the old people
of our neighborhood
are going up
into the air
their yards
still wear
small white narcissus
sweetening winter
their stones
glisten
under the sun
but one by one
we are losing
their housecoats
their formal phrasings
their cupcakes
When I string their names
on the long cord
when I think how
there is almost no one left
who remembers
what stood in that
brushy spot
ninety years ago
when I pass their yards
and the bare peach tree
bends a little
when I see their rusted chairs
sitting in the same spots
what will be forgotten
falls over me
like the sky
over our whole neighborhood
or the time my plane
circled high above our street
the roof of our house
dotting the tiniest
“i”
FEATHER
She’s walking up the street from Sanitary Tortilla
with her pink mesh shopping bag.
Mrs. Esquivel of the waving plants,
front porch lined with leaves.
In softer light she dances with sheets.
She came here from the old days.
Slipped out of the old days like a feather.
Floated here with her aluminum pot lids
and blue enamel spoons tied to her wings.
Fanning the heat away with an apron,
ruffled rickrack edge.
She believed in the screen door,
its tiny holes letting in breeze.
She preceded thieves and reasons for locking.
She held on to all her paper fans.
Her ¿Como estas? has a heart in it.
If I said No good, she would listen.
*
Honey how’s the little one? I see him come out
on the porch in his red shirt,
pick up the hose, shoot it straight
in the air at the bananas.
You got any ripe yet?
I walk over to see the President of the United States
at the Alamo and he don’t look like much.
He stand up high on a little stage and look down
into our faces. He got that tight look
like the curly-tail dog sit in the middle
of the street every night when the lamps
go on. Why you think it do that?
I say, Hey! Hey you! Trucks!
And it turn its head, look at me
so up and down like I’m the one
who crazy.
*
Sometimes the grass grows so tall
in the vacant lot beside her house.
Fancy pink vines tie knots
around the heads of weeds.
She swims through the field at sundown,
calling out to hens, cats, whoever
might be lost in there,
Hey! Hey you! It’s time to come home!
And the people drifting slowly past
in the slim envelope of light
answer softly, Here I am.
HIDDEN
If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it.
If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.
No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.
WAITING TO CROSS
One man closes his hand.
He will not show us
the silver buckle
he uncovered in his garden.
One man reads houses.
They make sense to him,
grammar of lights in windows.
He looks for a story to be part of.
One man has no friends.
His mother is shrinking
at a table with one chair.
She dreams a mouse
with her son’s small head.
One man feels right.
The others must be wrong.
And the world? It does not touch him.
One man stares hard
at the other men’s profiles
against the sky.
He knows he is one of five men
standing on a corner.
ESTATE SALE
A crowd of strangers flies over your life
picking out landmarks—stainless steel
cake pan, jello mold, pastel box of
thank you notes. Someone’s even put
a 25-cent price tag on the coffin
of Kleenex in the bathroom.
I’m a prowler, unable to smile back
at the bouyant women hired to coordinate
this last event.
Beside the dismantled bedframe,
a telephone with scrawled number of
SON DAVID EVANS taped to the side.
You intended it to be read by someone else.
I hope he came by often including you
in his regular weeks, not just his holidays.
Your angels with lace collars.
Christmas cookie plate
and rattled tea towels.
How big we are, the living.
We stomp between your flexible curtain road
and the dictionary with a chunk torn out.
I’m caught in the kitchen with a sadness
flat as the icebox door.
Considering reductions: your horizon,
your hope. Antique wooden wardrobes
stuffed into three tight rooms.
Carrying the stack of blank typing paper
and the Scrabble game with the Santa sticker
circa 1950.
Now we’re stuck together.
Wooden letters click in our hands.
We make ABLE, ADEPT.
Someone’s JIG turns into JIGSAW.
Someone’s HUNCH remains just that,
though we keep flying over it from different angles,
trying to make it larger,
trying to give it feet or hands or another ground
to stand on.
LOST
notices flutter
from telephone poles
until they fade
OUR SWEET TABBY AFRAID OF EVERYTHING
BIG GRAY CAT HE IS OUR ONLY CHILD
SIBERIAN HUSKY NEEDS HIS MEDICINE
FEMALE SCHNAUZER WE ARE SICK WITH WORRY
all night I imagine their feet
tapping up the sidewalk
under the blooming crepe myrtle
and the swoon of jasmine
into the secret hedges
into the dark cool caves
of the banana-palm grove
and we cannot catch them
or know what they are thinking
when they go so far from home
OUR BELOVED TURTLE RED DOT ON FOREHEAD
VEGETARIAN NAME OF KALI
please please please
if you see them
call me call me call me
PUFF
Somehow our grandfather’s old smoking cabinet
which held playing cards and pipes
has ended up in my brother’s guest bedroom
a thousand miles from Union Boulevard
where men dragged bundled laundry
in heavy carts down the street before dawn.
I feel startled each t
ime I see it, expecting
the crisp dachshund who lived inside
and puffed smoke rings, doughnuts rising
from his tiny white cigarette—how did he get away?
Our grandfather’s only toy.
They all ran, the gingham aprons and funnels,
the clock with an honest face.
Now we weigh an hour for a space
belonging to us.
Once it all belonged to us.
Our grandfather’s long chair, the slope
of his arm resting as he slept.
