A Maze Me Read online

  in the breeze, their job in life,

  and they are proud of it.

  My Body Is a Mystery

  My body is a mystery

  a magical geography of skin

  It keeps me in

  And I travel in it everywhere

  sometimes it seems to beat me there

  and then we meet again

  Oh my eyes are the windows

  and my face is the sky

  And my legs are the trees that hold me

  My hands are the branches and my head is a box

  and I spend my lifetime picking locks

  My body is a symphony

  a tuba and a piccolo and drum

  I hear some drum

  And it sometimes seems to beat so low

  And other times it makes me want to run

  and then I have to run

  Oh my blood is the music

  and my voice finds the notes

  And my lungs are conductors singing One! Two!

  And I sometimes lose the melody but I

  never lose the dream

  of the songs that might come through

  Because my body is a mystery

  a magical geography of skin

  that keeps me in

  And I travel in it everywhere

  sometimes it seems to beat me there and then

  We meet again

  Oh we always meet again

  Feeling Wise

  A lady was quoted in the newspaper.

  “It is not so hard to feel wise.

  Just think of something dumb you could say,

  then don’t say it.”

  I like her.

  I would take her gingerbread

  if I knew where her house was.

  Julia Child the famous chef said,

  “I never feel lonely in the kitchen.

  Food is very friendly.

  Just looking at a potato, I like

  to pat it.”

  Staring down

  makes you feel tall.

  Staring into someone else’s eyes

  makes you feel not alone.

  Staring out the window during school,

  you become the future,

  smooth and large.

  Sometimes I Pretend

  I’m not me,

  I only work for me.

  This feels like

  a secret motor

  chirring inside my pocket.

  I think, She will be so glad

  when she sees the homework

  neatly written.

  She will be relieved

  someone sharpened pencils,

  folded clothes.

  Poor Monday

  At the stoplight

  faces in the next window

  are plaster-cast ceramics,

  blank, unoriginal.

  At school my friends drag in glumly.

  Our teacher says, “What can you expect?

  It’s Monday.”

  So what?!

  I’m Naomi!

  You’re Rosa Lee!

  Watermelon Truck

  Today a truck heaped with watermelons

  at the corner—

  fat, stacked bodies

  striped like animals

  The sign said “75 cents and up”

  An old man shaded his head with a newspaper

  “And up”—the great American twist

  You know he meant one midget for 75

  The other hundred, $3.50

  Margaret

  May I describe the contents

  of my grandmother’s kitchen

  in Nova Scotia in 1949?

  Grinding mill, butter churn,

  hand-hemmed white cotton towels,

  pale purple swatch of linen

  spread diagonally

  across a scarred wooden table

  where Grandmother

  kneaded and stirred.

  A platter rimmed with violets,

  some of the petals rubbed away.

  And the crock of wooden spoons, of course,

  the giant matches in a box . . .

  There was something in the oven, always,

  a streak of patience in the air.

  My Sad Aunt

  She sits in the living room,

  mad at my parents

  because they won’t let her

  smoke in the house.

  Maybe it’s not always easy

  having a good imagination.

  It follows you around

  till you’re not sure who that is,

  sitting in the living room.

  She remembers a dream

  that didn’t come true.

  A riverbed

  with no water in it.

  Who did she want to be

  when she was younger?

  The List

  A man told me he had calculated

  the exact number of books

  he would be able to read before he died

  by figuring the average number

  of books he read per month

  and his probable earth span,

  (averaging how long

  his dad and grandpa had lived,

  adding on a few years since he

  exercised more than they did).

  Then he made a list of necessary books,

  nonfiction mostly, history, philosophy,

  fiction and poetry from different time periods

  so there wouldn’t be large gaps in his mind.

  He had given up frivolous reading entirely.

  There are only so many days.

  Oh I felt sad to hear such an organized plan.

  What about the books that aren’t written yet,

  the books his friends might recommend

  that aren’t on the list,

  the yummy magazine that might fall

  into his view at a silly moment after all?

  What about the mystery search

  through delectable library shelves?

  I felt the heartbeat of forgotten precious books

  calling for his hand.

  You’re Welcome!

  Where has courtesy gone?

