Voices in the Air

by Naomi Shihab Nye

  by your bed on a late day in June,

  in your yellow house by the giant linden tree,

  still wondering at words and the length of a mattress.

  Walt Whitman’s Revisions

  “Transcendent! New! An American bard at last!”

  (written about himself and his major life work, Leaves of Grass)

  Trim the grass

  Feed the grass

  Water the grass

  Direct the grass

  This parched lawnneeds attention

  What started as skinny chapbook

  of twelve poems

  grew into four hundred

  in forty years

  Who has such fortitude?

  Walt was always working on the same book

  First edition did not

  have his name on cover

  He reviewed himself in newspapers anonymously

  quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson

  without permission

  on the spine

  Emerson was not thrilled

  Take a breath

  Full breath

  That’s what I call a poet

  “Rest and Be Kind,

  You Don’t Have to Prove Anything”

  For Jack Kerouac, who said this was his best advice for writers

  In 1972 I sat with Stella Kerouac in her St. Petersburg, Florida, home thinking, “I can’t believe I’m really here, sitting in Jack’s lounger, Jack’s cat nuzzling my foot, I can’t believe she let me in, I can’t believe she’s putting these papers in my hands.”

  Stella, who met Jack as a child. He was her younger brother’s friend. She said it felt like only moments since Jack had died, though already it had been a few years. She wanted me to read some unpublished pieces of Jack’s fluent prose into a tape recorder. She was making an oral archive and thought her own voice, after years of smoking, too coarse for posterity. My hands trembled as I recorded his words, thinking, “This is a page he really touched.” She thought papers might disappear, but cassette tapes were going to last forever.

  Some sweet, quick link had been established between Stella and me weeks earlier, when I telephoned her from Texas on my forlorn twentieth birthday (also Jack’s birthday), let the phone ring at least twenty times, and finally heard her tearful “Hello?” I babbled into the phone, tentatively at first, since I’d heard she was reclusive. I expected her to hang up at any moment. She didn’t hang up. She said she’d been kneeling by Jack’s bed missing him on his birthday, wondering if anyone anywhere might be thinking about him right then. Perfect timing. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. She invited me to come visit her.

  My parents drove me down. I was going to take the bus, but they were always so good about driving me. The library? Violin lessons? Jack Kerouac’s house in Florida? Sure, let’s drive.

  They dropped me off and went away to the beach. For a few days Stella and I talked, ate tuna fish, pawed through closets, and didn’t answer the phone. The phone rang frequently, but she wouldn’t touch it. “It’s his phone, not mine,” she said. Indeed, the phone was still listed under Jack Kerouac in the directory, which was how I had found her. We used to call Information. There was no answering machine.

  Jack’s mother, Gabrielle, still living in a back bedroom, shook a tinny bell for attention. Stella rushed off to see what she needed. Trays of food and lemonade traveled to the bedroom and returned empty. I wanted to meet Gabrielle very much, but Stella said she was “beyond meeting people.” Gabrielle sent her greetings to me out in the front room, signed a little navy blue Christmas chapbook by Jack for me, and said to take it easy.

  Stella fed their cats at the kitchen table as if they were people. She set places for them. They sat on high stools, putting their mouths up to their plates. We sat at either end of the table. It seemed natural while we were doing it.

  Later she would try to give me the gray kitten of one of Jack’s cats. I loved this idea. We had many phone conversations about how the cat might be sent from Florida to Texas—I recall discussing a bus trip, but the cat could not travel by itself. A plane was expensive. The whole operation seemed too stressful a prospect for the kitten, however we imagined it, and was never accomplished.

  Then the phone in their kitchen rang again. This time, Stella told me to answer it. I fumbled the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Who’s this?” said a faraway voice.

  “I’m visiting Stella,” I stuttered.

  “Well, put her on, would you? This is Allen Ginsberg.”

  When I said, “Allen Ginsberg,” Stella put her hand out. She talked to him. She was friendly. I thought about the reading he’d given at our college in Texas that year, incense adrift on the air, his harmonium humming. We’d all gone into a sandalwood poetry trance, sitting with legs crossed, smiling back at him. Never had I imagined I’d be sitting in Kerouac’s house when I heard his voice again.

  As Stella handed the receiver back to me to hang it up, she sighed and said, “That Allen . . . I can always tell when it’s Allen. It has a different ring.”

  Peace Pilgrim’s Pocket

  How old are you, Peace?

  I am ageless!

  Only three things in her pocket

  combtoothbrushpostage stamps

  With those three possessions she lived

  so many (secret number) years

  making millions of friends

  hiking byways and back roads

  crossing the nation again and again

  town to town thousands of miles

  unafraid

  Life is a mirror!

