Fuel Read online

  ONGOING

  The shape of talk would sag

  but the birds be brighter than ever

  O I needed the birds worse & worse as I got older

  as if some crack had opened in the human scheme of things

  & only birds with their sharp morning notes

  had the sense for any new day

  The people went round & round

  in the old arenas

  dragging their sacks

  of troubles & stones & jaggedy love

  I could not help them

  I was one of them

  the people pitched advice

  in its flat hat back & forth

  across the table

  But the birds so far above us

  hardly complete sentences

  just fragments & dashes

  the birds who had seen the towns

  grow up & topple

  who caught the changing wind

  before anyone on the ground did

  who left for Mexico when we were not

  paying attention

  what could they tell us

  about lives in heavy bodies

  what could they tell us

  about being

  caught?

  BOY’S SLEEP

  All day a boy plunges his hands into his pockets.

  Tickets, tape, crystallized stones, a two-dollar bill.

  He will not wear pants without pockets.

  It is a point of honor.

  He sleeps as deeply as the crackle of the burning log,

  the breath of the far-flung sea.

  Where are you, world? Don’t do anything

  while I’m not paying attention.

  GLINT

  My grandmother mentioned only once how the piano teacher she had as a girl leaned over her too closely at the keys. His damp lips grazed her cheek or maybe they touched her mouth for a minute. My grandmother never felt comfortable with the piano after that. I think a little more music could have helped her life. I played her piano sometimes. Dust rose in little clouds from the cracks between the keys. A few keys had lost their voices. My grandmother told me some things but not enough. We had a sweetness between us. What happened to the piano teacher? His lips parting ever so slightly over middle C, eyes pinned to the ripe notes on the sheet . . . could he help it what they reminded him of? Here I am trying to gather her lost kisses from the air. They’re drifting just outside the tune.

  EARLY RISER

  The face of the clock at 4 A.M.

  doesn’t have many friends.

  Its wishes are thin and dark,

  to stay humble, close to the floor.

  Without it I am a crumb of talk

  stuck to a plate.

  The day unfolds its sad sack of chores,

  the broom loses two more hairs.

  Without it I am the letter carrier

  who never receives

  any mail herself.

  FUNDAMENTALISM

  Because the eye has a short shadow or

  it is hard to see over heads in the crowd?

  If everyone else seems smarter

  but you need your own secret?

  If mystery was never your friend?

  If one way could satisfy

  the infinite heart of the heavens?

  If you liked the king on his golden throne

  more than the villagers carrying baskets of lemons?

  If you wanted to be sure

  his guards would admit you to the party?

  The boy with the broken pencil

  scrapes his little knife against the lead

  turning and turning it as a point

  emerges from the wood again

  If he would believe his life is like that

  he would not follow his father into war

  DUCKS

  We thought of ourselves as people of culture.

  How long will it be till others see us that way again?

  Iraqi friend

  In her first home each book had a light around it.

  The voices of distant countries

  floated in through open windows,

  entering her soup and her mirror.

  They slept with her in the same thick bed.

  Someday she would go there.

  Her voice, among all those voices.

  In Iraq a book never had one owner—it had ten.

  Lucky books, to be held often

  and gently, by so many hands.

  Later in American libraries she felt sad

  for books no one ever checked out.

  She lived in a country house beside a pond

  and kept ducks, two male, one female.

  She worried over the difficult relations

  of triangles. One of the ducks

  often seemed depressed.

  But not the same one.

  During the war between her two countries

  she watched the ducks more than usual.

  She stayed quiet with the ducks.

  Some days they huddled among reeds

  or floated together.

  She could not call her family in Basra

  which had grown farther away than ever

  nor could they call her. For nearly a year

  she would not know who was alive,

  who was dead.

  The ducks were building a nest.

  NEW YEAR

  Over our heads the words hung down

  with giant sparkling margins.

  I was try-trying again

  every day of my life.

  That’s why I’ve been followed

  by stacks of blank notebooks, why

  any calendar page with nothing written on it

  strikes me full of ravenous joy.

