forever. But the blue chair looks best
with the red pillow. So you might as well
leave it that way.
Excuse Me But
Did you lose a black fleece vest with green gloves in the pocket? I found it on the ground at Asilomar, California, a few years ago. Now I cannot remember if there was one green glove nestled in each zippered pocket or if the gloves were rolled up together. They seemed very new and well-chosen for the chilly evening wind by the ocean. I felt bad for whoever had lost such a durable combo, and held the items out in my hands like an offering to the young Asian man at the lobby check-in desk in the beautiful building designed by Julia Morgan. He said, “No one will claim them. Everyone from the last conference is gone. See? I have all the room keys right here. You are the only person in that building right now and no one else is expected till tomorrow. Keep those things.” “But someone may claim them later,” I said. “Here’s my phone number back home in Texas. If anyone calls you, please call me and I’ll mail them home.” “They won’t,” he said. “No one will call. Trust me. No one. Why would they call me?” “But just in case,” I pressed. “Someone will be very sad when they discover their loss. These are lovely useful things. Tape my number to your desk please. Don’t let it get away.”
He stared at me as if I were a zombie from zombieland interrupting his day. “I will,” he said slowly. “Just in case.”
Well, he never phoned and I started wearing the vest right away.
By now I have worn it in probably thirty states and five countries. We have bonded. The zippered pockets are incredibly useful on planes. Gloves still feel fairly new. I mean, global warming and all—even in Canada people barely wear gloves. But if they’re yours, and you read this, I’ll still send it all back to you.
Bears
At breakfast we’re discussing
what to do if you meet a bear
Sometimes you run
Sometimes you stand still and shout
so the bear will think you’re bigger
Bears are great from a distance
ambling with cubs on a mountain trail
frolicking beside the train track
if you’re safely inside the train
Grandpa bear rising up
from a distant cave
stretching his limbs
after months of hibernation
We saw one in Maine
while trying to see
a moose
Pacify
Teenage boy lying asleep on a Toronto sidewalk
over a warm air grate
at 7 in the morning
people with briefcases & fresh shirts
stepping neatly around
his ragged pouch & filthy pants
baby’s pacifier tucked in his mouth Wow
Is it a Canadian thing?
So strange All day I think
how most boys that age
wouldn’t be caught dead…
What brought him to a chilly sidewalk
for the night?
Where is his mother?
How many times all mothers fail
to be the ones our sons might need
please someone
protect him on behalf of
the family
(for everyone’s sake)
we need to be
To One Now Grown
If we could start over, I would let you get dirtier.
Place your face in the food, it’s okay.
In trade for great metaphors,
the ones you used to spout every minute,
I’d extend your bedtime,
be more patient with tantrums,
never answer urgency with urgency,
try to stay serene.
In one scene you are screaming
And I stop the car.
What do we do next?
I can’t remember.
It’s buried in the drawer of small socks.
Give me the box of time.
Let’s make it bigger.
It’s all yours.
Watch Your Language
Pleasant words are a honeycomb,
sweet to the soul
and healing to the bones.
—Proverbs 16:24
A militant is not a man
who orders stealth bombers
to devastate a neighborhood.
He has a lot of money
so he is not a militant.
A militant is a man
whose 14-year-old son
was killed last week.
He is now out of his mind.
He could do something dangerous
and he has no money at all.
Watch him.
Cat Plate
That’s what we used to do in our house,
says Lydia, when we were mad at our dad—
we served him on the cat plate.
He didn’t know, since he never fed the cat.
It made us laugh secretly in the kitchen—
the plate had a crack so maybe
some cat saliva had stuck in there.
It gave us a little buzz.
Once when he was being really mean,
he grabbed what he thought was tuna in
a glass container
but it was cat food. Our mother, washing dishes,
froze with her mouth wide open when she realized—
I shook my head, finger on my lips.
From the living room he said, This tuna
has taken on a new taste.
No one told him.
We just did our homework silently
at the kitchen table
and grinned when we caught each other’s eye.
There were all kinds of ways
we felt better about our lives back then
and sometimes they surprised us.
