and the squirrel gathering what it needed,
scrambling high into the branches,
dropping shells on his face
as he stood under the tree looking up.
SAD MAIL
It’s strange to think how letters used to be letters, letting you know someone liked you, saying pleasant dull things like, How are you, we are fine, making you wish for more but not weighing you, really. Now the letters are funnels of want, requests for favors, Please do what you can, Help me get into Yaddo (where I have never been), Tell my teachers I am a good student, Don’t you think I would be excellent in that program overseas? I want to send everyone overseas. I want to be there myself, where my mail can’t find me. It’s startling to miss the sweet dim-witted reports of summers & boyfriends, journeys & pets, the scented lilac envelopes. Now the envelopes are long & white, letters begin How long it has been since we really connected & pole-vault into the request by the second paragraph. And no one ever says you have months to do this in. You have till tomorrow. I am lonely with my mail. Yesterday I went out walking before the mailman came, & the street was filled with carcasses of empty envelopes, dampened & tattered, the wings of exotic insects lost without their bodies. I wanted to bend & reclaim them, smooth them, fill them with unsigned notes, & drop them into my neighbor’s shining boxes. One at a time.
PUBLIC OPINION
What they say first, what they say next.
I never saw a public walking around anyway.
They throw it up in the air like a ball.
No one has her hands out.
If it hits you in the head, it hurts.
Bouncing, it dissolves.
I’m not worried about it.
Give me your pants,
and I’ll hem them.
How long do you want them?
OPEN HOUSE
I work as hard as I can
to have nothing to do.
Birds climb their rich ladder
of choruses.
They have tasted the top of the tree,
but they are not staying.
The whole sky says,
Your move.
QUIET OF THE MIND
A giant, puffed, and creamy cloud
ignited on the right-hand horizon
from Presidio to Marfa as the western sky
dropped solidly into deepest blue.
We who were driving north on that road
pulled the car over, pulled it over
because the grasses in their lanky goldenness
called for standing alongside them
while the whole sky
held.
Inside that lit stillness,
we drank the swelling breath that would
unfold on its own for months
whenever the cities pressed us,
rubbed us down, or called out
people, people, people.
RETURN
Build my home here
on the spot of old time.
I’m sure I have failed you
one thousand ways,
you ancient clock,
you stockpot of moments.
Look how the first thing I do
upon entering the house
is remove my watch.
It’s in your honor.
VOCABULARY OF DEARNESS
How a single word
may shimmer and rise
off the page, a wafer of
syllabic light, a bulb
of glowing meaning,
whatever the word,
try “tempestuous” or “suffer,”
any word you have held
or traded so it lives a new life
the size of two worlds.
Say you carried it
up a hill and it helped you
move. Without this
the days would be thin sticks
thrown down in a clutter of leaves,
and where is the rake?
POLLEN
When weeds eat the playhouse
what does that say about the family?
The ball left at the base of the tree
loses its breath shrinking into
a stump or clump of dirt and the mole comes
and the earth drums up into little mounds
nobody kicks. Then what year is it?
Maybe the door to the big house opens and a man comes out.
A woman comes out drying her hands.
Dinner is almost ready but there’s no one else
to eat it. Besides the man and the woman.
Maybe only the woman.
Or there’s no dinner.
The door to the playhouse stuck open not swinging
and light comes through
replete with pollen of cedar and foxglove
and something else is going to be planted
in the ditch by the road
on the bank of the river but there will not be
a child to tell its story. How will that change the story?
If the fox puts on her lavender gloves just as you shut your eyes.
If in the night something touches your sleeping cheek
and startles you and it is the fox
but you forget to offer her tea in the playhouse
then what year would you be sipping?
What would that say about the person you became?
THE LAST DAY OF AUGUST
A man in a lawn chair
with a book on his lap
realizes pears are falling
from the tree right beside him.
Each makes a round,
full sound in the grass.
Perhaps the stem takes an hour
to loosen and let go.
This man who has recently written words
to his father forty years in the birthing:
I was always afraid of you.
When would you explode next?
has sudden reverence for the pears.
If a dark bruise rises,
if ants inhabit the juicy crack,
or the body remains firm, unscarred,
remains secret till tomorrow . . .
By then the letter to his father
may be lying open on a table.
We gather pears in baskets, sacks.
What will we do with everything
that has been given us? Ginger pears, pear pies,
fingers weighing flesh.
Which will be perfect under the skin?
It is hard not to love the pile of peelings
growing on the counter next to the knife.
I STILL HAVE EVERYTHING YOU GAVE ME
It is dusty on the edges.
Slightly rotten.
I guard it without thinking.
Focus on it once a year
when I shake it out in the wind.
I do not ache.
