Voices in the Air Read online

  Dedication

  For Connor James Nye and Virginia Duncan

  In memory, Paula Merwin, Paul Rode, Bill Hanson,

  Thomas Lux, James Tolan, Catherine Kasper, Brother Tony Hearn

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  SECTION I: MESSAGES

  To Manage

  Aurora Borealis

  Propriety

  Big Bend National Park Says No to All Walls

  Time’s Low Note

  Bully

  Invocation

  Bamboo Mind

  Cross the Sea

  To Babies

  Songbook

  Unsung—on Finding

  Bundle

  Little Lady, Little Nugget Brooms

  Welcome What Comes

  What Happens Next

  Everything Changes the World

  Standing Back

  Three Hundred Goats

  Lost People

  Broken

  Twilight

  SECTION II: VOICES IN THE AIR

  For Aziz

  Sheep by the Sea, a painting by Rosa Bonheur (1865)

  Emily

  Warbler Woods

  Gratitude Pillow

  Life Loves

  Getting Over It

  Conversation with Grace Paley, Flight of the Mind Writing Workshop, Oregon

  Showing Up

  For Caroline M.

  Tomorrow

  After Listening to Paul Durcan, Ireland

  We Will Get Lost in You

  James Tate in Jerusalem

  Train Across Texas

  Longfellow’s Bed

  Walt Whitman’s Revisions

  “Rest and Be Kind, You Don’t Have to Prove Anything”

  Peace Pilgrim’s Pocket

  C. D. Stepped Out

  True Success

  Woven by Air, Texture of Air

  Tell Us All the Gossip You Know

  Every Day

  One State

  My Name Is . . .

  Invitation to the NSA

  Double Peace

  Break the Worry Cocoon

  The Tent

  Please Sit Down

  For the Birds

  Bowing Candles

  Black Car

  SECTION III: MORE WORLDS

  Mountains

  Oh, Say Can You See

  Anti-Inaugural

  I Vote for You

  Belfast

  Summer

  A Lonely Cup of Coffee

  Reading Obituaries on the Day of the Giant Moon

  To Jamyla Bolden of Ferguson, Missouri

  Your Answering Machine, After Your Death

  Ring

  Hummingbird

  Next Time Ask More Questions

  In Transit

  Zen Boy

  Where Do Poets Find Images?

  Cell Phone Tower Disguised as a Tree

  Before I Was a Gazan

  Morning Ablution

  What Do Palestinians Want?

  Arabs in Finland

  Ladders in Repose

  The Gift

  Voodoo Spoons

  Barbershop

  Getaway Car, United States, 2017

  “Little Brother Shot Playing with Pistol”

  Moment of Relief

  Unbelievable Things

  Airport Life

  Texas, Out Driving

  Missing the Boat, Take Two

  All We Will Not Know

  Loving Working

  Stars Over Big Bend

  United

  Reserved for Poets

  Her Father Still Watching

  Small Basket of Happiness

  Biographical Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Naomi Shihab Nye

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Poet Galway Kinnell said, “To me, poetry is someone standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

  Someone—Abraham Lincoln?—once remarked that all the voices ever cast out into the air are still floating around in the far ethers—somehow, somewhere—and if we only knew how to listen well enough, we could hear them even now.

  Voices as guides, lines and stanzas as rooms, sometimes a single word the furniture on which to sit . . . each day we could open the door, and enter, and be found. These days I wonder—was life always strange—just strange in different ways? Does speaking some of the strangeness help us survive it, even if we can’t solve or change it?

  Where is my map—where are we, please? Can voices that entered into our thoughts when we were little help us make amends with the strange time we’re in?

  William Stafford, great twentieth-century American poet and teacher, tireless encourager of dialogue and nonviolence, is still speaking in the slant shadows falling across the path. If we only knew how to listen better, he said, even the grasses by the roadsides could help us live our lives. They’re flexible, for one. What might he say about our current moments in history? Would he be surprised by the divisive rhetoric, mysterious backsliding? Or not surprised at all?

  When I see a highway sign, “No Right Turn onto Whirlwind Drive”—Stafford comes to mind. He carried a decisive calm.

  Peter Matthiessen, the only American writer ever to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, is still standing out on his Long Island beach, staring at the sky, asking us, Did you see that? Flying over just now? Did you catch the span of the wings, the rosy tip of the head?

  Might we pause on our way to everywhere we are rushing off to and hear something in the air, old or new, that would make sense?

  Not so long ago we were never checking anything in our hands, scrolling down, pecking with a finger, obsessively tuning in. My entire childhood did not involve a single deletion. These are relatively new acts on earth.

