Anitya

1.

Summer nights when it’s warm, and I come home to the valley, I walk the backyard fence casually peeking over. I pretend I can still see the aisles of peach trees, their globed ornaments on display: The elbertas, fuzz ridden, kissed in a blush. The O’ Henrys, throbbing like intangible suns, dipped in sangria. Years and years before the urban sprawl, I pretend that they weren’t all uprooted, torn out and replaced with houses. It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to go back to that 100-degree heat, back to that valley town where I spent my high school summers packing peaches at the packing shed. The peach fuzz irritating, itchy on my forearms, the juices drying sweet. When the only worry in the world was whether or not I finished unloading the bin.

2.

Take 395 south through Carson City, 88 east to Jackson, the winding mountain sometimes closed with snow. This one, the last one, the house empty except for the sounds of ice dropping in the freezer, as if she is still trying to serve. It stormed the night she dropped body, tree branches shedding what is only the periphery. I lay in the living room by the piano, un-played like the pots and pans pulled from the cupboards. Unable to sleep, I am unable to sleep rocking thoughts in the chair of my head, beside the bed where she used to sit, now a void—Outside, the pool holds the moon, and the rosemary stills blooms light blue flowers. Once or twice, picking some for the potatoes she made in many ways, twenty years ago watching the sun shift through the windows. I stand in it for the last time.

3.

Flowers in my chest, an ancient sea, pounding waves of color on the beach. I am five years old walking in the tides of this memory. The clouds staying put in the painting over the sea. My mother holds me in the waves releasing and lapping against my legs. I am in the middle of Maslow’s Hierarchy. The fog lifting off a late sunrise emptying light through the process. Summer camping with the family, eight years old in the mountains of the Sierra. Beneath pines on the lake’s edge, my fingers still stuck with sap. The suburbs, the peach trees behind the house, my parents arguing in the kitchen, and above on the banister, I listen and watch as their emotions fly out from hiding places. What is beautiful now is the water from the vase poured down the sink. The guitar ringing out the stubborn chords, not yet fully formed. I am sixteen. If at all, the undeveloped poet needs to sing. The songwriter needs to be born. There are only beginnings in the pain, in the things he loves. The days are egg clouds raining private rain, the sky a field of flowers, one moment a high, another a memory, another molting butterfly.