For my birthday we drive up the bajada
to Pioneertown Lanes, where the singer Cat Power
has left her scoresheet on the wall.
We bowl under pink and green lights.
Back in civilian footwear we walk
sand to Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneer Palace,
deal Quiddler to the roadhouse G-l-o-r-i-a,
and then a Marine, Band-Aid on his nose,
stumbles, steals my beer. I snatch it back.
The soldier’s buddy apologizes, says
forty weeks in sandbox, and they’re getting him
good and drunk. An officer, my age, in slacks,
leans in to say don’t worry, he’s watching.
But I’ve been beaten up by soldiers before.
I know how certain and nearly good
fists feel when the flesh is hungry for touch.
We finish our game, the bar closes,
and those who are sober go to bed,
while those who are left drive to town,
Joshua Tree, half an hour through last
summer’s forest fire, until we find
the saloon by the motel where Gram Parsons
died twice, in 1973. The first time, his hooker
expertly shoved a cube from the ice bucket
up his ass, restored him, and yet
he knew enough of life to shoot up again.
It’s hard to save your own life, to take
such extreme measures alone. The woman
at the saloon, heavy with heavy curls,
collect drinks and asks are you a Marine?
and I do feel underwater, undersea
five thousand feet above its level
in the entangled, ragged arms
of the Joshua tree, which is a lily,
and when I wake from drowning,
beyond the Pioneertown Motel window,
the mountains are still deciding what to wear.
My wife pours orange juice into a green glass
beside black crumbs of birthday cake.