ONGOING
The shape of talk would sag
but the birds be brighter than ever
O I needed the birds worse & worse as I got older
as if some crack had opened in the human scheme of things
& only birds with their sharp morning notes
had the sense for any new day
The people went round & round
in the old arenas
dragging their sacks
of troubles & stones & jaggedy love
I could not help them
I was one of them
the people pitched advice
in its flat hat back & forth
across the table
But the birds so far above us
hardly complete sentences
just fragments & dashes
the birds who had seen the towns
grow up & topple
who caught the changing wind
before anyone on the ground did
who left for Mexico when we were not
paying attention
what could they tell us
about lives in heavy bodies
what could they tell us
about being
caught?
BOY’S SLEEP
All day a boy plunges his hands into his pockets.
Tickets, tape, crystallized stones, a two-dollar bill.
He will not wear pants without pockets.
It is a point of honor.
He sleeps as deeply as the crackle of the burning log,
the breath of the far-flung sea.
Where are you, world? Don’t do anything
while I’m not paying attention.
GLINT
My grandmother mentioned only once how the piano teacher she had as a girl leaned over her too closely at the keys. His damp lips grazed her cheek or maybe they touched her mouth for a minute. My grandmother never felt comfortable with the piano after that. I think a little more music could have helped her life. I played her piano sometimes. Dust rose in little clouds from the cracks between the keys. A few keys had lost their voices. My grandmother told me some things but not enough. We had a sweetness between us. What happened to the piano teacher? His lips parting ever so slightly over middle C, eyes pinned to the ripe notes on the sheet . . . could he help it what they reminded him of? Here I am trying to gather her lost kisses from the air. They’re drifting just outside the tune.
EARLY RISER
The face of the clock at 4 A.M.
doesn’t have many friends.
Its wishes are thin and dark,
to stay humble, close to the floor.
Without it I am a crumb of talk
stuck to a plate.
The day unfolds its sad sack of chores,
the broom loses two more hairs.
Without it I am the letter carrier
who never receives
any mail herself.
FUNDAMENTALISM
Because the eye has a short shadow or
it is hard to see over heads in the crowd?
If everyone else seems smarter
but you need your own secret?
If mystery was never your friend?
If one way could satisfy
the infinite heart of the heavens?
If you liked the king on his golden throne
more than the villagers carrying baskets of lemons?
If you wanted to be sure
his guards would admit you to the party?
The boy with the broken pencil
scrapes his little knife against the lead
turning and turning it as a point
emerges from the wood again
If he would believe his life is like that
he would not follow his father into war
DUCKS
We thought of ourselves as people of culture.
How long will it be till others see us that way again?
Iraqi friend
In her first home each book had a light around it.
The voices of distant countries
floated in through open windows,
entering her soup and her mirror.
They slept with her in the same thick bed.
Someday she would go there.
Her voice, among all those voices.
In Iraq a book never had one owner—it had ten.
Lucky books, to be held often
and gently, by so many hands.
Later in American libraries she felt sad
for books no one ever checked out.
She lived in a country house beside a pond
and kept ducks, two male, one female.
She worried over the difficult relations
of triangles. One of the ducks
often seemed depressed.
But not the same one.
During the war between her two countries
she watched the ducks more than usual.
She stayed quiet with the ducks.
Some days they huddled among reeds
or floated together.
She could not call her family in Basra
which had grown farther away than ever
nor could they call her. For nearly a year
she would not know who was alive,
who was dead.
The ducks were building a nest.
NEW YEAR
Over our heads the words hung down
with giant sparkling margins.
I was try-trying again
every day of my life.
That’s why I’ve been followed
by stacks of blank notebooks, why
any calendar page with nothing written on it
strikes me full of ravenous joy.
When a year changes,
the little stuffed man
pitches into the flames,
his paper-bag body fattened by
ragged lists, crumpled mail.
Between 8 P.M. when I scrawl
the vanishing year on his chest
and midnight, we fall in love.
His rueful grin, his crooked hat!
He burns fast in the backyard pit.
Then a deep quiet plucked by firecrackers
under a weirdly lit city sky.
No plans come to mind.
I just stand there with my hands out
in smoke while something else
wonderful dies.
MY FRIEND’S DIVORCE
I want her
to dig up
every plant
in her garden
the pansies
the pentas
roses
ranunculus
thyme and lilies
the thing nobody knows
the name of
unwind the morning glories
from the wire windows
of the fence
take the blooming
and the almost-blooming
and the dormant
especially the dormant
and then
and then
plant them in her new yard
on the other side
of town
and see how
they breathe
VISIT
Welcome to Abu Dhabi,
the Minister of Culture said.
You may hold my falcon as we visit.
He slipped a leather band around my arm
and urged the bird to step on board.
It wore a shapely leather hood,
Or otherwise, the host described,
the bird might pluck your very eyes.
My very eyes were blinking hard
behind the glasses that they wore.
The falcon’s claws, so hooked and huge,
gripped firmly on the leather band.
I had to hold my arm out high.
My hand went numb. The heavens shone
a giant gold beyond our room.
I had no memory why I’d
come
to see this man.
A falcon dives, and rips, and kills!
I think he likes you though.
It was the most I could have hoped for then.
We mentioned art.
We drank some tea.
He offered to remove the hood.
I said the bird looked very good just wearing it.
Alright by me.
THE PALESTINIANS HAVE GIVEN UP PARTIES
Once singing would rise
in sweet sirens over the hills
and even if you were working
with your trees or books
or cooking something simple
for your own family,
you washed your hands,
combed water through your hair.
