Fuel Read online

  Copyright © 1998 by Naomi Shihab Nye

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  LC #: 97–74819

  ISBN: 978-1-880238-63-9

  13 14 15 16 12 11 10 09

  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with the assistance of grants from the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation, the Eric Mathieu King Fund of The Academy of American Poets, as well as from the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust, the County of Monroe, NY, and from many individual supporters.

  Cover Design: Daphne Poulin-Stofer

  Cover Art: “Cantaloupes and Ants,” by James Cobb

  Author Photo: Michael Nye

  Typesetting: Richard Foerster

  Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

  A. Poulin, Jr., President & Founder (1938-1996)

  250 North Goodman Steet, Suite 306

  Rochester, NY 14607

  www.boaeditions.org

  With gratitude to many writers who left us in 1997,

  their voices ongoing, sustaining—

  F

  that the mind’s fire may not fail.

  The vowels of affliction, of unhealed

  not to feel it, uttered,

  transformed in utterance

  to song.

  Not farewell, not farewell, but faring

  —Denise Levertov

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Muchas Gracias por Todo

  Bill’s Beans

  Wedding Cake

  Genetics

  Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things

  Elevator

  Cape Cod

  Being from St. Louis

  Eye Test

  The Small Vases from Hebron

  Darling

  One Boy Told Me

  Boy and Mom at the Nutcracker Ballet

  Passing It On

  Always Bring a Pencil

  Your Name Engraved on a Grain of Rice

  San Antonio Mi Sangre: From the Hard Season

  Wind and the Sleeping Breath of Men

  What’s Here

  Waikiki

  Ongoing

  Boy’s Sleep

  Glint

  Early Riser

  Fundamentalism

  Ducks

  New Year

  My Friend’s Divorce

  Visit

  The Palestinians Have Given Up Parties

  Half-and-Half

  Butter Box

  Smoke

  Alone

  Alphabet

  Feather

  Hidden

  Waiting to Cross

  Estate Sale

  Lost

  Puff

  Snow

  Steps

  Books We Haven’t Touched in Years

  The Rider

  Solve Their Problems

  Messenger

  Living at the Airport

  String

  Fuel

  Coming Soon

  Pancakes with Santa

  Alaska

  So There

  Across the Bay

  My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop

  Enthusiasm in Two Parts

  Our Son Swears He Has 102 Gallons of Water in His Body

  Morning Glory

  Boy and Egg

  The Time

  Last Song for the Mend-it Shop

  How Far Is It to the Land We Left?

  Our Principal

  Point of Rocks, Texas

  Pause

  Luggage

  The Turtle Shrine Near Chittagong

  Keep Driving

  The Difficult Life of a Yokohama Leaf

  Listening to Poetry in a Language I Do Not Understand

  From This Distance

  Sad Mail

  Public Opinion

  Open House

  Quiet of the Mind

  Return

  Vocabulary of Dearness

  Pollen

  The Last Day of August

  I Still Have Everything You Gave Me

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FUEL

  MUCHAS GRACIAS POR TODO

  This plane has landed thanks to God and his mercy.

  That’s what they say in Jordan when the plane sets down.

  What do they say in our country? Don’t stand up till we tell you.

  Stay in your seats. Things may have shifted.

  This river has not disappeared thanks to that one big storm

  when the water was almost finished.

  We used to say thanks to the springs

  but the springs dried up so we changed it.

  This rumor tells no truth thanks to people.

  This river walk used to be better when no one came.

  What about the grapes? Thanks to the grapes

  we have more than one story to tell.

  Thanks to a soft place in the middle of the evening.

  Thanks to three secret hours before dawn.

  These deer are seldom seen because of their shyness.

  If you see one you count yourselves among the lucky on the earth.

  Your eyes get quieter.

  These deer have nothing to say to us.

  Thanks to the fan, we are still breathing.

  Thanks to the small toad that lives in cool mud at the base of the zinnias.

  BILL’S BEANS

  for William Stafford

  Under the leaves, they’re long and curling.

