Foothill Drive
With the gas tank filled just enough to last the intrastate hopping,
our family presses forward into the night
without much thought about being missed
by what happens in the sunniness.
Baba listens to Mama
and responds as he edges the Honda wheel with his palms
in a way one does
when checking the pulse of a dead thing.
In the dark,
we pass through the dry foothills
with the scraggly grass veils
pruned colorless at every day’s high noon
like the white hair on a corpse’s chin
and held always
in the lateness of every consecutive nighttime
with a rather omniscient presence,
that is for doing nothing that will ever
last permanently.
It is when the desert sun sets.
Honeying a burnt tongue in a wet saliva mouth.
It is when we gloss what has been done
and think
Let it rest for a while.
Is it not deserved?
The family rides in this Odyssey
in the same meandering movement as
everything that is unsure.
There is no setting in the place we are in
and after all these years
I will ask Baba and Mama
What is a destination? and then I will wait.
The patch of a tousled hair
that is the big question between the Sierra Nevada and the Central Valley.
An unprobed scalp.
A feeling removed.
Ponderosa pines stringing
along both sides of the highway,
laid as carefully as angel ribbon,
like the outer strands of an
uncommenced braid
or perhaps a braid picked apart so carefully
and flattened to a fragmented origin
so it is something that can be new.
Composed by first being seen as decomposed
by the people who saw the core before there was fruit.
On the foothills,
on the road in its absences,
we glance at the raised dirt slabs as I imagine
What if there was a giant’s butcher knife that had parted this dirt
and we are just whatever muck that crawled out of it?
I look up like there is something beyond us on a raised stage.
A slice of what holds roots.
On a drive-by where violence doesn’t count as violence,
we crouch there,
wither-intended poppies who marvel the proud footloose
and, if we crouch there for long enough,
maybe soil will begin to fill our socks with a living thing.
On this foothill drive
to Grandfather’s funeral,
my Mama tells about the family
like a narrator and just that.
Those who we somehow don’t talk to much anymore
and those who don’t shut up.
Those who saw the war and those who felt it on bluing flesh.
Those who were the negligible splinters
on the ocean raft who, in a way,
encapsulated the happening.
My thirty-eight-year-old
fucked up Bic-Razor cousin born with the Eureka seal
who is home, now, smoking pot in PoPo’s
bathroom with the wrung adult diapers still dripping
from water in the peony-pattern tub.
He thinks of high school.
A VHS tape paused mid-cascade and pre-avalanche.
He dumps a glass of water over PoPo’s head
and watches the clear liquid break around
her like a closing bulb.
PoPo sits there blinking fast,
not muttering much.
A glass with a hand still closed over it.
One of the aunts. The knife.
The desire to scream Run! Run! Run so I don’t have to.
The family in Little Saigon and the Sacramento home.
The one who saw and the one who threw
and the knife that speared into the off-white wall
and landed in the wood
in a shape of a dead mouth sewn
with smile lines.
The cousin dressed wrongly
in the unerodible nest with no care to give ourselves.
He lights the blunt.
The corpse in the pine tree that fell.