Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

With his breath he drew upon the sands of his rock floor. These early weather maps coiled shape inside shape, the abiding forms present in the weather places at rest and restless and always ready to open out so that we saw a wind had been potentially a bird, a bending tree some moment clothing a wind; a flash flood rivering down the sky ocean high above it had once in the desert’s territorial memory been a reverse waterspout. The sands in which these maps were drawn were rose and green and blue sands, sands orange and nearly black, sand sand-colored (as the Anasazi’s colleague from New York put in); and more unusual was the live violet of that western chinook wind the Anasazi once had seen from far above it in this specialist eyrie of his, a wind that warms and dries and avalanches down a mountain so not even the desperate trees could detain it, speeding to eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour across the flatlands to remove, incidentally, moisture from the ground so swiftly some of it was never seen except in unexpected memories; long, shallow islands of volcanic dew; salt arms of some departed sea become rivers without issue or source that stood almost unnoticeable, dead as the dense Anglo rivers of the later East that have learned to store even the most bright-veined wastes against a time when we will know how to use them. So all the above colors dropped from the Anasazi’s ceiling as if dye-separated from the sands subtly crumbling thence down in order then to remix with them: but no, said the uniquely non-reincarnable elder to his much younger hermit-co-thinker who advanced this theory of separation and reunion; no, the colors could not have left the sand even as they filtered through the ceiling, because in that event they could never come back; so they must have created, in the precipitation from ceiling to floor, a shade in the color skins of our snake-like eyes, an obstacle or message that had the appearance of an illusion, so we saw only sand falling (and when it all caves in someday there will be no cave!).

But no, said the Hermit in his turn, when the ceiling falls in — and the Hermit had acquaintance with different ceilings where he came from and had invented some to fill a need — we will get the landlord to repair it! — and while they laughed, and the Anasazi muttered absently who is this Landlord of the East? they both admired what the four winds, or the four generally heroic brothers the name of one of whom the Anasazi bore, had created on the floor — a scheme of avenues and parallelograms and squares and anvil shapes, outer ovals and apparent cols and crags within, in turn hexagonally windowed by forthright trenches tempting a marriage of lights just as the irrigation ditch reaches out to the water if people let it. For like the weather patterns windblown into the map — that is, by breath not solely owned by the breather— the colors in the sand came from ages of high-handed flow especially at sundown or sunup when the blood of the mountains stirs about toward the thoughts of its own horizon light and this red passing to and from the Sun through that upper land of filaments and nation-sized curls and rippled sand ("Mackerel," put in the eastern Hermit, always inclined to give the precise, if eastern, term) becomes all the halo colors, all auras mapped on this floor cooled by one of the silver moons that come near, and in the night told the Anasazi again that these maps radiant as a musk thistle or serious as a city were not the four-cornered history of his early adulthood when his devotion to healings so curious they got to be ends in themselves took him away from his children whom he loved more painfully from a distance and his sometime loved wife from whom distance had too seldom been possible until one day he found that they had contrived distance between them and were lost to each other. And he would see her face looking up to him from a mountain he would pass when death had turned him into, as he predicted, an unprecedented cloud, or looking up to him from the shaken grass-grains of an earthen winnowing tray or straight into his eyes once when she told him she would not use the age-old wooden pillow for the head of their new baby in her cradle board. Until with, thus, the moon’s cool help, he saw again these weather maps for what they were, a history and prediction weatherwise as sure as that when you stand with your back to the wind stream you will feel its absence in your left shoulder and intensified presence in your right inviting you to turn, though when you do and find you have risen slightly onto your accepting toes, you find not the same pressure of hands upon you, for in the circles are always motions upward or away and thus we would feel deserted by these spirals of wind if we did not sense through the twining spirals originating inside us in our internalized four corners and always breathed outward if we only recall how from endless sources in us that it is always the same wind. It is always a different wind, groused the Hermit-Philosopher but saw in the sometimes angular neighborhoods in the map, which became another map before his hugely color-sensitive eyes, that winds did not follow only the curves of valleys and the ovals of bird flight but turned sharp enough and often enough to frame the very territories about which he and the Anasazi once quarreled.

This was not to be compared to the long-distance, sight-unseen, though ear-to-ear exchange of opinion between the Anasazi and Marcus Jones who heard upon an angle of the counter-twilight breeze, though they had never met, the (to him unmistakable) voice of the old healer identify the musk thistle as radiant, and Marcus found himself on instinct responding out of his ear, of all likely responders among his bodily parts, that the musk thistle’s flower-head system was in fact without rays, and while the Anasazi might have replied that the color over the haired and convex reddish-lavender head was radiant, he contented himself, and Marcus Jones, with praise of Jones’s love of the coyote thistle as witness his discovery that in look it obviously was some distant pineapple though he knew pineapples only in the descriptions of his visitor the Hermit-Inventor of New York.

Yet the Anasazi was stunned, as he told the Hermit upon his next visit, to hear the botanist Jones’s real point: that animal and plant were more than kin, blood and juice, animal and fruit, hide and leaf — for example, the immigrant giraffe of Choor and the wild swamp tubes of New Jersey that would stem-suck those swamps dry for one swift, illusory day each year were morph-ically one organism. To tell the truth, this thought had visited the Anasazi some centuries before upon loving his wife and sensing that they lived off each other’s breath for hours at a time and fed one another like cooperative animals and grew ripe and large and silent and close and even mutually shadow-rooted so that there was no telling which they were, plant or animal.

But the Hermit-Inventor, who was to love one woman from the time she was a thirteen-year-old girl throughout her later life’s general absence from him, shrugged sadly (perhaps because it was, that month, time for him to return to the invention of his eastern city, which equaled often the invention of ideas to explain or utilize what the city’s spirit had already brought into being), and grumbled that it or they would be all "one" a century from now, he was not sure how fast it was all flowing together, one gross anthill of coincidence, but it surely was. To which the Anasazi, who had not practiced medicine in many a generation, added: Like female and male, returning to the one they used to be. The Hermit said No, he drew the line there — though community might have much to gain from such a transformation, to judge from imminent mingling of the races and also to recall that, even with future increased vertical building, a part-time economist he had met in the forests of Massachusetts, or visited conceived of a mile as the right distance for neighbors, for they could if need be at that distance see each other. There was neighborhood in silence, concurred the Anasazi, as witness his own adept ear for what Marcus Jones had forgotten to be amazed by at the time, that in fact the Anasazi had picked up on the subject area of the coyote thistle only Marcus’s unvoiced thinking, for Marcus had said not one audible word out of his ear or any other of his functioning organs.