  I pull a perfect question mark and two lean twins,

  feeling the magnetic snap of stem, the ripened weight.

  At the end of a day, the earth smells thirsty.

  He left his brown hat, his shovel, and his pen.

  I don’t know how deep bean roots go.

  We could experiment.

  He left the sky over Oregon and the fluent trees.

  He gave us our lives that were hiding under our feet,

  saying, You know what to do.

  So we’ll take these beans

  back into the house and steam them.

  We’ll eat them one by one with our fingers,

  the clean click and freshness.

  We’ll thank him forever for our breath,

  and the brevity of bean.

  WEDDING CAKE

  Once on a plane

  a woman asked me to hold her baby

  and disappeared.

  I figured it was safe,

  our being on a plane and all.

  How far could she go?

  She returned one hour later,

  having changed her clothes

  and washed her hair.

  I didn’t recognize her.

  By this time the baby

  and I had examined

  each other’s necks.

  We had cried a little.

  I had a silver bracelet

  and a watch.

  Gold studs glittered

  in the baby’s ears.

  She wore a tiny white dress

  leafed with layers

  like a wedding cake.

  I did not want

  to give her back.

  The baby’s curls coiled tightly

  against her scalp,

  another alphabet.

  I read new new new.

  My mother gets tired.

  I’ll chew your hand.

  The baby left my skirt crumpled,

  my la
p aching.

  Now I’m her secret guardian,

  the little nub of dream

  that rises slightly

  but won’t come clear.

  As she grows,

  as she feels ill at ease,

  I’ll bob my knee.

  What will she forget?

  Whom will she marry?

  He’d better check with me.

  I’ll say once she flew

  dressed like a cake

  between two doilies of cloud.

  She could slip the card into a pocket,

  pull it out.

  Already she knew the small finger

  was funnier than the whole arm.

  GENETICS

  From my father I have inherited the ability

  to stand in a field and stare.

  Look, look at that gray dot by the fence.

  It’s his donkey. My father doesn’t have

  a deep interest in donkeys, more a figurative one.

  To know it’s out there nuzzling the ground.

  That’s how I feel about my life.

  I like to skirt the edges. There it is in the field.

  Feeding itself.

  *

  From my mother, an obsession about the stove

  and correct spelling. The red stove, old as I am, must be

  polished at all times. You don’t know this about me.

  I do it when you’re not home.

  The Magic Chef gleams in his tipped hat.

  Oven shoots to 500 when you set it low.

  Then fluctuates. Like a personality.

  Thanks to my mother I now have an oven thermometer

  but must open the oven door to check it.

  Even when a cake’s in there. Isn’t this supposed to be

  disaster for a cake?

  My mother does crosswords, which I will never do.

  But a word spelled wrongly anywhere

  prickles my skin. Return to beginning

  with pencil, black ink.

  Cross you at the “a.” Rearrange.

  We had family discussions

  about a preference for the British grey.

  In the spelling bee I tripped on reveille,

  a bugle call, a signal at dawn.

  I have risen early

  ever since.

  BECAUSE OF LIBRARIES WE CAN SAY THESE THINGS

  She is holding the book close to her body,

  carrying it home on the cracked sidewalk,

  down the tangled hill.

  If a dog runs at her again, she will use the book as a shield.

  She looked hard among the long lines

  of books to find this one.

  When they start talking about money,

  when the day contains such long and hot places,

  she will go inside.

  An orange bed is waiting.

  Story without corners.

  She will have two families.

  They will eat at different hours.

  She is carrying a book past the fire station

  and the five-and-dime.

  What this town has not given her

  the book will provide; a sheep,

  a wilderness of new solutions.

  The book has already lived through its troubles.

  The book has a calm cover, a straight spine.

  When the step returns to itself

  as the best place for sitting,

  and the old men up and down the street

  are latching their clippers,

  she will not be alone.

  She will have a book to open

  and open and open.

  Her life starts here.

  ELEVATOR

  We jumped in, trusting

  the slow swish of heavy doors,

  punching 7, 9, 12.

  O swoon of rising stomach! Then a sudden drop.