Click
The birthday party day unexpectedly holds
a funeral, too, Dutch chocolate torte layered
with His Eye Is on the Sparrow.
Buddhist wedding ceremony, same day
H and P decide to split.
Comfort’s General Store burns down
right before our neighbor’s house is robbed.
One million acres of the Texas Panhandle
flaming, ten thousand animals
scorched. Three people told me
poetry saved their lives, on the same day
they told me this.
Hibernate
My father’s friend Farouk
has a dream:
God resigned.
And all the people took better care of one another
and got together then
because, well, they had to.
Things grew really smooth.
There was no one to blame or impress.
Professor Brother Miguel Angel
is healing “mexican style”
every day of the week for free.
He is healing “different from others.”
He will “run away bad neighbors”
if you ask him to. Note: he stuck his
promotional poster on your neighbor’s house
as well as your own.
He will “bring back boyfriends”
and “give names of persons.”
Call for appointment
night or day. Good luck for Bingo,
too. Bingo is capitalized,
mexican is not. I want
brown magic this year.
Brown dusty desert magic.
I want peace even if it involves
a lot of weeping and apology.
Can you help me? Keep
your Bingo joy, I need real
people lighting sage sticks,
being honest. Say disaster.
Thank you.
Spring feels different this year.
It’s a bandage.
Mountain laurel…jasmine…
The wound keeps oozing, though.
I keep thinking how the man who said
100 Arabs don’t equal 1 American
was wearing a white shirt
and had seemed perfectly normal
up till then.
Favorite questions from the FBI:
In all your travels, have you ever met
anyone who used an assumed name?
Uh, it is possible Abdul Faisal Shamsuzzaman
was really Jack Smith, but how would I know?
In all your travels, did you ever meet anyone
who wanted to overthrow their country?
Hmmmm, would they have announced it?
Yes. Me. Now.
The turtles who live with us emerge from hibernation
on the first day of Official Spring.
How do they know?
And where were they for the whole iffy winter?
In which bed of leaves did they bury
themselves?
On the first Official Day,
they climbed heavily back into their old red tub
lifting reptilian heads above water,
blinking slowly…
we were so ready to feed them.
It’s awkward to be with people sometimes,
making shapes in the air
that feel like sense—
I’d rather talk to J. Frank Dobie
who died years ago.
Lucille remembers him sitting
in a white linen suit
on her grandfather’s South Texas porch,
stories spinning like spiders
along the wooden beams…
Homeland Security wanted to know
what those mysterious silver objects were,
entering my cousin’s home—
trays of tabouleh
covered with aluminum foil.
Logic hibernates.
Truth, too.
It has been known to stay gone
for years.
My President Went
quail hunting
to celebrate the advent
of a new year.
He didn’t kill many birds
only five,
but called it “lots of fun.”
Each bird had lungs
and fancy feathers
and elegant strong feet.
People who study quail
describe their
“small family groups,”
how some species prefer
to crouch and hide in tall grass
while others
“fly in the face of danger.”
There are many things
my president might have done
after months of killing and sorrow
but he chose to take a gun
into the fields.
Note: I wrote this poem before my vice-president shot his friend in the face while quail hunting in south Texas. The above poem also happened in Texas. Sometimes when young writers ask what triggers poems, I could just hold up a daily newspaper, which still costs fifty cents except on Sundays in many cities.
Texas Swing Low
JESUS IS THE KING OF CUERO
trumpets a billboard on Highway 87 South.
I wonder, is it enough,
would He be glad to hear this?
And what about Smiley and Pandora,
is He just a prince there, or perhaps
a backup band? And Stockdale’s signs
seem devoted to the Internet.
In brisk December, Victoria and Goliad
pray barbeque will come around again
on the Sunday grill.
New holiday trend in coastal bend:
bare wooden crosses in bare front yards.
But isn’t that Easter?
Jesus doesn’t get a lot of say.
Jesus is the king of the toy box.
Jesus misses the old days.
A lone ostrich stands
in a windswept overgrown brown field
behind the faded EXOTICS sign
tacked to her fence.