He had German words inside his tongue.
He lit a cigarette for the dog with a squat body
and leaned back.
The rings said Zero Zero Zero
rising into the shades
drawn shut in the daytime.
Zero against tears.
Zero against assorted sandwich cookies
in frilled cups.
Zero against the broom and the saltshaker
and the Dutch cleanser aching in the cracks of the tiles.
We went home to a street called Harvey
wanting the thing which could not happen.
Everyone to get along.
The dog thought it could happen.
Our grandfather who lit the match
carried a hat in his hands.
Where is his bed? His lamp?
*
I am confident the street called Harvey
lives in the zippered compartment of my purse.
It is mine forever. No one could steal it.
Giving me everything I go by,
my dictionary for pine and blame and snow.
On another street called Salah Eddin, a shopkeeper
called out, Your father was the most handsome man
in Jerusalem when he left!
Tears for the men and women
who leave the places that know them.
For the streets we cannot fix
and the gray school copybooks,
weeks plotted neatly in Arabic
as if days were really square.
We marched from Tuesday to Wednesday cleanly.
Streets were the blood of our bodies;
and just as you could say veins or arteries
carried red or blue depending on whether
they were coming or going, so we each traveled
our streets coming and going at exactly the same moment—
cells, scraps, puffs of living smoke.
SNOW
Once with my scarf knotted over my mouth
I lumbered into a storm of snow up the long hill
and did not know where I was going except to the top of it.
In those days we went out like that.
Even children went out like that.
Someone was crying hard at home again,
raging blizzard of sobs.
I dragged the sled by its rope,
which we normally did not do
when snow was coming down so hard,
pulling my brother whom I called by our secret name
as if we could be other people under the skin.
The snow bit into my face, prickling the rim
of the head where the hair starts coming out.
And it was a big one. It would come down and down
for days. People would dig their cars out like potatoes.
How are you doing back there? I shouted,
and he said Fine, I’m doing fine,
in the sunniest voice he could muster
and I think I should love him more today
for having used it.
At the top we turned and he slid down,
steering himself with the rope gripped in
his mittened hands. I stumbled behind
sinking deeply, shouting Ho! Look at him go!
as if we were having a good time.
Alone on the hill. That was the deepest
I ever went into snow. Now I think of it
when I stare at paper or into silences
between human beings. The drifting
accumulation. A father goes months
without speaking to his son.
How there can be a place
so cold any movement saves you.
Ho! You bang your hands together,
stomp your feet. The father could die!
The son! Before the weather changes.
STEPS
A man letters the sign for his grocery in Arabic and English.
Paint dries more quickly in English.
The thick swoops and curls of Arabic letters stay moist
and glistening till tomorrow when the children show up
jingling their dimes.
They have learned the currency of the New World,
carrying wishes for gum and candies shaped like fish.
They float through the streets, diving deep to the bottom,
nosing rich layers of crusted shell.
One of these children will tell a story that keeps her people
alive. We don’t know yet which one she is.
Girl in the red sweater dangling a book bag,
sister with eyes pinned to the barrel of pumpkin seeds.
They are lettering the sidewalk with their steps.
They are separate and together and a little bit late.
Carrying a creased note, “Don’t forget.”
Who wrote it? They’ve already forgotten.
A purple fish sticks to the back of the throat.
Their long laughs are boats they will ride and ride,
making the shadows that cross each other’s smiles.
BOOKS WE HAVEN’T TOUCHED IN YEARS
The person who wrote YES!
in margins
disappeared.
Someone else
tempers her enthusiasms,
makes a small “v”
on its side
for lines
worth returning to.
A farmer
stares deeply
at a winter field,
envisioning
rich rows of corn.
In the mild tone
of farmers, says
Well, good luck.
What happens to us?
He doesn’t dance
beside the road.
THE RIDER
A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.
SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS
On the horizon, their problems
loom as long as burial mounds . . .
if we rise early enough
we can visit their problems.
Low-hanging fog.
Planes held on the runway an extra hour.
We didn’t get our ginger ales till Cleveland.
Expecting some light chop, the pilot said.
Chop, now there’s a word.
Their problems sound arrangeable,
building blocks in a mesh bag
strung from the doorknob.
When I hear their problems I know
what the next sentence will be.
This is how they could solve them.
This is what they could do.
Hum from the lowest place in the body.
Take the problems off like a shirt.
Will they listen?
Of course not.
Without their problems they would be too lonely.
A crisis pitch i
s, at least, a pitch.
If they did not have extra sofas where would they sit?
A walk without any scenery?
Easy to stand back from anybody else’s problems.
My own, now there’s a different feather
sticking straight up out of the wing.
I need it to fly.
MESSENGER
Someone has been painting
NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE
across the backs of bus benches,
blotting out the advertisements beneath
with green so the strong silver letters
appear clearly at corners,
in front of taco stands
and hardware stores.
Whoever did this
must have done it in the dark,
clanging paint cans block to block
or a couple of sprays—
they must have really
wanted to do it.
Among the many distasteful graffiti on earth
this line seems somehow honorable.
It wants to help us.
It could belong to anyone,
Latinas, Arabs, Jews,
priests, glue sniffers.
Mostly I wonder about
what happened or didn’t happen
Fuel Page 4