  We took turns popping envelopes into the mail chute

  & watching them whiz by from a lower floor.

  Where are you? Calling down the tunnel,

  sweet high ding, nobody’s dinnerbell.

  In stepped the lady with a fur muff,

  her elegant gentleman smelling of New York.

  We sobered our faces, bit the glinting arrows

  while our father sorted receipts off the lobby.

  Good-bye! we called to him again & again.

  His desk wore a little spike.

  Where are you going?

  We are going!

  Breathing rich perfume & dust

  ground into burgundy carpet,

  we glistened in the polished edge

  of everything that didn’t belong to us,

  suitcases, humming radios,

  brass locks, canisters for ash.

  With nowhere to go we became

  specialists in Ups & Downs.

  Brother! I cried, as he rose to the penthouse without me.

  Sister! He wailed, as I sank deep into the ground.

  CAPE COD

  The graves of Desire Nye and Patty Nye (1794)

  and the two Mehitabels who lived one year each.

  William and Ebenezer and Samuel Nye

  and the wives and cousins and the one with no hands.

  Deep, deep in the ground that is cracking.

  We jog and skip the ditch.

  Your red shirt, your tipped cap.

  Is it strange to see your name

  on so many stones? I am not alone.

  A riddle hangs by a single corner

  like a towel pinned on a line.

  We forget to bring it in for days.

  It barely waves, taking on

  the shape of the sea.

  Whose towel was it?

  In the sun a pebble glitters.

  A hundred thousand pebbles line the sand

  where Henry David Thoreau

  ate a giant clam and threw it up.

  Ebenezer fell into the mouth of the whale.

  Henry was sad here.

  He wrote his gloomiest essay

  after a shipwreck, all the ladies

  floating dead into shore.

  That’s what you get for traveling.

  But this other lady with no hands

  stayed close to home sewing quilts.

  How? The riddle blinks.

  Tiny green triangles poked nose-to-nose.

  We saw them in the house

  down the road.

  Can we find a silver needle

  in her hem?

  BEING FROM ST. LOUIS

  Under the nickel-gray bridges

  the rumbling trains snaked over,

  and the bitter gray rain

  draining toward holes in the streets,

  beneath buildings with teeth for windows,

  the Veiled Prophet floated past

  in his strange parade. No one knew who he was.

  I cracked my head on cement when the giant lion

  opened his jaws to roar NO always NO

  but we were going to do it anyway.

  Over the scum of the fallen gray leaves

  and winter’s fist that held and held

  till every secret tip of the tree was frozen,

  beside the gray river that marked us off—

  what did east or west mean if you were in the center?—

  and its splintered, floating debris,

  we left our smallest clothes behind.

  Under the bent gray sky and its month-long frown,

  the gloomy wisdom of red brick and the silver Arch

  that would surely fall, we said,

  standing nervously off to one side

  as the last gleaming segment swung into place

  on the hook of a giant crane—

  That would surely fall.

  Come tumbling down.

  Since those days we became people

  who blink harder in sunlight,

  flying into our old city

  staring from the plane

  It didn’t fall after al
l

  who have become the gray rain

  in a quiet place under our skins,

  returning to the house still standing,

  to the trees who do not see us,

  to the schoolyard to pick up

  one pencil-sized stick from the rich gravel.

  Who carry it home as we would have done

  in another life when the earth was still writing

  its name on our knees.

  EYE TEST

  The D is desperate.

  The B wants to take a vacation,

  live on a billboard, be broad and brave.

  The E is mad at the R for upstaging him.

  The little c wants to be a big C if possible,

  and the P pauses long between thoughts.

  How much better to be a story, story.

  Can you read me?

  We have to live on this white board

  together like a neighborhood.

  We would rather be the tail of a cloud,

  one letter becoming another,

  or lost in a boy’s pocket

  shapeless as lint,

  the same boy who squints to read us

  believing we convey a secret message.

  Be his friend.

  We are so tired of meaning nothing.

  THE SMALL VASES FROM HEBRON

  Tip their mouths open to the sky.

  Turquoise, amber,