The Woman and the Windswept Plain

I was carrying a clay pot across the plain. Behind me, a prairie wife from 1902 was walking briskly along, her voice lost in the moaning gale.

Everything as far as I could see was flat and green, and fields divided by tall stands of barren tree and shrub, and little subdivided dip and bitter gorge. Perhaps, here and there, the illusion of a leaning house baked and peeled under the sun, hiding its face as it was, behind roiling clouds of white, puffy foam floating by, somnolescent beneath a canopy of eternal blue.

And somewhere, invisible on the wind, is the prop-driven death song of aerial bombardiers, flying by over farmlands tall and peaked with yellow and dips of brown and black and scarlet, and mauve and other colors too obtuse to rectify.

But the wind is a spiritual affair; it carries the brain-span intelligence of so many dead souls, howling in the emptiness; we stand, side by side, my woman and I, and consider the wet, red pulp of heart in our clay pots; and like ancient Aztec ritual sacrifice, someone has cut out the pigeon-innards and the wet scooped-out chest cavity and deposited it here, to crawl and beat feebly with its own hideous half-life.

Bowls full of human hearts. And the dress blowing, flag-like, behind, as I stand forth to assault the sun, and find that, being dead as I am now, the wind and all its voices lift me higher than a kite to come back down.

This howling plain, this maddening place. This Valley of the Shadow--somewhere between; it is the royal airport of our dreams. Somewhere, beyond, an invisible boundary in the air marks out the deep Southwestern skies. And if you cross that boundary line--then what? I couldn't say. The woman tells me:

"I was at the well. We put down out buckets. She drew out water. I drew out filth. I turned to scream out the injustice of it all. But, what do you know?"

At first, I think she is asking me what I think. Then I realize that she is not asking me what I think. She is just using the expression, flat and dull and slow and dead.

Her face is a mask-life, smooth surface, brown going to grey, and the hair is the dull color of faded flannel. The eyes are black buttons. No expression to mark out what she is trying to convey, whatever emotion that happens to be.

The dress grey. The demeanor grey. Is this a ghost? Perhaps. Somewhere on the wind, I can hear a voice intone,

"Down in the valley, the valley so low. Hang your head over, hear the wind blow..."

It's the old folk song. And, amazed I can hear someone sing it over the blowing gale, I turn to look around me for the singer. perhaps Burl Ives--

"Write me a letter, send it by mail. Send it in care of, Birmingham Jail..."

I think, She referenced the Women at the Well. That old dream of days gone by. Two women with oaken buckets at an old stone well. One woman lets her bucket down, and pulls out fresh, clean water; drinkable. The other woman lets down HER bucket, and pulls up dead animals, rodents and birds and mud and wet, miry clay; filth. She beats her breast, cries out to God at the injustice of it all. Turning to the other woman, she is shocked to find her vanished. And alone, the wind whistles across an empty, barren field.

"Roses are red, love, violets are blue..."

I follow her out across the cracked, ugly surface of the earth, her long grey form disappearing in the green. When she finally is lifted up, into the air, I'm not at all surprised.

They all go that way. Or, mostly all.

I look down, and still have my heart.

"Angels in heaven, know I love you."

Somewhere in the wind...