil i turn,

awaiting, with patience

the warming spring,

the crack,

the emergence.

i am not ready yet.

within me,

winter rests.

the bones of this land

i grew up on a mining claim

in the mountains of central arizona.

bear with me.

i grew up in a nice-enough house

on the poor side of a small town

in the mountains of central arizona.

i walked to school every day,

got a job in a thrift store when i turned 15,

and spent every second weekend

and then some

up at the mine with my dad.

this was not a hobby.

my dad drank hard.

the desert dried him out,

more or less. saved his life.

like a cactus, he retained

what he most valued.

books, beer, his daughters.

the desert gave back clarity,

integrity. silence.

his skin baked brown under that long sun.

the old copper mine had played out

decades ago, the top collapsed

into an open pit. an ore mill straddled

the hillside above. junk abounded.

old cars, oil barrels, you name it.

the product and refuse of industry.

dad’s buddy Chris would come

up to the claim with beer money

and they stood there talking

in the shade of one real big oak,

where dad kept his camper parked

near the edge of the bluff,

how they were gonna get that mill running,

and make a million bucks.

or even a living.

they didn’t try very hard.

it was enough

to stand in that shade, that sun,

and take in each day. the sun

and the solitude filled him up.

i spent my nights by the light of a kerosene heater,

in the old stone cabin, its shelves

piled with antique chemistry in jars,

enticing and dangerous.

my sister collected interesting rocks,

set them up in a pile by the old mine tailings.

we read books, talked with dad,

sat in the shade, or explored scrub-covered hillsides,

and the seep down the hill, at the old cave-mine entrance,

where a cottonwood grew, and watercress,

while dad sipped his beer, read, smoked cigarettes,

year after year. we ate lentils cooked with an onion,

circus animal cookies, orange crush. it sounds

like poverty, and it was, but those were good years.

twenty years after leaving that place, my sister and i

went back to scatter his ashes. it was not

the place he died, or the place he’d lived the longest.

but it was the only place that made sense.

we had the idea that we’d stand

on the edge of that bluff, under the old oak

that sheltered those years, and throw ash to the wind.

we found the mine. the road was gone,

locked and rucked into hillocks and destroyed.

we walked up.

the old mill was gone. how do you erase

something the size of an ore mill?

a wide flat spot remained, buzzing with

bees drinking nectar from horehound and mallow.

not a single gear or barrel or oil stain remained.

i found one steel washer in the dirt, and a piece of plastic –

a relief. this tiny human thing.

we walked on.

the bluff was gone. the old oak, vanished.

the land just – stopped.

a tree big enough to live under.

a hillside wide enough to grow up on.

washed down the gully. we felt

that we had imagined our childhoods.

the bones of the land

spoke to my bones.

the horizon remained,

limitless, green, unspeaking.

pinned under the vast blue

of that desert sky, and, always,

offering up to it.

nothing had changed, except us.

everything had changed, except us.

we ate lunch surrounded by manzanita and silence.

i found one stone, a pebble,

flecked with mortar

from the vanished cabin beneath the oaks.

i took it home.

now, even that trace is gone.

we scattered his ashes off the new edge of the bluff.

scrub oak and manzanita accepted

the dust of our father’s body,

as they had accepted the dust of his life.

i piled the last handful of ash

beside a tiny purple wildflower.

as we watched, an ant walked on it,

took a fleck of bone carefully in its mandibles,

and walked away.

now even that trace is gone.

it lives, like you,

only in our bones.

the perseids fall

the perseids fall.

the weather breaks,

sharp heat turning to sudden wind

and sometime rain.

i stand at the kitchen sink,

scrubbing what remains of your life.

a photo of the most beautiful work

your hands ever made.

the thing itself long since rotted

by mountain rains and sometime sun.

a license plate with your radio call sign,

the name you kept even after moving

to a place ham radio could not reach;

the plate you kept long after

you stopped driving.

eleven years of cigarette

smoke and winter gloom

scrubbed off the glass.

sent down the drain.

i cannot love only

the beautiful, only the proud, only

the moments of shining redemption.

i can only love you whole.

i wrap myself in the last coat

that comforted you in life,

curl up in the brief, welcome coolness

of a rainy desert night,

and miss,

without complexity,

your voice.

the heat of this night

i stand in a twilit field

watching the water ease in,

watching flickering bats hunt mosquitoes,

watching you prepare to leave again.

the water seeps over dry soil,

finds every fissure, pours in.

the bat careens in circles,

appearing and disappearing against a darkening sky,

feasting and frantic.

you load the last boxes into your truck,

shut the tailgate, and meet my eyes.

it will be half a year

before you return.

the last light slips from the sky.

at least, this time, it is summer.

the heat of this night must hold me

until you return.