Ella wanted to stay, soak in the hot waters, wake up in the hotel on the plaza one day and another, wanted to let buses leave for other cities without her. If only she could linger, not change her angle, her magnitude, her spiral from the earth, not forever, not for awhile, but beyond the measure of time. If only, yet Ella didn't know what consequences she hoped for. Maybe a delay in arriving in León, maybe a span of days timeless as those she thought Costilla lived, or maybe the warmth of soil and stones and water.

        Costilla, up before the sun to stretch her back, her arms, her fingers for the failing moon and then down for the swell of the earth, would settle into herself and walk to the well for water, precious water, water for her face, cold water, and water for drinking through the morning, drinking through the heat of the sun overhead. For the children when they woke, she'd roll oranges. On a hard surface, roll the spheres, round essence of orange under the pressure of her palm, squeeze juice for tall glasses, the weight of the oil filling the room. For her husband--his name would be Eugenio--she'd peel an orange, section it, each wedge an envelope of definition, delicious, and for herself she'd peel another. Side by side, backs to the dried mud wall of their sleep, they'd eat the segments, wait for the sun to warm their faces, their bodies, their hands.

        Into the full light, Costilla would bring two cups of boiled coffee, half milk, half sugar. Eugenio would leave for the fields, the children for school, and she'd sit alone and outside the house, walk the perimeter, turn out to the road to breathe in the morning air of her life. And maybe Costilla would then walk alone to the hot springs, silence and private, and like Ella wanted to, step into the water between rock, step down to hot water, join one nude and big woman soaking and asking another, also large, larger than Costilla, if she saw it, saw the bird in the tree, ask if it were a blue jay, and so, divert all eyes to the pines. The blue jay and the woman's asking would give Costilla privacy, space enough to settle herself into a warm pool at the place of the boiling waters, water from thermal rock deep within the earth's surface. Ella like Costilla would let out her breath from holding in her stomach as the warmth of the water eased up her ribs to her shoulders. She'd settle onto a vacant slant of a boulder. From the first pool, joined by a narrow inlet to a smaller pool, hot water passing according to the flow of gravity from the mountain and the movements of the eight or ten persons submerged to their necks, to their waists, languid, others coming in through the steam, easing out to the still and cool air. An effort to get out, an effort to get in. Water fluid and sweet, a liqueur distilled from the earth. Warm water, moss, sand, all held by boulders, granite, defensive of the approach, defensive of the leaving.

        "Maybe it's a Scrub Jay," Ella would tell the two women as she looked up to the net mesh of pine. "They have no white like the Blue Jay."

        Ella wouldn't stay in long.

        She'd be back in the afternoon. Hot water, too much chicken mole, sangrita y tequila for lunch. A community eating, everyone, and they, women like Costilla, would have insisted she sit with them. She would have eaten, but she'd never tell anyone her name; no one would ask. They'd want her to eat, fill herself. Spring air. Long-petaled clusters of serviceberry white hanging from trees void of new or old leaves. Yellow, like pollen, yellow slant of light on the tree in the late afternoon. A halo, a tree sainted with promise of fruit for songbirds in the middle of summer and twigs for deer through the snows of winter. Tree trunks, the warmth of the water, the sure embrace of granite. The waver of light and shade would move across the water, through the skin of air hovering under the trees. The breeze and the warmth of the water move from pool to pool, move from mood of subjunctive to mood of indicative, and new people arrived, three. One woman talked, talked too loudly, talked too much as if she were on exhibit, sitting, legs crossed, at a sidewalk café. Submerged to their chins in the silence of the waters, quiet voices answered Ella in low tones, turned away, moved out, climbed to higher pools, warmer water, a cave, the water hottest there where it came from the breast of the earth. Skin darker than Ella's, skin coated with a film of white minerals, and he crawled into the grotto, and Ella looked at him, at the ring piercing his left nipple, at the half-closed ease of his eyes. She smiled, and then she saw it, the spider coming from above, down and over the soft curve of the boulder, daddy longlegs easily traversing the vertical face of the granite, traveling and disappearing upside down just as easily on the underside of the rock entrance.

