Harvest, Crush

Harvest begins at night, when the grape berries are damp with desert-moon cool. The season when I turn to drape my leg over his, and he has already gone into the vineyard. He drives a harvester, eats through each hilly row, crashing through the dark. Square spotlights rumble bolted to the machine’s canopy, shaking the vineshadows with light. Tractors drag gondolas behind to haul the stripped and bruised clusters. Broken skins, early juice, tartaric tannins, woody stems all pressed together and leaking from a steel corner. In this season, he naps in daylight, heavy-lidded with raw wine.

He dreams of barrel splinters and staves, green oak meat on his tongue. He tastes the lips of a woman who has just eaten chocolate. He tastes the smell of redwood fog and plum pits. (He does not tell me what he dreams and tastes). When I wake him in the afternoon, he lights a cigarette with a match I strike. He eats a breakfast I make of boiled hot dogs and tomatoes. I think of each mile of fence from this trailer in California to Broke Leg Falls, Kentucky and wish his body would return to claim this creaking ghost.

There are late nights when we gather like lonely quail into a flatbed truck and shoot at anything that moves, or drive into a ditch, ruin our bodies, just to make the air around us shudder, break. There are long, one-lane roads that still have blood on them from wrecked bodies, split lives emptied of guns, boots, falcons, trucks, plentiful water shipped in from a thousand miles, an ocean just over that ridge. No, just over that one. No, that one there.