Rachel Dacus

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CHRISTMAS WEEK IN SAN FELIPE

Up my nose, between my teeth, tiny bullets

of sand flew thick and fast. I lay down

lost in wild howling on a dirt road

in Baja California. A dim dream,

my parents shouting as I was tucked

under the sky’s fierce blanket.

As quickly as it arose, the storm died.

I ran back to our car, oasis in blinding dunes.

Our voices swooped over the expanse like gulls.

Unrelenting sand glittered like a snowfield.

Christmas week in San Felipe.

Why did you wander away? — they said.

I shot back — Why did you bring us

to a vacation on the moon?

In the front seat, my parents’ disapproving silence.

My younger brother and I

stared out windows rolled up

against poverty and dust. Windowless

houses, children without clothes. A desolate

Mexican town and beyond, the beach –

aquamarine water ringed by rock spires.

Burning sun and sand

from horizon to horizon.

We tumbled out and filled the void

with a fight. My father’s voice boomed,

a train freighted with spit consonants

that hurtled at my mother as she sat

blowing up air mattresses.

My brother scampered away. Behind a dune, /

Dad’s rasping breath and rhythmic cursing

as he pounded tent pegs.

His tent, his family: enemies.

My brother rolled in, a small wave bearing shells,

only to be brushed aside, flotsam.

My father saw me and exploded

into blue-word jazz. Control those kids –

he ordered my mother, his hammer.

Obedient, she fell – Fill this pail.

The ritual smacked so hard I saw

my family’s outline — them.

I stood at the surf, tears mingling

with the wind’s gritty lace.

A week of sand stuck to sweaty skin,

crunched between teeth, rubbing me red.

A torture I learned to shape

into wet mounds, sand forts, sand doll houses.

A week amid the dunes

learning to imitate sand –  answering

threat by being limp and malleable

or wild and grating.

Fishing rod propped in a spike,

my father drank tequila and sang

Louis Armstrong songs on New Year’s Eve,

capering in the surf. Alarms in me

squealed shrill as the fishing line

that raced unnoticed through his reel.

Giggling, he fell asleep on the sand.

In the morning we walked down the beach,

peering into tidepools. He reached down

and scooped up a dark blob, /

handed me a tiny, squirming octopus.

The water baby slithered in my hand — velvet-wet

exchange of softness in this hard expanse.

A gift fished out of murky depths,

and released to float

in the years of silence between us.

From my book Earth Lessons, an homage to the season’s weather. May the weather gods be benign in February!

WHY I LIKE WEATHER

Famous for always being there, it takes no hikes

or long vacations, leaving forty beeps on the answering

machine. Evasive, evocative, weather

is as much what you see through as what you see.

This afternoon my dog and I headed out

to find a pyramid of taffy-rolled cloud

wrinkling the sky’s forehead. We circuited

the neighborhood, bemused by vast aerial doings.

The cumulus spread away, thin as bouillon.

Sun winked on the flanks of an airplane — last buffalo

roaming the high plain. “He’s smiling again”

I said to my dog, as if the sun

were a cloudy-headed Apollo

dashing from horizon to horizon.

I often take comfort from weather

as a folk remedy. It’s good for blame, lovemaking,

moods, price dips, metaphors in talk of politics. Whether

you can think straight may be attributed to it –

“I’m under a cloud today.” Forecasters will say,

“There’s not much weather out West” –

as if air, moisture and electricity

flowing at the speed of thought around the globe

does not achieve the status.

Farmers and scientists pigeonhole energies

with chewy words: drizzle, Nor’easter — like naming

your bloodstream Sally or your elbow Sam.

The sway of a temblor underfoot

makes me think weather churns underground,

loose and roving as comets and sea spouts,

ball lightning, St. Elmo’s Fire, the katabatic winds

called foehn, Chinook, cow-killer. //

Does the equator’s airy calm — the doldrums– seep out

of the planet’s bellybutton?

Is that a huge stomach I hear underfoot?

I like the Hindu belief that ultra-fine weather

circulates in our bodies, too subtle for computed tomography.

I suspect similar currents whirl inside earth’s core

spinning magma like clothes in a dryer.

Weather crashes planes, sends killers

on rampages. Is it subject to the moon’s pull?

Does El Nino come from rays of hypnotism?

I like to believe anything’s possible, exercise

the muscle of wonder so it does not atrophy

and make me overly scientific, a calculating cynic

who sees a cloud and thinks only of ice.

We’re made of weather — electrons twirling

like tiny twisters, blood-tides rushing and pumping.

How can anyone predict how we’ll blow?

Or what will come of our combative forces –

disease, health, madness, illumination?

Wild planets with fierce cycles of emotion,

we wobble on elliptical trajectories

toward idealized destinations,

subject to massive buildups of uncertainty.

We can be exalted as the galaxies and atoms

who share our mad momentum. — But enough of chaos.

We need the comfort of names and laws.

A name can call you, but no one can be predicted by it.

And that’s why I like weather: its events evoke

daily self-explorations that slam restlessly

hither and yon, seeking shape then frantically undoing it

for something better — or perhaps just wilder and wetter.

You’ve heard of a lemonade stand? Picture one with cookies and books, on the street, author standing behind stacks of her own work, like a book signing only right out there, wherever she chooses to set up. Bringing literature to the streets. And she’s not a self-published author. She was published by Houghton Mifflin and had great reviews. No support from the publisher, hence her guerilla book marketing tactics. Get creative.