TOCALOMA ROAD
—for Alan Mclssac
The round sound of Tocaloma rolls off the tongue
like night drowning in the gibbous moon.
The herefords stop grazing and low to each other
as I help my neighbor gather topsoil for her lawns. Tocaloma.
We stop afterwards at the Western Saloon.
I sip sasparilla as she rolls down another beer
beneath the cobwebbed mooseheads.
At the other end of the bar, a gaggle of men
bang down a cup of Liar's Dice for another round.
Ranchers in overalls and gumboots
argue over what's the best feed for cattle. It's a lean year.
Two-wire bales of alfalfa sell at the price of three-wire bales.
We overhear them talk of planes dropping emergency feed
to livestock stranded on the open ranges.
Toby's Feed is shipping in the last of the Nevada hay.
I'm having trouble feeding my horse.
The corners of Agnes's mouth turn downward when she sips bourbon—
as if it were an uncertain pleasure.
She salutes the empty morning air, saying, Sköl pifiskin,
and I look for the toofta from Norway who always steals her drinks.
When her husband is at sea, and alcohol loosens inhibitions,
she tells strangers met in bars we have no socks.
Their eyes fill with easy tears, and during whiskey runs,
they take us to the General Store, buying me more white socks
than I know what to do with.
Tocaloma. To touch the earth.
The McIssacs went from milk cows to beef.
Alan says they couldn't make it any other way.
In the barn, we step over a dead weaner calf. He says, Don't look.
Their ranch stretches from the sky to the old Tocaloma train station.
Alan has a “Stop” sign in his bedroom, but the cattle erode the hills
and fine silt settles in Papermill Creek. No good for salmon.
On Sundays, her husband sends tightly written letters
on thin blue airmail tissue from Bombay, Hong Kong, the Mekong Delta.
When his ship, the “Baton Rouge” loaded with secret ammunition
was torpedoed, we watched the news again and again, but got no word.
The weeks uncoiled a glittering chain of days before she heard if he was alive.
I played with leopard cowries from the Indian Ocean,
and Caucasian silk dolls with Japanese eyes.
My music box chimed a tinny Sayonara, filled with foreign coins
as she showed me on the big map where the stamps and letters came from.
On Sunday evenings, we'd listen to “Hawaii Calls” on the radio.
When the liquor warmed her blood,
she'd spend hours rolling white bread into little doughballs.
After they got good and gray, she fed them to Smoky, the springer spaniel.
She made me feel unclean for becoming a woman—
as if it were something I could control— like those doughballs.
It was O.K. when we were still kids playing in the thistles.
My neighbor died in summer, when the waves turned golden,
and the lawn stretched to the hills like a green wave.
We pulled weeds, stood under sprinkler rainbows,
tumbled on the grass, until sky and land blurred, became one.
The rich black soil from Tocaloma sprouted healthy thistles
nourished by the cow paddies we stuffed into empty feed sacks.
Her husband drinks and thinks about the sea: Korea. Vietnam.
He planted the disease in deep so she never had children
(other than us). Couldn't, says Gram'ma, tisk-tisking.
Her insides blackened. The surgeon trimmed what he could,
but it wasn't enough. I felt nothing when I heard the news—
as if she were never there. And only now, twenty years later,
I am remembering all those lawns, and Tocaloma—
this place where we touched the earth
because the rolling hills and grazing cattle
weren't enough to feed the eye.
10/1982
1988 Creative Discourse
1987 California Quarterly
1986 Marin Poetry Review
