Voices in the Air

by Naomi Shihab Nye

  to tucked-away forests and creeks, could see

  a slightest flicker of movement,

  a nesting memory, how the world was once,

  would never be again.

  He could stand under skies for hours,

  never weary of their habits, never tire.

  When did humans equal this glory?

  Glory of feather and snippet.

  Glory of the rangeless distances—

  abundant glide.

  When did humans soar so high?

  Gratitude Pillow

  “Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel . . .”

  —Maya Angelou

  Maya loved the jingle of the massive key ring

  carried by cable car conductors. First woman

  in the San Francisco trolley uniform,

  she liked the shiny buttons on the jacket,

  appreciated the swoops and dips of the routes,

  sharp curves, corners, bustling avenues.

  Clinking coin dispenser latched to her belt,

  she’d be a conductor all her life. Write, and talk,

  take people everywhere, out of their tight little

  rooms.

  And if anyone told her they were going

  to Gloomy Street,

  she’d say, What? Lift those eyes. Take a look at the

  sea to your right, buildings full of mysteries, schools

  crackling with joy, open porches,

  watch the world whirl by,

  all we are given without having to own, and shake that gloom right out of your system!

  Hope is the only drink you need

  to be drinking—jingle, jingle, step right up.

  Life Loves

  to change, wrote poet John Masefield,

  in the cobbled town of Ledbury, Herefordshire,

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s town too.

  Precise crosswalks, Saturday cheese markets,

  hourly church bells bonging with conviction.

  A man called Ledbury one of the few “real towns” left in England, meaning—sad to say—they don’t have many immigrants. (Took me a week to figure

  this out.)

  Too bad, for it was easy to imagine

  hiding out down Cottage Lane behind

  massive white roses for years,

  paper-wrapped hunk of greasy fish and chips

  on the iron garden table. Who knows how many lives long for any one of us? Who else we might be?

  We’re thirsty for a cider shop’s thirty faucets,

  no idea which is best. Whatever you say! We’re not headed to Hope’s End, where Elizabeth lived, we’re awash in Hope’s Beginnings.

  Haunting the old-fashioned print shop, plucking sheaves of discarded margins from rubbish bin—

  long thin creamy strips—

  basking in disgusted teen chatter

  on the green by the graveyard,

  holding the air. It became my air too quickly.

  I felt drunk on general coziness . . .

  thinking of Elizabeth,

  whose “father never spoke to her again,” once she had a child (what was his problem?),

  and Masefield, who suffered intense seasickness

  yet wrote about going down to the sea

  as if it were his favorite act.

  Walking everywhere, pausing for slow crossing lights,

  nodding conspiratorially to ladies with canes hiking hill path at dawn . . .

  Life loves to change—but some of us want to stay.

  Getting Over It

  Years ago, the writer and translator Coleman Barks & I met up in Rome, Georgia, a town that had once been the home of his grandmother, to eat Chinese food with friends. He drove us to the restaurant. I was on a nine-day poetry tour of Georgia, filling in for someone who had cancelled at the last moment. The sheriff of Macon had attended my reading & told me his real dream was to be a writer. The Branch Davidians in Waco had just burned up. I was lugging my canvas poetry bag stuffed with books & papers into the restaurant.

  Coleman said, Why drag that? Leave it in the car! It will be safe!

  No, I said. Everything I need is in this bag. I keep it right next to me.

  That is ridiculous, he said. No one will take a bag of books.

  We ate a delicious dinner & upon returning to the car, discovered it had been broken into & Coleman’s own bag taken—which contained his books, personal journal, plane ticket to Turkey for the next week, passport, drawings by his granddaughter—many treasures.

  He was shocked. He said something about my worry having attracted negative attention to the vehicle. He wasn’t blaming, just musing. I said I wasn’t worried, really—I always lugged my bag.

  Coleman called the police. They looked around vaguely & loaned us a giant flashlight, saying we could return it to the police station the next day.

  A whirl of awkward searching through weedy ditches & smelly Dumpsters turned up nothing. We kept looking & hoping, in case the thieves had ransacked Coleman’s bag for money, then thrown the rest of it away.

  We searched into the night.

  I got angrier on Coleman’s behalf as the search went on, but he grew calmer. How can people take what isn’t theirs? I thought about refugees, my father, women who are attacked unexpectedly, then have to accommodate that brutal shock into the future, too many things. Coleman apparently kept his mind on the bag.

  Around midnight, he said, “How long does one stay robbed, after being robbed? I think I’m over it.”

  He drove me back to the house where I was spending the night. My friendly host, artist and writer Susan Gilbert Harvey, was still awake. She thought we might have been abducted. I told her what had happened & what Coleman said, which caused us to suspend our search. Susan burst into tears.

