The bedouin sits astride his camel on a mound of sand.
I believe I smell incense, cinammon, hear tiny bells
and harness jangles, leather saddle squeaks.
A breeze spins a veil of dust between us.
Behind him are the people of his kind,
Black-robed and brown-skinned, the women wrapped up
safe from the scratchy fingers of sand and men,
everyone dragging tents and bundles
of heavy, multi-colored cloth.
It's a Hollywood image, I know.
Their tribe disappears over the slope.
At the funeral of a friend, years ago,
I saw a photograph of her family
taken when I lived among them.
Daughters, a son, friends with babies
who thumped against her sturdy thighs,
we sat or stood in rows, smiling under an oak.
My first husband's face looked out from the photo, next to mine.
My hand rested on his knee.
As I looked into the framed image on its easel
in the dry air of the funeral home,
I had already fallen from this family
had already divorced that husband
and stumbling, knees skinned, had walked on
and was walking, then, through the desert
to my next tribe.
The Christmas of the yellow truck and the green firs
bouncing in the back with children, branches alive with arms and legs,
kids jumping while we tied one more kangaroo down, boys,
I became a mother.
Without swelled belly or sweating sharp labor,
without marriage, even:
I lifted one more body into the truck bed,
and took my lover's child.
The neighborhood shifted one or two steps aside
reformed like an amoeba growing a bulgy new arm
to accommodate one more microbe
and we oozed into the woods
dads yelling to get back here
kids yelling about the next good one
moms hefting babies to their hips.
Watching the moving mass of needles and fingers,
I heard myself call a name, shout, come back!
the transformation complete.
Summer, and my parents' house was filled with boxes,
my bedroom motionless and quiet, with a carpet
and curtains I don't remember from my childhood
but the view over the hedge, across the lawn, down the road
past two rows of houses to the thin blue air and a haze of amber hills
remained the same.
My mother and father, brothers, sister,
their wives and children and lovers
sat on the lawn in clusters.
The Sold sign hung straight and flat and white.
Soon my brothers would fill the vans
and drive over those amber hills that separate
the Santa Clara from the Sacramento valleys
and over another set of hills, green with pine and fir,
to the new house.
There men in golfing hats putter past in little carts
and the women phone my mother
to get together for bridge.
Sitting on the sofa with my young daughter
I look over her head to the pictures clustered
on top of our bookcase,
nomads captured for a moment in their travels
and think about who I love
and think about who might love me
and wonder which tribe
will welcome me next.
6/22/96