        No one watched the spider, and Ella didn't say a word. She feared someone might kill it. Again she smiled at the dark man and then turned to look for the blue bird the two women still discussed and looked up at.
        Truth was, she wouldn't have seen, didn't think she could see the bird when she came into the water, hadn't seen it later, in the morning nor the afternoon. She turned her neck, her shoulders, stood up--water to her waist, arched her neck back, searched the sky, the pine boughs. The sand at the bottom of the pool shifted, sand broken and displaced from the rock, detached by the flow of water and centuries of winds blowing down the canyon, broken off perhaps most often by the clinging grasp of hands and feet, human more often than spider. Ella saw no bird, yet quietly, the women discussed the absence of white on the blue wing and the tail feathers. Ashamed to admit to not seeing or hearing the bird, too shy to pretend ethat she did, too hot to ease back into the water, water to her neck, she worked her way up, spider-like, to a flat shelf, where she turned her back to the cooling warmth of the setting sun. The rock shelf she sat on was as smooth as her back, formed and hard like her muscles, strong in the water and the wind.

        She moved on to the adjacent pool. Alone there, she floated, feet up, head back, hair an intricate and horizontal web. Buoyant. She touched nothing, let the ripple of the water support her, caress her. Above the serviceberry, beyond the invisible blue bird, she looked to the strip of sky, broad and widening toward the south, narrowing up the canyon to the north, saw it light blue by the afternoon sun. A slice into the universe, and she at the vertex. She drifted. She soared. She was eagle, hawk, airplane, gliding, rising, falling, looking down from the blue of the sky: the narrow canyon of warm pools a minute crevice lost to the shadows of an undulating terrain dotted with the delicate green of foliage. Not visible were the tumble of boulders along the trail she climbed to reach the hot pools, not visible the detail of the rough-hewn bridge over the canyon creek, nor the trail up the far side of the canyon.
         Within this most improbable triangle, from this axis of contact with earth to the breadth of her vision of the universe, Ella floated through colors varied as the lily-yellow of spring and the purple-pink of summer, the blue of summer flax, the hunter green of leaves that would come against the grey of the dry horizon, the dark green of the window curtains on the bus, the dusty brown of it all waiting for the heat of the summer, and she wandered through changes in reflection, the smooth of quiet waters taking her home to the true and trembling shimmer of round Colorado aspen on a summer breeze, the light on pale bark in the green of evening. She floated beyond the difference between what she saw, what the woman fatter-than-she saw, what she saw of myself reflected in the people around her, what she saw as a bird of the sky. She glorified the spider, and she lamented her awkward hand-and-foot scramble over the boulders. She was a joke to the spider's elegance in scaling the granite at any angle. And she examined the weight of existence, the easy and generous fat of the women of the blue bird, the fine elegance of the spider, the known and unknown names, the truth or non-truth of Costilla, the narrow shoulders of a shy balding man, the arrogant dark beauty of a still baby-faced youth, the nervous flat stomach of a young almost-beauty, the barrel-like chest and stomach of the friend who talked too much and too loudly, holding her arms around herself, not differently from the way the almost-beauty might hold a man. And the woman talked on, talked, and her arms held herself like steel banding as if she might tighten the barrel, hide herself within her arms under the volume of her voice. The voice rose, reached higher pools, reached the pitch of nerves before coming unstrung with the climb down, the crossing, the climb up, the undressing, the plunge into the water, and Ella wished she'd be still, silent like the spider, invisible like the blue bird, soundless and distant like the crevice of their pleasure as it might have seemed from the height of flight.
        Yet their bodies bobbed under the surface, and no one said anything to make the barrel feel bad. The current moved quietly to the miles of their coming by car and foot and bus, bodies and minds alike in their need to take the hot baths, alike in their need to renew or release their aching muscles, the tension of their steel bands, come to gather dissolving spirits, renew hope for understanding, need for others, rediscover the wit of senses, reclaim reason, recover or discover the texture of rock and water and heat and open air, their knowledge of blue birds, the height of trees, re-establish difference, celebrate sameness, renew fancies, secrets, libido, their poetry, their agility, refine themselves, respond to the earth, feel the sand rise between their toes, reflect on humility, reflect in amazement on the impossible. Perhaps though, finally, they came to regain, to understand the truth of deference, the need to give themselves to the earth, to give and then reclaim their lives within the cadence of time.
        Sun to the horizon, and Ella pulled herself from a last submersion. She was frantic for her clothing, frantic to be gone from the confines of the pools, the fixed point on the earth, frightened of the dark to come. She boarded, and the bus sped for the city, to a night of street lights just as the first stars, a planet and a fine thin crescent of moon shown through in the southern sky. Coyotes cried out to the coming night. It was then, only there she could give into the roll of the land, and hope that the mad twilight dash might have saved, perhaps could maintain some semblance of the suspension.