  (MY GRANDMOTHER’S CHANT)

  People who don’t say “Thank you”

  are a mysterious tribe.

  Who do they think

  they are?

  People who say “No problem”

  instead of “You’re welcome”

  have a problem they don’t even

  know about.

  Moving House

  A whole house traveled

  down Broadway yesterday.

  An old-fashioned white house

  with green trim . . .

  traffic stopped

  so the house on wheels could pass.

  You could almost hear

  the lost family laughing,

  clink of dishes,

  swish of a screen door

  in summer heat.

  I wanted to follow the house,

  to see where its new landing place would be,

  but we were on a shopping trip

  (faucets, tile, sinks)

  for our very stationary house

  that hasn’t gone anywhere

  in a hundred years.

  Actually, my mom and I were tired,

  wishing we didn’t have to shop.

  Seeing the moving house

  changed us.

  Everything felt easy after that.

  Making a Mosaic

  Some people begin at the center,

  others at the outer edge,

  pressing down chips

  of lovely broken plates and cups.

  Is this the story of days?

  Arranged, glued down,

  without much space between.

  Here is the blue flowery fragment

  from dinnerware

  on a ship

  that sank in 1780.

  The antique green plate

  Louise gave me

  w
hen I finished fifth grade.

  Side by side,

  a nice time, a terrible time.

  It’s a messy job,

  glue stuck to fingertips.

  You keep standing back

  to see a pattern

  emerge.

  Necklace

  I hope Sunday’s slow and long,

  steeped like a pot of mint tea.

  Soft sun and deep thinking.

  Saturday was a crowded calendar page,

  a mound of chores.

  Could Monday be a porch?

  Facing the week.

  Wednesday a meadow?

  Thursday, let’s leave

  small baskets at everyone’s door.

  Flowers, notes, stones.

  No one does that anymore.

  Could a week be strung on a silver chain?

  A boat?

  A tree?

  Tuesday as a tree?

  From Labrador, 1800s

  “If you wish to know who I am, I am old Lydia Campbell, formerly Brooks, then Blake, after Blake now Campbell. So, you see, ups and downs has been my life all through. And now I am what I am . . .” (A CANADIAN ORAL HISTORY)

  We are who we are.

  Lydia, we send you light

  from far away.

  We send you green from a warm place.

  You who knew the ice and cold,

  who grew old inside your many names,

  what were you like

  before it all happened?

  What did you hope

  and where would you have

  wandered?

  Did you ride on a sled pulled by dogs?

  When you stared into the swirl

  of green northern lights in a midnight sky,

  did you think those icy fingers

  were pointing at you,

  did you whisper, “Hi there,”

  feeling the little hairs

  on your skin

  stand straight up?

  SECTION FOUR

  Sweet Dreams Please

  Historical Marker

  out here in the land of wind

  little purple flowers

  where people once fought

  it’s hard to imagine

  people finding one another

  in this huge space

  and having something to fight about

  Baby-sitting Should Not Be Called

  sitting. Because it is chasing, bending,

  picking up, and major play.

  It is helping Wiley throw eight basketballs

  into a green wheelbarrow and getting them out

  again and doing this one hundred

  times. Then he sits on the second step

  to roll basketballs off the edge.

  He waves at me to give them back.

  Then he pitches pecans

  at the tree trunk and wants me

  to retrieve them.

  They are small and

  hide in the leaves.

  But he knows if I find the right one.

  Also he wants me to climb the ladder

  (only to the third step)

  holding him under one arm

  so he can poke the fat basketball

  through the lowered hoop.

  Sitting? That’s a joke.

  He wraps the baby doll

  in a piece of green tissue paper

  and eats Cheerios at the same time.

  No! He doesn’t want me to

  give the baby doll a Cheerio!

  He wants to roll cars into

  a parking lot in the corner

  and speed them over my feet.

  Wiley helps me remember

  where I came from. I love him for

  more than one reason.

  I love his clean purpose,

  his careful eye.

  His pure glee when the pecan hits hard

  and bounces off.

  I love baby-sitting

  even though I have to sleep

  stretched out flat

  like the monkey without stuffing

  afterwards.