Mountains of rice, shiny shoes,
a hurricane of dancing.
Children wearing little suitcoats
and velvet dresses fell asleep in circles
after eating 47 Jordan almonds.
Who’s getting married? Who’s come home
from the far place over the seas?
Sometimes you didn’t even know.
You ate all that food without knowing.
Kissed both cheeks of anybody who passed,
slapping the drum, reddening your palm.
Later you were full, rich,
with a party in your skin.
Where does fighting
come into this story?
Fighting got lost from somewhere else.
It is not what we like: to eat, to drink, to fight.
Now when the students gather quietly
inside their own classroom
to celebrate the last day of school,
the door to the building
gets blasted off.
Empty chairs where laughter used to sit.
Laughter lived here
jingling its pocket of thin coins
and now it is hiding.
It will not come to the door dressed as a soapseller,
a peddler of matches, the old Italian
from the factory in Nablus
with his magic sack of sticks.
They have told us we are not here
when we were always here.
Their eraser does not work.
See the hand-tinted photos of young men:
too perfect, too still.
The bombs break everyone’s
sentences in half.
Who made them? Do you know anyone
who makes them? The ancient taxi driver
shakes his head back and forth
from Jerusalem to Jericho.
They will not see, he says slowly,
the story behind the story,
they are always looking for the story after the story
which means they will never understand the story.
Which means it will go on and on.
How can we stand it if it goes on and on?
It is too long already.
No one even gets a small bent postcard
from the far place over the seas anymore.
No one hears the soldiers come at night
to pluck the olive tree from its cool sleep.
Ripping up roots. This is not a headline
in your country or mine.
No one hears the tiny sobbing
of the velvet in the drawer.
HALF-AND-HALF
You can’t be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast day after Ramadan.
So, half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can’t love
anyone else. Says he.
At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa,
he’s sweeping. The rubbed stones
feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar
across faces of date-stuffed mamool.
This morning we lit the slim white candles
which bend over at the waist by noon.
For once the priests weren’t fighting
in the church for the best spots to stand.
As a boy, my father listened to them fight.
This is partly why he prays in no language
but his own. Why I press my lips
to every exception.
A woman opens a window—here and here and here—
placing a vase of blue flowers
on an orange cloth. I follow her.
She is making a soup from what she had left
in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.
She is leaving nothing out.
BUTTER BOX
To close: Fold in small end flaps. Insert Flap A
into Flap B as shown.
There is a picture to help us.
Also an announcement: Carton has been opened.
In case we are stumbling through an afternoon,
have lost our way, or plate and knife confound us.
Once a plastic bag intoned: There should be a suggestion
of firmness in the cooked macaroni. Not entirely firm,
not utterly anything, just a suggestion.
But I don’t want to close the butter box
with the butter in it. Place a single brick
in the pink dish, extra three
stacked in waiting, box discarded.
See how much help we didn’t need?
SMOKE
The new slash of road curves up beside five sleeping smokestacks.
Four stand together, one apart—the lucky or the lonely one, depending.
I’m driving you to school with your blue pants and box of lunch.
I’m combing your hair with my eyes.
They’ve built fancy houses around a giant pit. What do people see in it?
The smokestacks were smoking when I was in college, when my father
drove me down the old road on the other side.
Was it neat? We both know smoke isn’t neat but I guess
what you mean. Was it black or white? I can’t recall.
So much has poured out the top of my head.
I knew the lady who owned the smokestacks, her peacock
bit my hand. We take turns imagining what happens next,
if they stand or fall, whether the wrecked warehouse
with arches will be spared, or the fog lift, or the sun.
Today a small red light glitters at the throat of the lucky one.
You call it a good sign. At school your friends wear puffy coats
bright as parrots. You fly into your teacher’s arms.
I could even hug a dull-looking father in his necktie
as we roll out of the lot into our daily lives. When I pass
the smokestacks again, their firm ladders
and proud ALAMO lettering up the sides, I’m fiddling
with the radio dial, swinging into a lane of cars.
Now the gloom of distant news washes over worse than grit
and we can’t clean it, fix it, or make good sense.
Still we hold our mouths wide open, and the birds,
the sky, the trees, and the river
fly into us as if anything could heal. Somewhere deep,
these years must be churning the way cement does
inside a truck. The cement those smokestacks helped to make—
it became sidewalks all over this city. It became
buildings and tunnels and walls. We don’t think of it gleaming.
Even the highway I drive on.
ALONE
He grows used to the sound of the floor
Not yet Not yet each evening
right before the news comes on.
Then the killing and the stabbing
and the beating and the crashing.
Turn it off. There’s a smudge on the wall,
a Jesus with a blazing heart.
His coffee cup waits
upside down on its plate.
<
br /> The shape of dinner tastes upside down.
He eats whatever the nurse-lady left him,
the hamburger in its three-day shirt.
Sometimes he doesn’t know the name
of what he eats.
He hauls his body to the porch,
sinks his eyes into the weeds.
A hose curls in the lilies.
If he could reach it,
make it down
those three crooked steps . . .
When his wife died he was very quiet
for one day. Then he smiled
and smiled with his two teeth
for the bad time they had
that was over.
His tongue could sound Soledad or Solamente
for his bones and his blood and his few good hairs.
When the drop of water on the white sink
meets the next drop and they are joining,
he thinks of other ways to spend this life
that he didn’t do. He would like to meet them.
ALPHABET
One by one
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