Oasis of Mara

This was the Oasis of Mara
where the Washingtonian Palm Trees
suckled on water from the spring,
where the continental and Pacific shelves
harmonized in one shallow push of things
Not many earthquakes in the stories
of Chemehuevi but when they came
with disharmony, it was the lizard with
a black tail, like the comet in night skies.

This was Carlota, whose father was Mike,
whose father was the tribal leader and
medicine man, who walked his family
to their summer work at Gillman Ranch,
a walk along the cridges of springs and
other related palm tree oases, nurturing
their young, providing shelter and shade,
a 45 mile stroll through desert and hills.

Carlota, who was mis-named later, who
was said to have scrawled childish signals
in the sand when she ran away from Mike,
ran somewhat towards the ancestral home
at 29 Palms but knew she was not going there.

And the waters at the Oasis of Mara quaked
a little, knowing a ripple had been frogged
into the pond, the late summer evening,
uneasy, with President Taft campaigning
in his fat chair at the Mission Inn, Riverside
and the Mission Indians weren't real at all.

And this was Mike Boniface, who was related
to everyone at the spring, and to many Cahuilla
throughout the southland, the Cahuilla who held
their tribelets at more than a dozen homes
throughout the valley and hills, culminating
at Morongo, where Mike and his family picked
fruit, where the parents and grandparents told
Carlota she could not marry Willie Boy because
they were too closely related, Willie Boy, who

the white newspaper reports, along for the
sensation of ride, would write was a drunk,
a crazy, and a wild Indian on a rampage of kill.
This was Willie Boy, who might be penciled in
for Romeo, and this was Carlota, who was Juliet
for all plot-structuring purposes, even Robert
Redford cast a real life killer in a movie for him.

Romeo and Juliet, we all feel sorry for them,
white and Shakespearean, safe in their 16th
century habitats, European-clean. They, too,
were teens, like Willie Boy recently was and
Carlota is, and couldn't be together. And this

was the Oasis of Mara, where Willie Boy's
grandmother buried his gun, although her
grandson hadn't yet come, after he killed Old
Mike, after Carlota was mis-named Lolita and
Isoleta - how convenient to minimize when
we have such ludicrous outtakes on names,
crazy Indian, wild Indian, girl who writes in
ancient symbolic scribbles although she was
educated and planning to attend college soon-

even Clara True, who is this, the Indian agent
who rescued the pinned-down-by-Willie-Boy
posse near Ruby Mountain, who scoffed at the
fact that Willie Boy was dead, killed by self-
inflicted gunshot wound, that he killed his
beloved because she was dragging him down.

This was the Oasis of Mara, where Willie Boy's
mourning songs, the songs for the dead of the
Chemeheuevi which he undoubtedly sang
after he ran north from Pipes Canyon, knowing
he could not follow the not so uncommon plot
structure of murder for love in the conventional
manner of rising action-climax-denoument,

that for him, the gun he'd never claim rusted
at the bottom of the Oasis of Mara, which the
people who pretended they had a picture of
Willie Boy dead after Willie Boy had run to the
north to another homeland, renamed 29 Palms,
and claimed as their own, much as Willie Boy
had claimed Carlota as his beloved, and had
killed and exiled for a much higher cause than

to blame the Indians, the firewater-drinking
savages from the 29 Palms Band of Chemehuevi
Indians, so-called, as if they all were responsible
for the love-sickness of one young man, as if they
made the earth move and upset the complicated
balance of lateral slip thrust faultline, the edgy
relationship between the Indians and the whites

and set the earth afire, made the ground shake
its furious fist and rattle its teeth and complicated
the faraway and simplistic plot structure of the
story of Romeo and Juliet, for whom we feel sorry
and for Willie Boy, the savage Indian, who brought
disaster and exile upon his own head, and that of
Mike's family, and all of their relations. This is the

Oasis of Mara, reclaimed now by Joshua Tree
National Park, in the name of public service,
and this is the Salt Song Singer, brushing sage
and remembering the old ones, the young lovers,
and how the impossible tried to live side by side
once upon a time, at the Oasis of Mara, 29 Palms

and the lizard had no legs, it had no black song.

c. Ruth Nolan 2008