There she was in that lavender dress, in that room, in that apartment, turning around to answer his fist pounding that door in the middle of that day that must’ve been a day in August, the start of that season when all around them, all that could be changed by violence and violently changed, the hills and the valley, the canyons and the cliffs tongue-kissed by the Santa Ana, burst into bright seams of silver smoke, and though it was unclear how he burst through that door, why her dress fell to that floor like that flame and flash lashing the bed- straw and the sunflowers until the flowers bent their heads from the sun, or what they saw in each other —who was whose horse, rider, ride, reins, neck pulled, pulling, arching, arched back like the curves of that wildfire’s hips, that scorched hour grinding into the next, there, in that room, in that apartment— my mother and father became my mother and father and, the next spring, for the first time, brought me home through that entryway that was neither a way in nor a way out of that violence, that pounding, that answer, that turning around to discover, so clearly, all that would not change.