INFO ON HUNTING it says.
Then a telephone number she can’t dial
from this life or the next.
From an Island
One quick blip of Internet
After days of disconnection
Streak of startling lines
Train blown up in India
Someone famous dies
Guerilla actions
Military movements
Bridges bombed
Buckets and bags of sadness
Don’t want
Don’t want to know
any of it
Want any?
No
The White Cat
I never heard his name. Does he have a name?
Right before I rose to give a public lecture in Cairo, in a room far too fancy for a simple person like myself—ornate carvings in the ceiling, Oriental rugs, fine intricate windows—a white cat walked confidently down the center aisle of the hall and stepped onto the platform at the front, where I was being introduced. He looked at me, with an “Ah, there you are!” look and sat right beside me while I gave my talk. I had looked up the word “lecture” in the dictionary beforehand and discovered the source of the quiver in my stomach—“lecture” means something stern someone gives you, a life lesson sort of thing. Also, a formal reproof, a reprimand.
No thanks.
I didn’t have that. I had scrambled bits and pieces, poems, quotes, a weird outfit, bits of paper written on by 8-year-olds, and a vagrant white cat. Somehow the cat—most pure discourse offered that afternoon—never entered the comments I made to the audience, which in retrospect seems strange. It is so easy to make a joke out of something right next to you. But there was a sanctity about him. There was also the chance I was the only one seeing him. He seemed ghostly and I felt quite disembodied and no one else was looking at him. He just sat there, then left at the end of the talk, stepping neatly out of the room. I did not see him for the next week. Dodging all over Cairo in wild taxicabs and the underground Metro, riding a fellucca sailboat on the Nile at sundown, stomping here and there, I saw many other cats (Cairo is famous for cats) but not that one. Till I was preparing to leave the school campus where I had worked—over by one of the security stations (where only days before I had a slight fracas with a security agent who wanted to hold on to my passport, which I did not like—What if he took off with it? What if I needed identification while on campus?), the same white cat rose out of some low bushes, sleepily, and stepped over the cobblestones daintily to press against my legs.
In two simple acts of movement, he welcomed me to campus and told me farewell. It is difficult to predict what our finest moments will be, but we know when they happen.
Ducks in Couples
Four pairs of ducks
Swimming in strong circles
In the lake
Heads down
Kicking hard
Four perfect clots of spinning duck
In perfect harmonic movement
Trying to lift the bits of tasty debris
From the bottom of the lake
I didn’t know this at first
Thought a mating ritual might be underway
But discovered later what they were doing
On that day when human beings in the world
Continued to kill one another
Because their imaginations
Were broken sticks
Without any feathers
Campaigning Door to Door
Maybe we will not
vote
no candidate is worth US
we are
patriotic Americans
guarding our precious American gloom
pinned to our screens
and incomplete yard projects
Who? BEAT IT!
When is
early voting? No I did not
think about it yet I have a lot
on my mind
You can’t get
me
to do
anything
Parents of Murdered Palestinian Boy Donate His Organs to Israelis
Ahmed Ismail Khatib, you died,
but you have so many bodies now.
You became a much bigger boy.
You became a girl too—
your kidneys, your liver, your heart.
So many people needed what you had.
In a terrible moment,
your parents pressed against
spinning cycles of revenge
to do something better.
They stretched.
What can that say to the rest of us?
In the photograph your hand
is raised to your chin—position of thought.
This was not your intention.
But people you will never meet are cheering.
Please keep telling us something true.
Because of your kidneys, your liver, your heart—
we must—simply must—be bigger too.
Before I Read The Kite Runner
I held it on my lap on the plane in Cairo while other passengers were boarding. It seemed like a good book to read, finally, on such a long flight. I’d had it since it came out, but now the time felt right. Two men from Yemen across the aisle, who had been snoozing when the Egypt passengers first boarded, pointed and said, “Good book! Good book!” Some women from Germany patted my head and said, “We loved that book.” An American man with his wife leaned over and said, “It opened our eyes.” What a surprise! Everyone on the plane seemed to have read it before me. And they were all my friends simply because I was holding it!
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