Whatever I want the world will take away from me . . . I thought about it that way—stake out boundaries, build walls, don’t trumpet good fortune in white rooms. Don’t put “true love” out there as a proposition. Fate adores sending a rogue wave to capsize your little skiff just when the weather seems cloudless. Cuidado, my comadre used to say to me, the Lady might drop by—you could get la visita, if you don’t watch out.
My strategy? Say nothing.
So I never dared be the moon to his sun, my scarred white stone to his fire, no, we were both wordless, in the drink—though water’s not mute, but conversational, the murmur of water’s ordinary—a husband driving home from work turning onto his own street just as the light goes watery violet, and the gurgle, the steady slap of the heart is water, that elaborate pump I listen to, my ear curved against his breastbone and inside a liquid fist clenches and opens. My sister once hired a dowser for a barren plot she owned on the edge of the Sonora, and oh how the willow bucked and quivered in his hands diving for the hidden spring, a branch machete-struck from its limb tough enough to remember, even severed, soft enough to sob for water, one body to another, what’s between them at sea, the wordless drift of interior currents, our two bodies only rarely glinting their tie-dyed silks of water, all that wet splendor—should I be saying this?