  She said, “That’s it. That’s it exactly. That’s what I’ve been needing to hear. Such a gift!”

  Conversation with Grace Paley, Flight of

  the Mind Writing Workshop, Oregon

  It’s been a spectacular day, Grace!

  We gushed

  And she cleared her throat.

  Not that great, she said—

  But pretty good.

  Didn’t you like our long drive into the woods

  to see trees with rounded buttocks?

  They were okay.

  Our splendid dinner?

  Tasty.

  Grace, guide us! What is politics to you?

  You are such a brave activist!

  How do we live, what do we do?

  Politics is simply the way human beings treat

  one another on the earth.

  Showing Up

  For Lucille Clifton

  Where else would I be? said Lucille, after surgeries

  and months of pain, where else? She swooped back

  into action, visiting with students, attending readings,

  sending out her beams. Some people are born

  to be present, hold the note.

  Shape a mouth around words, air them fully,

  convince others they could do this too.

  We’re such skinny souls sometimes,

  brimming with excuses for inaction,

  passing the blame.

  Lucille’s own daddy had said,

  “All good-byes ain’t gone”—and she carried that truth—

  Hello again!—even when she’d been laid up in hospital for a while. Never mind!

  Picture the whirl of energy

  beneath each human move—

  circulating, rising with every

  step. Lucille stayed late, singing the song of

  carrying on, admitting the truth . . .

  “Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last . . .”

  Lucille gave everything she had.

  For Caroline M.

  What does it mean when, across fifty years and a thousand miles, a voice literally reaches out of the sky, Naomi! I did it! Good-bye!
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  and you dial rapidly, last number you had for her,

  to find the nurses scrambling, since they haven’t

  even reached her brother yet,

  and you say, Now! Now! Let me speak to her!

  and they say, You can’t!

  so you know she just wanted to alert you,

  have you as witness she finally broke free,

  same way she used to announce

  she was driving into town

  in the rattled truck with the crushed bumper—

  Good-bye! Try to finish up those rows before you leave, okay?

  so you’d know she still had her eye on you

  always watching even when she wasn’t present—

  you were the only girl at the farm, except for her.

  Caroline and her husband, whom you worked for at

  twelve,

  attempting to impress them with your berry-picking

  skills,

  tin can looped around your neck. She wasn’t sure you could stand it, spoken day one, but grew impressed by your love for heat, your trance-like gathering.

  Years later, whenever you returned to town,

  you always stopped to hike up the dirt drive

  into sweet-soil-smelling paradise,

  flag of honest organic farming

  growing more precious in the world.

  Caroline, I still love your tomatoes, don’t you?

  I hate tomatoes, they smell like work.

  Also, I never liked farming, you know, I only loved him.

  What?

  I was a city girl. Or wanted to be.

  Seriously?

  More layers than anyone can see,

  roots threading into soil, tightening the grip,

  leaving you standing on the land years after she

  called you without a phone, whispering,

  Blackberries, tomatoes.

  Thank you.

  I’m home.

  Tomorrow

  For José Emilio Pacheco who said, “I like poetry to be the interior voice, the voice no one hears, the voice of the person reading it.”

  1

  What animal is waiting to hear what we have to say?

  Not one. Not the red-winged blackbird,

  the speckled trout

  or the French Chartreux. Beg an iguana

  for editorial advice.

  Whatever we do, slim drift on the wind.

  We could talk forever, never equaling the dawn song of the thrush.

  Pacheco said, “Fish don’t torture. Their banks don’t ever charge interest.”

  We open our mouths.

  We find and hide the words.

  2

  My friend who knew him says, “I thought of him

  as a businessman only. A lawyer? Had no idea he wrote poems.”

  She found him dignified, stately, quiet.

  Papers, envelopes, nice neckties, polished desk.

  José Emilio, your “certain silences”

  were invisible girders.

  They held everything up. Childhood stories,

  first moments, “. . . we go never to come back.”

  No wonder you translated Beckett, Yevtushenko . . .

  belonging to other worlds deepened our own.

  You wanted to ask your old teachers if the Future—“Tomorrow”—

  lived up to their dreams. Everyone’s hard work, supposed to count for everything, right?

  Who predicted torture, murder, people

  disappeared?

  Didn’t those people work hard too?

  Which animals live like this?

  Could metaphor soothe or save?

  There are nine moths to every one butterfly.

  Your poems at first surrealistic, then closer to home.

  Fancy awards, dramatic titles, did not intrigue.

  Your pants fell down when meeting a king, but you hiked them up, calling it a cure for vanity.

  We love you forever for moments like this.

  Leaning into your pages all those years—

  working and working. “All that is truly ours now

  is the day that is beginning.” Once we gleaned what went on in high places—

  our job to build something better.