  Smile at it, it smiles back!

  woman with a white bun

  striding by herself in a navy blue tunic

  white tennis shoes

  no money no credit cards no tickets

  opening her mouth wherever people would listen

  Never stop your efforts for peace!

  walking till someone offered a bed

  fasting till they offered food

  Personal peace necessary before world peace!

  Every good thing you say . . . vibrates on and on

  and never ceases!

  I am standing outside under ageless pecan trees

  listening to the voice I first heard in my parents’ living room

  as a girl of three

  Would you kill a cow?

  The three-year-old said, Never!

  Then how can you eat meat?

  Why let someone else do your dirty work for you?

  She was thrilled to turn kids into vegetarians

  I’m only a little person but

  there are lots of little things to be done!

  C. D. Stepped Out

  “I believe words are golden as goodness is golden. Even the humble word brush gives off a scratch of light.”

  —C. D. Wright

  C. D. stepped out into the dark.

  Didn’t tell anyone she was going—

  she just left.

  Some of us thought she was inside

  in the bathroom on the second floor,

  so we waited for her.

  Some of us thought she was in the backyard

  on a metal chair, listening.

  Dark Street, MacDougal at Houston—

  old furniture piled on sidewalks—

  rooms of light in ancient brick buildings—

  somehow she had inhabited every one

  of those rooms one time or another.

  She heard the twining chorus of accents,

  carried them with her, rolling in her cells,

  heard the roll and clash of citizens,

  layerings of rooms draped with old India print,

  Japanese kimono cloth, some rustic basket weave of

  putty grays.

  It was time, enough of this talk,

  I heard you all, heard you better

  than you heard me maybe, never mind, we’ll catch up later,

  I just had to go.

  True Success


  “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive . . . ”

  —Robert Louis Stevenson

  The hau tree under which you wrote holds fast

  at Sans Souci Beach.

  Memory curled in sap and cells—people now sit

  in your favorite shade, near Waikiki,

  drinking pinkish cocktails,

  eating elegantly designed plates of rice and fish . . .

  but the presence of one tall thin Scottish man

  with a debonair mustache,

  who leaned over his page, right here,

  . . . feels more real.

  Once you were packing your leather valise in old

  gray Edinburgh—

  farewell to the fireplace, the daily chill rain, the

  cough.

  You dreamed of ships, currents, a warm pause with a horizon on it—

  already you’d written Jekyll and Hyde in a week,

  and the poem about lying abed on pillows,

  creating a country of toys in the sheets,

  that would comfort sick children for decades.

  When you, Robert (your wife called you “Louis”),

  arrived for a time on O’ahu—ink pen and hat—

  you quickly made a new life in a gangly bungalow

  on Queen Emma Street,

  preferring soft rain against misty green

  mountains,

  clean bright air, sailboats—to the colder worlds you

  had known.

  Writing outside in sun under a twisty tree became

  your refuge.

  “True success is to labor,” you said.

  Though you died at forty-four,

  who does more than what you did?

  Making pages that would live so long . . . islands as treasures . . .

  human lives as treasures . . .

  you took a deep breath,

  opened your packet of cheese and fruit, curled into

  the words.

  These branches still rustle.

  Woven by Air, Texture of Air

  “Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.”

  —William Stafford

  Some birds hide in leaves so effectively

  you don’t see they’re all around you.

  Brown tilted heads, observing human maneuvers

  on a sidewalk. Was that a crumb someone threw?

  Picking and poking, no fanfare for company,

  gray huddle on a branch, blending in.

  Attention deeper than a whole day.

  Who says, I’ll be a thoughtful bird when I grow up?

  Stay humble, blend, belong to all directions.

  Fly low, love a shadow. And sing, sing freely,

  never let anything get in the way of your singing,

  not darkness, not winter,

  not the cries of flashier birds, not the silence

  that finds you steadfast

  pen ready, at the edge of four a.m.

  Your day is so wide it will outlive everyone.

  It has no roof, no sides.

  Tell Us All the Gossip You Know

  (How I was introduced at a writer’s club in small-town USA)

  Gulp.

  I’m a reader not a gossiper.

  But we know you know some. So tell it.

  Gulp.

  Robert Bly said writing a bad poem before breakfast every day is a good habit.

  He did it in honor of his old friend Bill Stafford

  (who also did it) after Bill died.

  The poems were never bad, by the way.

  They were great.

  There were a lot of them.

  You could work on them later, after you ate.

  Leonard Nathan, chairman of the Department of

  Rhetoric

  at UC Berkeley, worried computers might diminish

  one’s investment in a line. If you could just erase the line instantly, and insert a new one—

  well, it might be too easy.