  Abandoned Homestead, Big Bend National Park

  Gilberto Luna and his wife

  raised nine children

  in this stone house

  off the gravel canyon road.

  They grew corn and peppers

  between the dry lips of the desert.

  Did his children ever fight?

  What did they dream of,

  so far from any city or train?

  I think they dreamed of a fossil

  full of clouds.

  Gilberto lived to be extremely old.

  Deserts will do that.

  What about his wife?

  The walls tipped in soon after they died.

  Houses miss their people too.

  A hundred years later, thin slits of light

  sneak into three crooked rooms.

  Turtle

  Tonight I read a newspaper story

  about a turtle found in Virginia

  key on a key chain

  looped through a hole in his shell

  a number engraved on the key

  the man who found him called the number

  far away in Pennsylvania

  learned that turtle was let loose twenty years before

  Ho!

  Think about it:

  all these years of our lives,

  he’s been walking.

  Little Blanco River

  You’re only a foot deep

  under green water

  your smooth shale skull

  is slick & cool

  blue dragonfly

  skims you

  like a stone

  skipping

  skipping

  it never goes under

  you square-dance with boulders

  make a clean swishing sound

  centuries of skirts

  lifting & falling in delicate rounds

  no one makes a state park out of you

  you’re not deep enough

  little blanco river

  don’t ever get too big

  The Bird Pose

  For two months I examined

  the photo in my mom’s yoga book.

  It looked so easy,

  balancing your knees

  on your elbows.

  But mine kept collapsing

  like portable chairs.

  My mom said, Remember, you

  have to start slow.

  How slow is slow? I said.

  This feels slow to me.

  Nothing helped so I threw the book

  back on my mom’s bed.

  What a dumb thing I tried to do.

  That night I dreamed I flew.

  Meteor Watch

  Leaving the car on a high hill in the dark,

  we spread a tablecloth on the ground

  and eat with our fingers—

  grapes, gingersnaps, cheese—

  staring at the huge sky.

  This night feels ripe.

  What will flash by?

  We want stars to surprise us.

  We want to be

  amazed.

  Each streak of light, we cry out.

  If you turn your head

  for just a minute, you can miss one.

  Focus on east,

  you lose the ones in the west.

  I think of people knowing one another

  in the great spaces,

  the brave arc of connection

  between friends, lit up.

  And all the quiet stars

  holding their places in between.

  Writing in a Silo

  I used to translate what a hen said.

  Little kids believed me.

  I looked deep into a cat’s eyes

  to speak her language.

  Memory is a silo

  —what’s stocked

  up?—

  Corn or sorrow?

  Crumbs of wheat

  spe
ckled hope?

  1 door

  2 windows

  is this

  a blossom

  or a day?

  What would I dream if I slept in a silo?

  Standing by the train track

  I wrote something different

  than I might write

  in a library.

  When I sat by the river

  my words became brown ducks

  dipping their heads.

  Finding a Pink Ribbon on the Wilderness Trail

  We went hiking on the edge of town,

  saw three deer, an armadillo

  with coarse hairs on his belly when

  my dad turned him over.

  He snorted like a little pig.

  Golden eagles flew huge circles

  around their nests.

  Then I found a lost ribbon on the trail,

  the kind I would be sad to lose,

  satiny smooth, with no rips

  or blemishes.

  I picked it up and put it in my pocket.

  Later I worried.

  What if the girl who lost it came back

  looking for it?

  We are tied by a trail,

  tied by a ribbon.

  I hope someone nice

  finds the things I lose.

  Bird in Hand

  She was trying to show

  the baby bird to her older sister

  but the big girl said, “Yeccccch!

  Put it down!”

  The smaller girl kept holding it out,

  shielding it from sun

  with her other hand

  and the big girl shouted, “I told you,

  get rid of it!”

  —squirting water

  from a plastic bottle

  on her sister and the bird.

  The face of the younger girl,

  stunned in the courthouse square.

  Pressed-in pair of wings.

  Scared heart pounding.

  The Word PEACE

  We could find words or parts of words

  inside other words, it was always a game.

  PEACE for example contained the crucial vowels of

  EAT and EASY. If people ATE together

  they would be less likely to KILL one another

  especially if one were responsible for

  shopping & cooking