  When a year changes,

  the little stuffed man

  pitches into the flames,

  his paper-bag body fattened by

  ragged lists, crumpled mail.

  Between 8 P.M. when I scrawl

  the vanishing year on his chest

  and midnight, we fall in love.

  His rueful grin, his crooked hat!

  He burns fast in the backyard pit.

  Then a deep quiet plucked by firecrackers

  under a weirdly lit city sky.

  No plans come to mind.

  I just stand there with my hands out

  in smoke while something else

  wonderful dies.

  MY FRIEND’S DIVORCE

  I want her

  to dig up

  every plant

  in her garden

  the pansies

  the pentas

  roses

  ranunculus

  thyme and lilies

  the thing nobody knows

  the name of

  unwind the morning glories

  from the wire windows

  of the fence

  take the blooming

  and the almost-blooming

  and the dormant

  especially the dormant

  and then

  and then

  plant them in her new yard

  on the other side

  of town

  and see how

  they breathe

  VISIT

  Welcome to Abu Dhabi,

  the Minister of Culture said.

  You may hold my falcon as we visit.

  He slipped a leather band around my arm

  and urged the bird to step on board.

  It wore a shapely leather hood,

  Or otherwise, the host described,

  the bird might pluck your very eyes.

  My very eyes were blinking hard

  behind the glasses that they wore.

  The falcon’s claws, so hooked and huge,

  gripped firmly on the leather band.

  I had to hold my arm out high.

  My hand went numb. The heavens shone

  a giant gold beyond our room.

  I had no memory why I’d
come

  to see this man.

  A falcon dives, and rips, and kills!

  I think he likes you though.

  It was the most I could have hoped for then.

  We mentioned art.

  We drank some tea.

  He offered to remove the hood.

  I said the bird looked very good just wearing it.

  Alright by me.

  THE PALESTINIANS HAVE GIVEN UP PARTIES

  Once singing would rise

  in sweet sirens over the hills

  and even if you were working

  with your trees or books

  or cooking something simple

  for your own family,

  you washed your hands,

  combed water through your hair.

  Mountains of rice, shiny shoes,

  a hurricane of dancing.

  Children wearing little suitcoats

  and velvet dresses fell asleep in circles

  after eating 47 Jordan almonds.

  Who’s getting married? Who’s come home

  from the far place over the seas?

  Sometimes you didn’t even know.

  You ate all that food without knowing.

  Kissed both cheeks of anybody who passed,

  slapping the drum, reddening your palm.

  Later you were full, rich,

  with a party in your skin.

  Where does fighting

  come into this story?

  Fighting got lost from somewhere else.

  It is not what we like: to eat, to drink, to fight.

  Now when the students gather quietly

  inside their own classroom

  to celebrate the last day of school,

  the door to the building

  gets blasted off.

  Empty chairs where laughter used to sit.

  Laughter lived here

  jingling its pocket of thin coins

  and now it is hiding.

  It will not come to the door dressed as a soapseller,

  a peddler of matches, the old Italian

  from the factory in Nablus

  with his magic sack of sticks.

  They have told us we are not here

  when we were always here.

  Their eraser does not work.

  See the hand-tinted photos of young men:

  too perfect, too still.

  The bombs break everyone’s

  sentences in half.

  Who made them? Do you know anyone

  who makes them? The ancient taxi driver

  shakes his head back and forth

  from Jerusalem to Jericho.

  They will not see, he says slowly,

  the story behind the story,

  they are always looking for the story after the story

  which means they will never understand the story.

  Which means it will go on and on.

  How can we stand it if it goes on and on?

  It is too long already.

  No one even gets a small bent postcard

  from the far place over the seas anymore.

  No one hears the soldiers come at night

  to pluck the olive tree from its cool sleep.

  Ripping up roots. This is not a headline

  in your country or mine.

  No one hears the tiny sobbing

  of the velvet in the drawer.

  HALF-AND-HALF

  You can’t be, says a Palestinian Christian

  on the first feast day after Ramadan.

