Lost Quails in an Easter Pastoral
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new.
—John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Last Easter, I gave my mother-in-law a large, brown, simple ceramic
Navajo water pot, shiny with pine-pitch lacquer.
It was a pot created by my family, from clay forming a muddy
wash, near the fall of Yé’iitsoh, at the edge
of a Sacred Mountain. Purely decorative, my in-law placed
the round pot under her juice-orange tree,
in a manicured backyard. In the sprawling desert vista views
of Sun City, with a rolling fairway snaking
its green golf-course grass from west to east, micromanaged HOAs
for a retirement community’s adobe duplexes,
overwrought with snowbirds driving mini carts to the dollar store
and eyeing antiques through palm-tree lined
plazas with a paletero pushing his cart waiting for children with sickly
sweet hands. The Diné hands that shaped this gift
are not designed with ancient symbols of Thunderbirds with falling
rain patterns gently outlining the mouth of Talking
God. My in-law’s ceramic water drum sits dusty from last summer’s
monsoons, still it glistens between sunrays shifting
fragrant citrus leaves and flowering white buds attracting arid honey
bees and whizzing reddish-purple blurs: torpedoing
hummingbirds. It is a Southwestern scene—a photogenic rustic
perfection with even a two-armed saguaro waving.
The evening songs arrived dragging a long bluish tarp. Hours before
the resurrection, my in-law spoke in perfect Diné:
“Tó Bájíshchíní bitsee’í biyi’ naadą́ą́’ dilchxoshí
dilchxosh!” “The Water Bearer’s pot is popping
popcorn!” When grandmas speak, we listen and never interrupt, yet
here I am too stunned to respond. What pulled
me away from the magical realism emanating from a limestone tomb
in Jerusalem is the movement that catches my eye.
Just two breaths ago, my in-law’s prophetic fortune came to pass
in her metaphor of popcorn popping. One by one—
pop, pop, pop, more like cheep, cheep, cheep—round beads with beaks,
like chicks looking over a canyon ledge. These were not
the obvious holiday mascots: colored chicks and chocolate bunnies.
The slothful pot this night shaped nature itself,
no longer devoid of wild deer nibbling grassy tufts in a glade giving
way to bluebells, dandelions, sleeping glories ...
Living up to its namesake protecting a giving nest of baby quails.
This pastoral was ridiculously heartwarming
as we became unwilling witnesses. No, we were unvetted actors
in a morality play. We represented the Ages:
Birth, Love, and Wisdom. The chicks are hatched innocent
as newly-melted snow roaring mists over beavers
swimming past summer. I represent love itself. I too am a married
in-law, my heart scrying its way through a lost
treasure map requiring self-sacrifice, and to become a defender.
My mother-in-law represents all-that-is-yet-to-come,
her worry on passing a desolate legacy found in being alone enough
for tranquilizers to calm the cornfields of Iowa
most her life. She is deeply happy her children have married. A widow,
a single mother rejoices the silence no longer,
to hear again bluebirds sing. There is bliss in knowing we are all woven,
connected on a spider’s web, thin and precise.
Intertwined destinies link the Hero Twins’ battle against ancient evils
to an almost empty two-story house surrounded
by cornstalks. From Jerusalem to Arcadia to Nashville to the slick clay
forming at the bottom of a wash of the Turquoise
Mountain peaks’ outline, there is a thread leading you to me, and me
to you, where our horse-charging hearts jolted Tempe.
The holiday a now-buried memory, as invisible migrant gardeners
armed with a chainsaw and a blower to clear away
the remnants of missing eggs and discarded foil, pastel wraps, half-eaten
candies. I am alone listening to the man-made roars:
a chainsaw, blemishes of all mankind rip nature apart at each seam.
It pulls so tight ready to snap. A gardener accidently
trips over the ceramic nest, a disruption of memories, a swarm of tiny
quails erupt like an angry wasp hive zipping quickly.
They are tiny woes following concussive grenades creating collateral
damage, a form of acceptable losses, easy as coins
pipe-line a casino slot machine. We are but fool’s chaos run amuck,
continuing the long walk to Ft. Sumner in the dead
of winter to giving over rule to opulent dictators, the past crowns
free reign. On the radio station is NPR news, crackle
whispers, “melting ice shelf, great tabular bergs dissolve, laying waste
to many generations of penguins.” More static
is misheard, “youthful eye states, ‘what is not seen, does not bother me.’”
The unseen gardeners try to gather casualties,
revealing a conspiracy, in elegies to an urn under the orange tree, but
no number of tries help. In the distant, we all hear
the constant stresses of the final filament. The crucifix and communion
bypass the gardeners’ retreat into blowing away
feathery leaves into large piles for trash collectors. My in-law’s house
is now empty as we pack the last cardboard boxes.
My other half packs away crystal, while I never got to ask “my” mother
about that night of watching popcorn popping, “How?”
Her Diné was more perfect than an urban NDN tongue, her tongue
a sphinx’s prophecy I couldn’t answer. Tomb-hidden
broken shards echo under heavy oranges ready to succumb to gravity,
lifting the veils one final time to connect our families.
The answer appears slowly as a mother quail with three smaller quails
tailing her every move to learn penguin chants:
Thunderbirds watch over us, holding back the tides. Legions of water lynx
ready to pounce, to devour the earth, to end all there is.
Outside, the sound of the paletero continues to ring, as he pushes his cart
down the street. I don’t dare buy a popsicle, after
each crowned answer dances through the lawn, fading into the bushes.
If I did buy a popsicle, and the smiling paletero opened
his lidded ice box, we would immediately freeze solid from the intense cold
contained, never stopping, to ever plunge the world
into snow drifts, releasing a new ice age. The end of the ages is soon upon
us, every soul is an atheist to history. Yet, you feel it over
and over again, the nudge. That taut pull is ready to snap. The quails
are important for your survival. Watch them closely.
Source: Poetry (March 2025)