  Mary Oliver wanted to smell flowering pink bushes and blossoming trees in Texas.

  Pull over, she said, at more than one corner. She needed to absorb the scents.

  A city wasn’t just a name.

  In her presence, babies might sing for the first time.

  She is like that.

  Ernest Hemingway ate an apple before writing.

  This might or might not have explained his crisp, short sentences.

  In the house where he died in Idaho, his shaving cream still sits inside the medicine cabinet.

  Ruth Stone wore a pale shimmering prom dress from—1930?—1940?—

  to her poetry reading in Texas in the 1990s.

  She said the dress was lonely hanging in her closet and wanted to be used.

  Josephine Miles, who traveled with her wheelchair around the country to read poems,

  said, Don’t make your poem a neat package with a bow tied at the end. She also said,

  It’s hard to help.

  Anyone can visit Walt Whitman’s birthing corner on Long Island.

  The guide points and says, There, right there, he was born.

  Some visitors can’t move on quickly

  to the next room.

  They are hypnotized.

  What if Walt had never left this corner or stepped out into the streets

  to do and say all he did?

  Then who would we be?

  Genine Lentine said she’d like to ban the word “flow”—I don’t understand this

  but respect her, so think about it. What’s wrong with “flow”? Are your thoughts

  flowing? Your words flowing? What’s up with this, Genine?

  She does not care

  for haiku.

  William Burroughs also believed in taking Vitamin C.

  Ken Kesey wore a Mexican serape and said Jack Kerouac got trapped in his “own little

  box”—that was his downfall. Can we really say anyone who changed so many lives

  had a downfall?

  He just drank too much alcohol and had a shorter life than he might have had.

  Jack’s box was pretty vast.

  William Goyen said writing started with trouble—

  what you never worked out yet—just start there.

  That thing in the street when you were seventeen?

  Make it a story.

  There is only one known video of Mark Twain, wearing a white linen suit in 1909,

  walking outside a house in Connecticut,

  talking with Thomas Edison.

  Daria Donnelly’s last essay was about “literature of empathy.” Why we need it in our crazy world.

  Don’t put any Americans in your story for American kids, maybe.

  Don’t make them heroes or villains, if you do.

  On her tombstone she wanted

  NEVER TASTED COCA-COLA.

  Garth Williams got a letter from his close friend Margaret Wise Brown after she died.

  It traveled from Europe so it took a while.

  When I visited Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst,

  a lively plump robin was sitting on her step,

  right under the second-story window she would have stared out of.

  John Steinbeck

  would sharpen

  twenty-four pencils every day

  and write

  till they were

  dull.

  Every Day

  For Aziz, and Palestine

  He loved the world and what might happen in it.

  Some people labor to get up but

  he was so ready to rise.

  Refreshed and still alive

  after the dark hours,

  glistening with hope and cologne.

  Must we love the world doubly much now

  in his absence?

  He is not absent.

  Still living in the fig tree,

  the carefully placed stone,

  the draping mimosa.

  In his empty notebooks, th
e lonely wooden chair.

  We will keep it pulled up to the desk, just in case.

  Just in case Justice suddenly walks into the room and says, Yes, I’m finally here, sorry for the delay.

  Tell me where to sign.

  He tried to think the best of people.

  His drawer was not stacked with disappointments.

  Only folded white handkerchiefs still waiting.

  After the storm, frogs and toads chorus along the pavement,

  We believed! We believed!

  One State

  “I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together and sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen.”

  —Dr. Edward Said

  Hiding place inside the early hour—

  You’re there.

  Fold in the sky’s softest cloth—

  what rises as we sleep,

  the dark and ripe and narrow wedge.

  You dropped every list of activities.

  You’re off the hook.

  And who are we?

  Slice of the deep, hanging on hard.

  Trying to do honor.

  Situations getting worse.

  Bumbling pie.

  Hello, good morning, guess what,

  you didn’t die.

  My Name Is . . .

  Their silence

  is bigger

  than our silence.

  Chief Joseph

  did not wish to go to Kansas.

  He said, I think very little of this country.

  It is like a poor man. It amounts to nothing.

  Of course we realize a poor man can amount

  to anything, Jesus was a poor man,

  Gandhi, but Chief Joseph

  had been kicked out of his valley, away from his gleaming Wallowa Lake, and he was burned.

  To this day you cannot walk there without aching.

  Look at this earth.

  How many adrift.

  A man-in-exile read words and phrases

  copied by a Syrian refugee boy

  into a notebook dredged sopping from the Mediterranean, dried on the shore. The boy was learning more words every day

  before he went down, improving