If I were to tell the story, she would tell it in one way, with one word. Just a whisper. To hear it once would be enough. Enough to enter us quietly. Enough to fill all the shoreless spaces, and to forget the habits and all the little stories we knew by heart. Enough to forget History -- the one they write, the one you write, the illusion that we all write together in reconcilable pieces. But all of that is impossible, now and forever, because I is still driving

through desert red landscapes lit by a full moon flashing across winter hills, rocks, and dark shrubs rising out through thin crusts of snow. Midnight is all shadow and glow -- all alone on the two-lane road.

Looming is the word I finds inside herself for the mountains on both sides, glistening on their peaks, but secretive in their darkened creases where the hand of death has painted long streaks of bare trees. Looming, I repeats to herself and keeps blowing forward on the tiny forgotten highway drawn through these parts long ago by eager settlers. They came for gold to fill into their gaping grins. And for free land -- the chance to break through to the other side of their hemmed-in-destiny. In and out of I's peripheral vision

in the margins of sight, mining towns nestle against the mountains' motherly breast, long sucked dry. The towns are of no account now, propped up by the old bones of memory. Here the "sons and daughters of life's longing" grow up anxiously and wind up in nearby cities or even as far as

memory -- like a red fox, furtively emerges from its hiding place and enters the night.
Don't go away, I whispers out loud and allows the past to spill through her, filling her inner folds with a painful stain --

the sound of water pounding in the white plastic shower of the attic she and her lover shared for a summer. In the middle of the day they would go there together, sun washing them from a skylight in the roof. Two shadow lovers moving slowly and quietly against a world of white.

But I only want to remember the sound
of water like a storm in her ears, loosening up all the dry discarded things inside her. She was young at the time; he -- married. Neither of them knew what the future would hold.

I don't want to remember
his dark body pressing her, long fingers of water stroking her neck, forming diamonds at her nipples then falling

I don't want to remember
his lips breathing softness into her, Ya Hiati. Ya Rohi. My life. My soul.
How the water made her shudder as it pulsed from the head of the shower.


I don't want to remember
being so desperate and so awake, I says to herself again in the dark of her car, driving down the winding road to nowhere, now that she's all alone. Love is over. War is over. Its dead are buried in neat rows; top secrets are openly told in the papers to ghosts who have ceased

to care. And there are many parts of the story I doesn't want to see or can't see clearly. It's like the blind leading the blind, I had said to her lover's wife who had called once that summer crying, How can you do this? Don't you know what this is doing to me? I am crumbling. I'm falling apart. Is he there now? You both are shit. Don't you have anything to say?

It's like the blind leading the blind, I said after a long silence, then quietly put down the phone.

But I only want to remember the sound of our voices murmuring together with the drumming of water. I love you, the two said at the same time. I love you they whispered, looking without fear into the other' s eyes, smiling. Smiles that reach back into the throat and beyond into that small part of the soul that never quite withers. I love you was like a breeze blowing through the desert.

I finds herself

looking in the rearview mirror at her own image and then beyond into the dim world she has left behind. She steps on the gas, moving faster and faster through the hole pried open by her own high beams revealing an arbitrary path through her eternal landscape, the wild west

stretches its splattered canvas across the universe. Lies flutter through the air like ticker tape. Smiles flicker through the static. Cockroaches have stormed the attic. Laying eggs in the sand. Multiplying under the eyelids of millions, crawling across the pages of

History is what we write down so we can afford to forget -- what really happened. There are promises and then the desolation -- all the discarded lifeless things flow bloodied through gutters and streets. And behind every image of rubble -- bodies; and everywhere you see bodies everywhere you remember the sound of gunfire and crying.

I steers herself very carefully through this existence -- a field of unresolved contradictions. She flips on the radio. She flips off the radio. I would like to deny that

I am part of this, she says to herself scrutinizing her surroundings. I am part of this:
'life in the desert.'

A tour of the ruins --
the color of the storm
is manic

second guessing
a dog barking
in the senses

was it me who left
last night, or did you
leave me

in the dream of the prison
we choose to stay inside.
In the dream of the dance
the music is

Silence fills the shoreless space between present and memory. I can't recall how it all happened. At least not the sequence of how things fell apart. Because things don' t fall apart in sequence. They are born apart. But in fleeting vulnerable moments we create for ourselves the illusion of unity. Days and years pass. And then at one point a harsh light shines through and finds the faults and fissures in the myth that

This time things will be different, I promise they will.
This time we will forget everything..

The rash words and long letters and the things said much later,

This is just a marriage. Like any other. Like my last one.

Exhausting nights that don' t go forward, but move backwards toward the dim fixtures of dawn -- then all alone on the AM road, looking for a place to have coffee and read the newspaper. And the headlines that come day after day:

Your homeland is burning.

If I were to tell this story there is a lot she might leave out. Her background. Her class. Anything ambiguous or misleading about her character. She might allow herself to seem innocent. Her voice might come across as "above reproach" and she'd speak freely in detail about "whatever is true for ME." And she would have the right to go for pages and pages either in a stream of consciousness, or in an alluringly magical narrative style, leaving us to wonder, Should we take this for real?

A lot of well meaning people would lend a sympathetic ear to hear all about this romance with an Arab man. They'd nod their heads knowingly. They might even want to make a movie out of her story. But we' ll never have the pleasure of reading or seeing that version because I is still traveling

across stark winter terrain. The mountains have passed behind; and the earth is flat. I is left with nothing, no distractions to relieve her of the clear picture of her path, cutting through barren lands, almost viciously. And nothing, not the road sparkling in the moonlight, nor the crackling radio, nor the gentle halo above the dashboard can keep her mind from hearing his voice:

This is not a war. This is a massacre. Only the masters of war would call it a war. Desert Storm? Where did they get that metaphor? This is not a storm, this is a massacre. People, children are dying. But that means absolutely nothing to you or the rest of your bloodthirsty country. This war means nothing to you people because nothing means anything to you anymore. Don't you know...Can't you see that this is really happening? No, you can't because you are blind. Why don't you take a stand? I' ll tell you why. Because you are impotent, eviscerated. What you need is to find someone like you. I'm getting out of here.

I'm getting out of here. I'm getting out
hangs in her head, like the sound of rain, like the sound of hunger, like the sound of death







mirage myself mirage
I arrive at night
find dryness absence

oasis lover oasis
wait for me wait for me
while I cross the scorching sand

This is the high desert covered with sagebrush, light snow, and hardly a sign of civilization, except the road. It knows its own way -- to any town any city where a million settlers sleep, undaunted by the specter that haunts this occupied land. Slaughtered coyotes and deer litter I' s path every few miles, victims of passing traffic through these wilds. I slows down sometimes and pulls up beside them. She gets close, very close, just to study their sad glazed eyes, staring out past this world
into the open sky.

.