  In those archaic but still vivid days, there might be a meandering walk into trees, an all-day bike ride, a backyard picnic, a gaze into a stream, a plunge into a sunset, a conversation with pines, a dig in the dirt, to find our messages. When we got home, there was nothing to check or catch up on—no one speaking to us in our absence.

  Recently, when I had the honor of visiting Yokohama International School in Japan to conduct poetry workshops, student Juna Hewitt taught me an important word—Yutori—“life-space.” She listed various interpretations for its meaning—arriving early, so you don’t have to rush. Giving yourself room to make a mistake. Starting a diet, but not beating yourself up if you eat a cookie after you started it. Giving yourself the possibility of succeeding. (Several boys in another class defined the word as when the cord for your phone is long enough to reach the wall socket.) Juna said she felt that reading and writing poetry gives us more yutori—a place to stand back to contemplate what we are living and experiencing. More spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen.

  I love this. It was the best word I learned all year.

  Not that sense of being nibbled up—as if message minnows surround us at all moments, nipping, nipping at our edges.

  Perhaps we have more voices in the air now—on TV, in our phones and computers and little saved videos—but are we able to hear them as well? Are these the voices we really need? Is our listening life-space deep enough? Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible?

  Can we go outside and listen?

  In 1927 Freya Stark, an English writer b
orn in Paris in 1893, who would become known for her astonishing travels through even the most remote parts of the Middle East, paused for a picnic near some Roman ruins outside Damascus. She wrote, “We ate our food with little clouds of Roman sand blown off the hewn stones and thought of the fragility of things.” Near Baghdad she wrote, “. . . in the morning all is peace, and all went out to pasture. The camels, looking as if they felt that their walk is a religious ceremony, went further afield; they are comparatively independent, needing to drink only once in four days; the sheep and goats stayed nearer. And when they had all gone, and melted invisibly into the desert face, the empty luminous peace again descended, lying round us in light and air and silence for the rest of the day.”

  Freya Stark’s light and air and silence feel palpable in her paragraphs. Her respect for people unlike herself, her fascination with worlds very different from the European ones she had grown up in—yet fully recognizable in their humanity and hope—heartens me when my own time feels too odd to bear. Her curious voice traveling through the air is more comforting than people currently claiming power, demanding recognition, trying to make others feel as if they don’t belong. Literature gives us a home in bigger time.

  But how do we find our ways home? Continually, regularly? With so much vying for our attention, how do we listen better? Reminding ourselves of what we love feels helpful. Walking outside—it’s as quiet as it ever was. The birds still communicate without any help from us. In that deep quietude, doesn’t the air, and the memory, feel more full of voices? If we slow down and intentionally practice listening, calming our own clatter, maybe we hear those voices better. They live on in us. Take a break from multitasking. Although many of us are no longer sitting on rocks in deserts watching camels, sheep, and goats heading out to pasture, we could sit. In a porch swing? On the front steps? In a library or coffee shop? On a park bench? Quiet inspiration may be as necessary as food, water, and shelter. Try giving yourself regular times a day for reading and thinking—even if just for a minute or two. Mindfulness, many agree, is profoundly encouraged by regular practice. A different sort of calm begins feeling like the true atmosphere behind everything else. If you’re an “I read before I go to sleep” sort of person, why not add a little more I-just-got-home-from-school-or-work reading? In the modern world, we deserve to wind down. Or perhaps some morning reading, to launch yourself ? How long does it take to read a poem? Slowing to a more gracious pacing—trying not to hurry or feel overwhelmed—inch by inch—one thought at a time—can be a deeply helpful mantra. It’s a gift we give our own minds.

  The melancholy, brilliant singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt died suddenly on New Year’s Day 1997. His many fans were stunned and saddened. That was the first day our son showed me I could “enter the world wide web” to read obituaries and stories about Townes rising suddenly from all over the world—Nashville, London, Berlin. Incredible! How had this happened? Everything was now—available? The searching process felt exotic, haunting, and comforting—fans around the world, grieving for Townes together. His song lines kept rising in my mind for months afterward. “If I needed you, would you come to me?”

  I think they all would. All the voices we ever loved or respected in our lives would come. And they would try to help us.

  —Naomi Shihab Nye

  San Antonio, Texas

  MESSAGES

  Broken pencil

  Broken pen

  Maybe today

  I’ll write my best poem

  To Manage

  She writes to me—

  I can’t sleep because I’m seventeen

  Sometimes I lie awake thinking

  I didn’t even clean my room yet

  And soon I will be twenty-five

  And a failure

  And when I am fifty—oh!