  So, half-and-half and half-and-half.

  He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,

  chips. If you love Jesus you can’t love

  anyone else. Says he.

  At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa,

  he’s sweeping. The rubbed stones

  feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar

  across faces of date-stuffed mamool.

  This morning we lit the slim white candles

  which bend over at the waist by noon.

  For once the priests weren’t fighting

  in the church for the best spots to stand.

  As a boy, my father listened to them fight.

  This is partly why he prays in no language

  but his own. Why I press my lips

  to every exception.

  A woman opens a window—here and here and here—

  placing a vase of blue flowers

  on an orange cloth. I follow her.

  She is making a soup from what she had left

  in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.

  She is leaving nothing out.

  BUTTER BOX

  To close: Fold in small end flaps. Insert Flap A

  into Flap B as shown.

  There is a picture to help us.

  Also an announcement: Carton has been opened.

  In case we are stumbling through an afternoon,

  have lost our way, or plate and knife confound us.

  Once a plastic bag intoned: There should be a suggestion

  of firmness in the cooked macaroni. Not entirely firm,

  not utterly anything, just a suggestion.

  But I don’t want to close the butter box

  with the butter in it. Place a single brick

  in the pink dish, extra three

  stacked in waiting, box discarded.

  See how much help we didn’t need?

  SMOKE

  The new slash of road curves up beside five sleeping smokestacks.

  Four stand together, one apart—the lucky or the lonely one, depending.

  I’m driving you to school with your blue pants and box of lunch.

  I’m combing your hair with my eyes.

  They’ve built fancy houses around a giant pit. What do people see in it?

  The smokestacks were smoking when I was in college, when my father

  drove me down the old road on the other side.

  Was it neat? We both know smoke isn’t neat but I guess

  what you mean. Was it black or white? I can’t recall.

  So much has poured out the top of my head.

  I knew the lady who owned the smokestacks, her peacock

  bit my hand. We take turns imagining what happens next,

  if they stand or fall, whether the wrecked warehouse

  with arches will be spared, or the fog lift, or the sun.

  Today a small red light glitters at the throat of the lucky one.

  You call it a good sign. At school your friends wear puffy coats

  bright as parrots. You fly into your teacher’s arms.

  I could even hug a dull-looking father in his necktie

  as we roll out of the lot into our daily lives. When I pass

  the smokestacks again, their firm ladders

  and proud ALAMO lettering up the sides, I’m fiddling

  with the radio dial, swinging into a lane of cars.

  Now the gloom of distant news washes over worse than grit

  and we can’t clean it, fix it, or make good sense.

  Still we hold our mouths wide open, and the birds,

  the sky, the trees, and the river

  fly into us as if anything could heal. Somewhere deep,

  these years must be churning the way cement does

  inside a truck. The cement those smokestacks helped to make—

  it became sidewalks all over this city. It became

  buildings and tunnels and walls. We don’t think of it gleaming.

  Even the highway I drive on.

  ALONE

  He grows used to the sound of the floor

  Not yet Not yet each evening

  right before the news comes on.

  Then the killing and the stabbing

  and the beating and the crashing.

  Turn it off. There’s a smudge on the wall,

  a Jesus with a blazing heart.

  His coffee cup waits

  upside down on its plate.
<
br />   The shape of dinner tastes upside down.

  He eats whatever the nurse-lady left him,

  the hamburger in its three-day shirt.

  Sometimes he doesn’t know the name

  of what he eats.

  He hauls his body to the porch,

  sinks his eyes into the weeds.

  A hose curls in the lilies.

  If he could reach it,

  make it down

  those three crooked steps . . .

  When his wife died he was very quiet

  for one day. Then he smiled

  and smiled with his two teeth

  for the bad time they had

  that was over.

  His tongue could sound Soledad or Solamente

  for his bones and his blood and his few good hairs.

  When the drop of water on the white sink

  meets the next drop and they are joining,

  he thinks of other ways to spend this life

  that he didn’t do. He would like to meet them.

  ALPHABET

  One by one