  After Listening to Paul Durcan, Ireland

  “Should there be anyone who has not got mixed feelings?

  Could there be anyone who has not got mixed feelings?”

  Poured full of ripe language

  but no mixed feelings about

  how much we adore him

  we lift into night

  buttery streetlamp glow

  gray sweaters and topcoats

  unbuttoned at the throat

  pearls and nubby mufflers

  tonight the cream of understanding

  elevated elegance of sound

  funny quirky joy

  two neighbors who never met before

  meet in a doctor’s office and end up befriending

  each other same way you could hear poems

  and feel restored to clear notes

  so when we step into the street

  taxis bunching and idling

  bowed heads

  silent grins

  we have those notes to go by

  deeper current

  streaming into the fluent dark

  We Will Get Lost in You

  “You forget everything when you play—that’s why you do it, actually.”

  —Leo Kottke, guitarist

  Joni Mitchell said in an interview, Everything I am, I’m not.

  Bigger. Smaller. Entirely invisible. A painter, not a musician.

  Secrets you never dreamed. Somewhere else.

  Tish jumped over a fence. Tish narrated a story—

  where people went when they disappeared, inside your own skin.

  Lay your burden down—no, dissolve your burden! Not your burden! Bruce kept singing from

  an engine deep inside.

  We could walk the halls where Robert Johnson walked. Patty Griffin, The further I go,

  more letters from home never arrive. Not to be lost.

  Amidst millions of people, calm sanctuaries of sound in Tokyo, beyond the Sad Café,

  Joanna Newsom’s high notes

  weaving harp trills, lifting a crowd to the ceiling.

  Or Minnesota when winter was nearly over,

  Sara Thomsen stomping, Too many roosters

  in the White House! Yep. Spirits in time of disaster.

  You! Can do it when you open your mouth, right?

  There Will Be a Light, when politicians lie,

  people insult,

  when you didn’t want to read the comments on a

  story but did,

  and can’t stop wondering why people take time to be

  cruel,

  when they could be all those other things,

  baby beating drum on a box, train clatter braking

  into station,

  pluck the string of the day and go away.

  James Tate in Jerusalem

  A writer whose lines could “ambush with wonder

  and wit”

  saved me once. In the rugged hills outside Jerusalem,

  I was reeling with sadness, as usual, my people

  pressed like cattle

  by sharp butts of Israeli guns, herded through battered lines, endlessly insulted,

  (I wanted to fix it, always a problem, or translate us all into a better world),

  when a guide climbed on our bus wearing

  a FREE TIBET T-shirt.

  Jim just looked at me. He saw it too.

  “That’s thoughtful.”

  Something cracked.

  Sanity ambushed day after day. His kindness

  made a calm place in my fury.

  He drank a Pepsi. I seethed.

  His words cool and angled, pieced together like triangles in a quilt stitched by the calm Amish.

  Blue and green don’t fight.

/>   Trust me. We have sunk so low in this valley of repetition we forgot how to sew a seam.

  Train Across Texas

  For Langston Hughes

  Langston, what did Texas look like back then,

  where were you going?

  From your seat on the train, the small table,

  you encouraged your pen pals,

  timid Baltimore sisters,

  who had shared their writing with you,

  and no one else.

  Sure you can do it. You are doing it!

  Sent them gloriously handwritten

  black-inked letters . . .

  sentences trailing across pages on neat tracks—

  drew pictures in margins—hills outside the window,

  a dining car waiter with a white towel folded over his

  arm.

  You had time on your beautiful ride, so much space to stare into, horizons of thinking.

  I believe in you. Don’t let anyone tell you

  otherwise.

  You knew what it was to be a busboy, wipe tables,

  contemplate crusts, dregs of tea in a cup.

  Urging your pen pals to remember their dreams

  whatever shape they might be.

  You were ready for the next installment . . . there were ways to get anywhere you wanted to go,

  if you really want to go.

  And the land opened up in front of you.

  The long land.

  And the years in which you would be writing to every one of us

  every day.

  Longfellow’s Bed

  For Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  seems too short for a man, especially one with

  such a name, but they say it stretches six feet.

  Dark wooden sleigh with coverlets,

  bed to dive into, in another century,

  to hide in, beyond flame and sorrow,

  bed with large pillows to comfort

  an aching trove of rhythms and syllables,

  down by the Charles River we will go

  when daylight shines. I wish I had known you,

  Longfellow, but truly I did, as a small reader

  with a book cracked wide, speaking aloud

  on the old wooden stairs of my grandparents’ home,

  saying your words, between the daylight

  and the dark, swinging them like small lanterns

  which have brought me to this place