When danger threatens it’s often mysterious and exterior, so we gather everyone and all the vegetables we can carry in the rec hall. It isn’t a story of personal peace, although the valley is green, fence-flecked and rolling. The peaceful mind tipping from container to container: what kind of giving is a series? What clings to the glaze, wondering if it’s true to become numb to the dead outside, the number the more there are of them. If there’s no outside a problem vanishes, but not the main one.

Brown goats and white. Four-year-old girl, leggy and whining, long brown hair. I pick her up—she spiders onto me—and start to sing to quiet her, but can’t remember or find the tune to more than a couple lines of any song.

All questions cloud. What to do with predators, is it in their nature—activists counter with stories of vegetarian dogs, or fuel with the plainness of blistered bodies hanging the smoke out of clothes. Who are we to object to blows? We are very small, almost everything is bigger, with features we don’t see, round forms. Round water through property or proportion: pass. In books and in history, revolutions fall on violence because everyone can imagine where they are and what they want but not the ground, not how to cover. That terrain what is. Bitten pasture with rocks breaking through it like sobs.

Had I gathered everybody, or had everybody gathered? Completeness stops being important; now there’s the toilet problem, questions of water and food that ask themselves. Length of threat, as often, unspecified. How do you imagine it? Right now I can’t, only dream it when night is working on the rest of the tissues: uncoupled from likelihood can see where we converge, furrow, not fissure. This isn’t a story except in the most temporary way. Without any proof, it must be placed on this earth—what amplitude, what folds! Along the hill’s long profile as many of us as there are, hoofed or footed. Brown goats and white. We appeal to these to woo us from the creatures that we are, but round off in no other way.

Or once past the gates of emergency how inhabit what we once crossed, implying that all outside isn’t well. Don’t send anyone, anyone out to do your job for you. This is the beginning of the parable. But there are children in the valley of changing times, one of them holds me with her spider limbs because she can’t hold herself. I get off to a ragged start, but the next song catches, voices—my sisters’—come in. The next chorus everyone in the hall roars out together.  Limbs of dependence contract and relax.

My dad insists on reading about war and hope at the dinner table. The valley is not where everything else is far away. Geologists can’t stand their best behavior, all the time to be stuffed with it. Where histories ball and socket tendons connect but burdens gather, ligature. Where the border is the porous other and the hero feels it in his joints.  The border conserves threat, threat, always, everywhere, not always everywhere. In the quiet, wealthy land, voices hoarsen in song. In the woods, self-congratulation, paranoia become resentful dangers. Anyone can kill anyone. Anyone can come, bearing any relation, to the line of the body of water, which is the bottom line.

Who lives in the valley? Whoever is there at the time. It’s because it is a place that we can be there, and we owe our facts to this, if not our natures.

I see that I’m troubled in describing conditions instead of actions, letting action break offstage replacing a static sky of gray and black branches, which cracks at the rim and is made strange. I suspect the eye can adjust to necessity. Just like everything else, this takes a long time.
Paradise: if it’s walled—engineers seem to agree that it is walled, split-railed and blistered with lichen, feel jaw muscles bulge and square, they are only yours, and your descendants’. Sometimes I think I’d kinda like that and other times I think I’m already there. I go over to my dad, who is lying on a couch with his brother, like spoons, not estranged. I hold up the big bunch of kale and parsley I’m carrying and he lifts his head to smell. To give more love than you received, that is the reverent economy, planned to run uphill.

“To need it most” is a troubling description—look at the bread model even with the most earnest, bespectacled eyes. If the need is active, yours or mine, it doesn’t sharpen according to others. If hunger isn’t bounded by the body that holds itself empty, should it be fewer, should it be real? Bodies need even without machinery: bundles, fistfuls, haste, teased out, wrenched up. Whether the swift or the slow move’s best, everyone is the one who makes it. At the site of an experiment, everything is new, is effluent.

