Robbie Gamble
Water Bearer
—Ajo, Arizona
Two degrees of separation from the spiculate
hardpan of desert scree: a wafer of sleeping pad
and the useless nylon sheer of tent floor, he splays naked
and counts his beaten muscles, those chronic friends,
their new excruciating neighbors, and wonders why
the hang of air, now the sun is down, wraps insolently
around his core. Does a heatwave ever fever-break?
He ponders his far-off birth on the Aquarian cusp. Is this
why he up and left temperate New England woodlands
to stagger blank and dusty Sonoran arroyos with gallons
and gallons of water on his back? Oh stars! So vaguely
viewed through mosquito mesh and riffles of duskheat,
did you choose me, soft touch that I am, so I would
hold my leathered tongue as night comes down,
numerating the cholla spine stabs to calves and wrists,
even as I meditate through the clamp at my temples
that chides of salt loss, amazed at the desiccation
of all of my surfaces? Ha ha, such arrogance, you all
must twinkle, to think I might save a migrant life
with my puny jugged oblations, that my scratchings
into this vast borderscape could be a scant comfort
to one lost in the wilderness, that I might even
hydrate a passing body into a tolerable future.
And he drifts, taut and dustcaked, onto a dreampath
strewn with stately saguaro cacti, khaki elbows
raised high, until they morph into border agents
swarming a checkpoint he can never return through.
Two degrees of separation from the spiculate
hardpan of desert scree: a wafer of sleeping pad
and the useless nylon sheer of tent floor, he splays naked
and counts his beaten muscles, those chronic friends,
their new excruciating neighbors, and wonders why
the hang of air, now the sun is down, wraps insolently
around his core. Does a heatwave ever fever-break?
He ponders his far-off birth on the Aquarian cusp. Is this
why he up and left temperate New England woodlands
to stagger blank and dusty Sonoran arroyos with gallons
and gallons of water on his back? Oh stars! So vaguely
viewed through mosquito mesh and riffles of duskheat,
did you choose me, soft touch that I am, so I would
hold my leathered tongue as night comes down,
numerating the cholla spine stabs to calves and wrists,
even as I meditate through the clamp at my temples
that chides of salt loss, amazed at the desiccation
of all of my surfaces? Ha ha, such arrogance, you all
must twinkle, to think I might save a migrant life
with my puny jugged oblations, that my scratchings
into this vast borderscape could be a scant comfort
to one lost in the wilderness, that I might even
hydrate a passing body into a tolerable future.
And he drifts, taut and dustcaked, onto a dreampath
strewn with stately saguaro cacti, khaki elbows
raised high, until they morph into border agents
swarming a checkpoint he can never return through.
Biography
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Robbie Gamble (he/him/his) works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, and is the assistant poetry editor at Solstice magazine. Over the past five summers he has spent time in the borderlands providing medical and material support for migrant passing through remote and dangerous stretches of the Sonoran desert.
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