OTTERS SAVED FROM DEATH

When I got off the bus, dry air flooded my chest.  I felt alone except for my teeth and tongue.  This was quite some time ago.  There were days of white-hot sunshine, nights on fast dark roads.  One night I threw an empty bottle out the window of the speeding universe, and it shattered into stars.  (There was a woman, Denise.)  The desert was not exactly kind.  The desert was dazzling and fierce.  It was full of fierce, hot ghosts.  I was a bit of a ghost then, too.  Churning up the sand on my feverish journey.  The sun tasted like minerals.  I remember the car overheated by the side of the road and Denise drinking cokes and I drank a coke too.  She could hold a cigarette in her mouth and talk at the same time.  The sun pressed down like a hand.  There are things I don’t remember.  Much of the time I felt caved in, like a deer crushed in the ribs by a truck.  Like a desert struck by a deep meteor.  I made a lot of promises and didn’t keep them.  A lot of people were doing that back then.  Sometimes I flew into the empty sky like an arrow.  It was America.  At night the desert felt like it was moving, creeping away down a thousand dry creek beds.  The moon stepped silently in its own tracks and then disappeared.  Denise could take my earrings out using just her tongue.  And put them back in again.  That I remember.  What ever happened to that car?  Maybe the desert took it, like it takes old houses, or birds exhausted by heat and wind.  Like it takes certain people and inhabits them, and drums on their abandoned hearts.  I remember I was walking down the street one afternoon towards a bar with its door propped open.  An incoherent music drifted out.  Someone had washed the streets.  They sparkled.  That’s when I saw a hummingbird courting one lone silver pay phone.  It looped and stopped, looped and stopped.  Flashing its green throat, iridescent… trembling on the very verge of itself.  It just stayed there, hovering.  I thought, something extraordinary is going to happen.