Fuel

by Naomi Shihab Nye

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