Red,
Fire and coffee in the strawberry fields, we haul sandstone along the riverside all afternoon. The project is to flood the farm’s black bog with river water, make a lake just so we can name it. So a slow dam forms within Pearl River, green water rising without a name.
Our brother’s been right, Red, we’re beginning to see again. The birds again, pink flowers pinned to our butterfly hat—our grandpa’s.
Dolly once said how our favorite restaurants on First Avenue are to be eaten away by a Chilis, by a Red Robin, how corporate chains are the only entities left with any money. How, soon, the city will look deranged, like too bright, and we believe him.
On our last ride we saw an unmasked white couple getting married on a famous city bridge, laughing like an advertisement, and on a billboard uptown we read how sixty percent of these deaths could have been prevented.
It’s pathetic, Red, and our hypocrisy is, and our phobia of uniforms suddenly isn’t, and we couldn’t be considered for a position at Chilis even if we tried. We aren’t willing to bear witness to this city’s grand reopening. No, we think it may be best to head south somewhere, someplace warm and ignorant to the next waves of death.
So with our white house check we buy a red pickup and twist into the north country mountain. A week on the farm before leaving, our brother offers us the Teahouse. Says all is well if we can stay distant, defends again the clarity in a hard day’s labor.
Farming is work against capital, he repeats, and communal gardening is work toward the Green Revolution.
During beer breaks we explain the terrains of our worry. How difficult it will be to leave Dolly, how much we’ll miss searching empty streets in our rides, the bike. Our brother is a poet, Red, a listener, he understands there are no good answers. So we joke about the paralysis of choice again, how our decisions might actually—like accidentally—define us.
And at night, like our grandpa, we sit alone by the fire thinking. The landscape on this side of the Hudson is harsh, Red. Bluestones lay in severe stacks like sculpture, like relief, like monuments or tombstones rising. And even the thinnest birch trees thirst for something more than soil. You can hear it in their wind sway, their dance, they’re reaching up for something. How some grow out of rock, how the fallen exhibit the dead webbing of their roots.
For dinner we roast yams over a little fire and our brother climbs the cliff face with a jug of red wine. The waving air of the firelight distorts his features, like stretches them, and the shape of his beard growth reminds us of our grandpa.
Today’s the anniversary of his death, Red, and our brother says it’s mother’s day.
So we tell a story about our time on the mountain. How one morning we saw our grandpa holding coffee and crying by a small indoor fire. We sat beside him and heard what love could do. He told us about abstraction, how it’s a way of sculpting sense out of endings. He showed us the metaphor in flowering mesquite, how a pack of masked bandits are far more likely to speak truth than any blue suit.
We were in the Coyoacán plaza when our mother called us, man, you remember. The color of the parade smoke, the masked children lighting fireworks, the dancing. Everything swirling with the color of our mother’s cry, so our brother led us to a place to toast a tequila. We did, several times Red, to our grandpa’s work, to his love, to his leaving,
and to his hunger, and tonight we cry for him from opposite sides of the fire. Cry for ourselves, for our mother. Cry for the museum director, the girl with the flower tattoo, for our sister. We cry for how we can’t touch or be touched or choose or even fucking see. We cry for Dolly, twice, then we drink ourself sick before laying down by the water.
And by morning things are fixed, like fine. Time is kept by the river water running, and soon the bog will become lake. There’s a red heron standing on it now, Red, can you hear it? It’s screaming.
We’ll name the lake after you, Red. We promise.
Dyl
PS — Remember the story we wrote about the hungry dog? It was published today. We read how Coyoacán means place of the coyote, and tonight we wake to their cries swelling out of a ravine. They cry because they’ve sacrificed something.