I would not trade.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the editors of the following journals where some of these poems first appeared:
Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Cat’s Ear, Chaminade Literary Review, Chili Verde Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Fine Madness, Five Points, Grafitti Rag, Green Mountains Review, Hawai’i Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Herman Review, Hurakan, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, Many Mountains Moving, The New York Times, One Trick Pony, Paragraph, Poetry Kanto (Japan), Rain City Review, Rio Grande Review, Solo, Tampa Review, ¡TEX!, Two Rivers Review.
Individual poems appeared in the following books:
“Elevator” appeared in I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye and Paul B. Janeczko (Simon & Schuster, 1996);
“The Small Vases from Hebron” appeared in The Best American Poetry 1996, edited by Adrienne Rich (Scribner, 1996);
“Darling” appeared in Contemporary American Poetry, Sixth Edition, edited by A. Poulin, Jr. (Houghton Mifflin, 1996);
“Always Bring a Pencil” appeared in Minutes of the L
ead Pencil Club, edited by Bill Henderson (Pushcart Press, 1996);
“The Rider” appeared in The Place My Words Are Looking For, edited by Paul B. Janeczko (Bradbury Press, 1990);
“My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop” appeared in Written with a Spoon: A Poet’s Cookbook, edited by Nancy Fay and Judith Rafaela Sherman (Asher Publishing, New Mexico, 1995);
“Last Song for the Mend-It Shop” appeared in Travel Alarm (a chapbook), (Wings Press, Houston, 1993);
“The Time” appeared in Invisible, a chapbook, (Trilobite Press, Denton, 1989).
*
Deep thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for their heartening support.
Also I am grateful to Madison, without whom it would be Ticonderoga #1 pencils all the way.
“Listening to Poetry in a Language I Do Not Understand” is for Shuntarō Tanikawa.
“How Far is it to the Land We Left?” is for Aidan Artemus Gurovitsch.
“String” is for Phyllis Theroux.
“F” by Denise Levertov, from Poems 1968-1972. Copyright © 1970 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Naomi Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio, Texas. Her recent books include Habibi (a novel for teens), Lullaby Raft (a picture book) and Never in a Hurry (essays). Her books of poems are Red Suitcase (BOA) and Words under the Words: Selected Poems. She has edited four prize-winning anthologies of poetry for young readers and is a Guggenheim Fellow for 1997–1998.
BOA EDITIONS, LTD.: AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES
Vol. 1
The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress
W. D. Snodgrass
Vol. 2
She
M. L. Rosenthal
Vol. 3
Living With Distance
Ralph J. Mills, Jr.
Vol. 4
Not Just Any Death
Michael Waters
Vol. 5
That Was Then: New and Selected Poems
Isabella Gardner
Vol. 6
Things That Happen Where There Aren’t Any People
William Stafford
Vol. 7
The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974–1980
John Logan
Vol. 8
Signatures
Joseph Stroud
Vol. 9
People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983
Louis Simpson
Vol. 10
Yin
Carolyn Kizer
Vol. 11
Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada
Bill Tremblay
Vol. 12
Seeing It Was So
Anthony Piccione
Vol. 13
Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems
Vol. 14
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980
Lucille Clifton
Vol. 15
Next: New Poems
Lucille Clifton
Vol. 16
Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family
William B. Patrick
Vol. 17
John Logan: The Collected Poems
Vol. 18
Isabella Gardner: The Collected Poems
Vol. 19
The Sunken Lightship
Peter Makuck
Vol. 20
The City in Which I Love You
Li-Young Lee
Vol. 21
Quilting: Poems 1987–1990
Lucille Clifton
Vol. 22
John Logan: The Collected Fiction
Vol. 23
Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays
Delmore Schwartz
Vol. 24
Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard
Gerald Costanzo
Vol. 25
The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems
Barton Sutter
Vol. 26
Each in His Season
W. D. Snodgrass
Vol. 27
Wordworks: Poems Selected and New
Richard Kostelanetz
Vol. 28
What We Carry
Dorianne Laux
Vol. 29
Red Suitcase
Naomi Shihab Nye
Vol. 30
Song
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Vol. 31
The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle
W. D. Snodgrass
Vol. 32
For the Kingdom
Anthony Piccione
Vol. 33
The Quicken Tree
Bill Knott
Vol. 34
These Upraised Hands
William B. Patrick
Vol. 35
Crazy Horse in Stillness
William Heyen
Vol. 36
Quick, Now, Always
Mark Irwin
Vol. 37
I Have Tasted the Apple
Mary Crow
Vol. 38
The Terrible Stories
Lucille Clifton
Vol. 39
The Heat of Arrivals
Ray Gonzalez
Vol. 40
Jimmy & Rita
Kim Addonizio
Vol. 41
Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum
Michael Waters
Vol. 42
Against Distance
Peter Makuck
Vol. 43
The Night Path
Laurie Kutchins
Vol. 44
Radiography
Bruce Bond
Vol. 45
At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties
David Ignatow
Vol. 46
Trillium
Richard Foerster
Vol. 47
Fuel
Naomi Shihab Nye
Fuel Page 7
