Poetry
Ted O'Callahan - 1 Poem |
Huerta De Oliva
The diesel generator's ragged moan
echoed from its concrete bunker. At 10:30
this century was turned off.
The town went dark and silent—
wet stars pressed, date palms
chirred and the San Pedro Martir hills—
hills of crumbling shale, hills speckled
with bits of shells-all this was underwater—
a ring of hills that suggest there is nothing
worth seeing outside this valley. Sitting on the sparse
grass and sandy soil-the uncertain space between
churchyard and orchard, we eat granola,
powdered milk, stale treated
water. Manuel stops on his way to work
the orchard. We offer coffee charred
on the camp stove. He is kindly literal
for our gringo Spanish unprepared
for nuance. He poses for a photo and tells us
once a month, the priest comes, in a tattered
little pickup with a Jesus air freshener,
to say mass here at the end of the road.
He walks us through a shaded trail overhung
by brush. Then brightness and a dancerly
avocado. Slender tall, determined in its pose.
Grapefruit, oranges, and Manuel's invento
a lemon orange cross. It seems disrespectful
to throw the peel but we follow his lead.
As we return along a different path,
again into the dense foliage, set apart with a tattering
of leaves slowly decomposing around its base.
Silvery trunk and grey green leaves. Three hundred years
old-planted by the first priest. Dull nubs-new olives
are growing from this tree with a history.
Carried by hands from Europe—
so unimaginably far away through time
and a different sort of space
that journey was not the same-that man was courageous
to find himself in a land
named for a mythic island.
What did he believe so strongly as to gather
the people, spread in judicious patches
over these desert hills. Gather people to him.
Insist they build a church. What must it have been
to see them die of his foreignness? Where
did he carry the seed for this tree? In a pocket or a pouch?
In his hand as a reminder of home?
Among so many trees, this one
has a history. To know it was in a hand
so long ago-ridged pit scraped clean by tooth and tongue
a tarry black knot in time, stringing
together a world unmapped
to this present that so often seems ghostly
in its electronic precision. Did that priest cry himself to sleep.
As the people around him died
and died? Did he worry he had taught
only enough to knock them out
of heaven?
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