A threat by wanting little, owing little. We’ll have to decide if guns are realistic at the same time we’re planting root crops—under a waning moon, the almanac and my mom say. So far all the farmers have only done what they can imagine: weak, precise charters. Driveling, superstitious fear. Who are the actors, the cooks cooking gritty-eyed, distracting? Hush your baby mouths. Story after story in the fleeces of the oldest, oiliest sheep. Gift after gift a paradise of hospitality and threat.

Tell the valley why you are thinking of it. Vast, as if a bear as big as God had scooped out a pawful of earth to get a lily root. What firefighters are educated to know takes place offstage, offscreen, in the mountains, where the bodies are. At checkpoints, what can take their place, disclaim. I’m not complaining; the lily root must be almost as big as God itself. In fastness, no remoteness: the valley is continuous, its fences notwithstanding.

Harmony is achieved, not recovered like a lost ball out of the round water, whereas the quest assumes its natural state. All along, it says, dripping. Difficult and dangerous, it says, you hope, don’t have the heart to plant or explain it in the valley, already in and all night long, the breathing of old and wheezy sleepers. Uneasy sleep, temporarily safe.

Salt and ore draw back the village. Prophecy, very early, is of a trade-off: prosperity for cannibalism, for literal truck-driving. To work around self-interest priests have to find something more interesting. A makeshift small god, hung with motives, a virtual narrative certainty.  I am not complaining in the yellow kitchen, not in the valley, not on the altiplana, not in the computer. All night long we sleep and wake with the value the moon gives us to the last decimal place. We spend the morning discussing silver, lions, Napoleon, and the election. None of these in their crudest functions will just fall away. They depend on each other also and are continuous.

On the altiplana, foreigners replace heroes. Options are nonrenewable: once dig them, they transform, leaving no valley but a surrounded pit. Trucks replace ambitions with new teeth by the load. It is dreamlike. It is like a story, if a story’s your idea of success. Feel the halt climbing the arches of your feet. Miners undergo troubling dreams that have to do with the plot: sexual frame-ups, luxurious buffets and practical revolutions.

In naked conflict radical optimism and radical pessimism faced off in the best hotel. “You can’t hurt me and you can’t hurt any of mine,” I hissed into the dream. I stretched up my hands. Near the ceiling the air was warmer. Is this too much like saying we must learn to float, from corner, from center, with pinpoint pupils and missing teeth? We talk about having a baby; I say, “Honestly?”

And your descendants? A powerful argument is powerful to budge, to drive people to a valley they didn’t select. Or the accident of entrants and occupants lie down together as is for a while, adjusting to the present, sharp green and dirt filling the room of stress and song; bringing an empty bowl you fill another’s and it’s like a chain of fountains or models, making a ceremony of trepidation, the around in enough to go.

The present, my dad keeps saying, with its fertile ruts of non-time, wrong garbage cans for extras to rot in, returns us to the hero at “stupendous sacrifice”, leaving everything below, burning for a thousand years, giving up and emptying out. A vessel drained of ceremonial blood, even if he succeeds in bridging the calculus of success. Crossing the valley from height to height, he says. One day we’ll call this the era of relics and artifacts, height of one culture, we’ll characterize it with common knowledge, common carnage. In every story somebody lets the prophecy slip, crack like a bowl to the hero, so much for borders.

The valley winters over the taste of mint not without a tinge of rot. Thin light and bleak time, less sanguine, written in larger pellets and footprints, odorous legume farts—I don’t even like camping, but I have a long conversation with Xuan on a strangely warm winter day about the place in the fold of decision and legislation.  “Are you changing the model?” I’m expanding the model into the cross-hatching and concentric bowls of contour, the very weave. And you have come over to water the water.

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Notes: “Sometimes I think I’d kinda like that…” is from “She’s an Angel” by They Might Be Giants. The term “reverent economy” is from Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson; the “bear as big as God…” is from The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Conversations with Joel and Diane Schapira and Xuan Gao also fed this poem.

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