  I write her back

  Slowlyslow

  Clean one drawer

  Arrange words on a page

  Let them find one another

  Find you

  Trust they might know something

  You aren’t livingthe whole thing

  At once

  That’s what a minutesaid to an hour

  Without meyou are nothing

  Aurora Borealis

  (Fairbanks, Alaska)

  The light was speaking to me

  stretching out its long gleaming fingers

  pointing down

  maybe it could hear my shout

  shimmering green parentheses

  put me in my place

  my place was low

  every earthbound element

  Alaska Gas

  Sam’s Sourdough Café

  lifting into radiance

  snow felt less cold

  tiny human leaping

  under green swoops

  rippled fringes

  staggering swish

  middle of night

  by myself

  not by myself

  came so close

  I almost felt

  more than I had

  been waiting for

  what possible tellings

  purplepurplepurple

  You sawnothing

  knewnothing

  beforenow

  Nowwhat

  doyouknow?

  Propriety

  How dare they they they

  say say say

  anything we can or cannot do with our own

  red and blue

  We are voting for ourselves

  unbound by convention

  your convention

  I refuse to go to the convention

  too many people

  we will kiss in the hotel hallway

  if we please

  you and me

  New York City on the last day of an old year

  in future anytime

  EXIT door to hotel stairway appears

  feel a sizzle

  swizzle stick of memory spinning me

  through so much dullness

  red and blue

  Big Bend National Park

  Says No to All Walls

  Big Bend has been here, been here.

  Shouldn’t it have a say?

  Call the mountains a wall if you must,

  (the river has never been a wall),

  leavened air soaking equally into all,

  could this be the home

  we ache for? Silent light bathing cliff faces,

  dunes altering

  in darkness, stones speaking low to one another,

  border secrets,

  notes so rooted you may never be lonely

  the same ways again.

  Big bend in thinking—why did you dream

  you needed so much?

  Water, one small pack. Once I lay on my back

  on a concrete table

  the whole day and read a book.

  A whole book and it was long.

  The day I continue to feast on.

  Stones sifting a gospel of patience and dust,

  no one exalted beyond a perfect parched cliff,

  no one waiting for anything you do or don’t do.

  Santa Elena, South Rim, once a woman here knew

  what everything was named for. Hallie Stillwell,

  brimming with stories, her hat still snaps in the wind.

  You will not find a prime minister in Big Bend,

  a president or even a candidate, beyond the lion,

  the javelina, the eagle lighting on its nest.

  Time’s Low Note

  When the giant moon

  rises over the river,

  the cat stretches,

  presses himself to the window,

  croons.

  He needs to go outside

  into dark grass

  to feel the mystery

  combing his fur.

  The wind never says

  Call me back,

  I’ll be waiting for your call.

  All we know about wind’s address isr />
  somewhere else.

  A peony has been tryingto get through to you

  When’s the last timeyou really looked at one?

  Billowing pinkish whitish petalslushly layered

  Might be the prime object of the universe

  Peoniesin a house

  profoundly upliftthe house

  never say noto peonies

  Some daysreviewing everything

  from brain’s balcony

  filigree of thinkinga calm comes in

  you can’t fix the whole streetchange the city

  or the world

  but clearing bits of rubbish possible

  moving one stone

  Bully

  One boy in our grade school was considered

  a bully—

  muttering rude insults under his breath,

  tripping girls as they walked to their desks.

  He bothered everyone equally, shook his shaggy

  blond hair when teachers called his name.

  My mom, hearing the tales, decided he was lonely

  (no one ever played with him—in those days

  bullies weren’t popular)

  and committed me to attending

  a children’s Christmas party with him

  in the basement of a Methodist church.

  Somehow she arranged this plan with his mother

  as they waited for us by the schoolyard.

  Impressive he had a mother who waited—

  he seemed like a person who sprang from a forest,

  growling.

  My parents argued about the Christmas party

  every night before it happened.

  Daddy said Mom was “sacrificing me to her idealism.”

  He kept calling it my “first date.”

  I was only interested in what people did

  in basements of churches

  and what I would wear and would there be cake.

  Since we ate no sugar at our house (idealism),

  I dreamed of meeting sweets everywhere else.

  The night of the party, Bully wore a suit

  and striped tie. He didn’t growl.

  It was his church, but he didn’t seem to know anyone.

  I stood in my puffed pink icing of a ruffled dress

  by the cake table and watched him. He skulked around

  while the choir sang Christmas songs,

  looked embarrassed when Santa appeared.

  I talked to him any time he came near.

  Would you like some cake? I don’t recall him