Where Do You Sleep?

I warn my son against eating the red berries 
on the chaparral hillside—coyote food lumping 
the odd scats we see on the clay road 
that edges the long pasture 
where the wild geese come down at twilight 
to gabble like the crowds at the town fair, 
strangers' voices winnowed through the limbs 
of the bordering oaks. Once we saw 
a bobcat, like a pistol-shot on the haunches 
of a jackrabbit diving into the expedient dusk, 
and then darkness came, and my wife's mother 
walked out from the screened porch, 
her breath a mist in cold starlight, 
her eyes on the deepening hills. 
"No fires tonight," is all she said 
and nipped her bourbon, and it was true 
we saw no lights then under the black 
angle of ridge where the big cat had vanished, 
no suspected camps of the illegals who make 
their way up this secluded valley, pushing north, 
who walk up to our sagging, whitewashed house 
to barter work for sandwiches, dollars, 
a chance to wash their children 
in the spray of the black hose 
coiled on the side of the cow-barn. 

And on our rummage sometimes 
through the oak knees and barbed wire, along 
the steep rills of the dung-lined creek, 
I look for tramp-signs—the cross of sticks 
or diamond of stones that mark a house simply, yes or no. 
We are far enough from the border 
to only hear of its drama, the other coyotes, 
their craft of promise, the government dogs
rooting spoor in the waste of the dry arroyos, 
but we may be marked by some emblem here, 
for they come, the men and boys mostly, lean as rails, 
and I squat in the dirt of the dooryard with them, 
my once-good Spanish rusting like the fence wire 
or the rabbit cages stacked in the tall weeds and bamboo: 
Here is some money for food. The Señora wants 
the weeds knocked down in the old pasture 
and will pay you the rest when you finish. 
She doesn't need the work done. When the family 
comes on weekends, her sisters chide, It's dangerous. 
You don't know what they might do. 
She never argues, but she never stops hiring them, 
learns their names, speaks to them in signs 
and single words, tries to learn where they sleep, 
where they come from, 
and where they think they are going.

Our valley within the valley: I have 
never felt the wind here, but nights 
the cold air flows down the cleft 
like a slow river, invisible 
under the lip of the low ridges, touching to life 
each leaf and branch, brimming up to glaze the moon 
and even the stars as they wheel their long track 
around the pole. An owl flies, bats rise 
like scraps from a fire, and something sets 
our own dogs barking in the brush behind the sheds. 
I rise too and softly walk inside to where my son 
breathes heavily in his sleeping bag 
adorned with bright monsters. He shudders 
at my footfall, tosses in some deep dream, 
and I lay a hand to his forehead, brush back 
his hair and spend a minute in his clean boy-smell 
before I go back outdoors. The dogs 
have run off, and the sky 
has become its own river of light. 
I sit perfectly still. I cannot 
tell if the owl has settled 
somewhere beyond the pasture and I hear 
the long night-rhythms of its call, 
or if I hear the slow, persistent lilt 
of a single human voice
sifting down, out of the hills.