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  or their fathers and mothers thin as lace,

  their own teachers remaining in front

  of a class at the back of their minds.

  So many seasons of rain, sun, wind

  have crystallized their teachers.

  They shine like something on a beach.

  But we don’t see that yet.

  We’re fat with binders and forgetting.

  We’re shaping the name of a new love

  on the underside of our thumb.

  We’re diagnosing rumor and trouble

  and fear. We hear the teachers

  as if they were far off, speaking

  down a tube. Sometimes

  a whole sentence gets through.

  But the teachers don’t give up.

  They rise, dress, appear before us

  crisp and hopeful. They have a plan.

  If cranes can fly 1,000 miles

  or that hummingbird return from Mexico

  to find, curled on its crooked fence, a new vine,

  surely. We may dip into the sweet

  together, if we hover long enough.

  BOY AND EGG

  Every few minutes, he wants

  to march the trail of flattened rye grass

  back to the house of muttering

  hens. He too could make

  a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh

  it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it

  to his ear while the other children

  laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him,

  so little yet, too forgetful in games,

  ready to cry if the ball brushed him,

  riveted to the secret of birds

  caught up inside his fist,

  not ready to give it over

  to the refrigerator

  or the rest of the day.

  THE TIME

  Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this

  in winter especially. Summer comes,

  I want to tumble with the river

  over rocks and mossy dams.

  A fish drifting upside down.

  Slow accordions sweeten the breeze.

  The Sanitary Mattress Factory says,

  “Sleep Is Life.”

  Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?

  Yesterday someone said, “It gets late so early.”

  I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.

  Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.

  LAST SONG FOR THE MEND-IT SHOP

  1.

  Today some buildings were blown up,

  rounded shoulders, the shoulders

  of women no one has touched for a long time.

  Men and women watched from their offices

  then went back to filing papers.

  A drinking fountain hummed.

  I translate this from the deep love

  I feel for old buildings.

  I translate this from my scream.

  2.

  The rosebushes held on so tightly

  we could not get them out.

  Under the sign that promised

  to stitch things together,

  the thorny weathered MEND-IT

  fading fast now

  fading hard,

  Jim heaved his shovel.

  We were loosening dirt

  around the heavy central roots,

  trespassing, trying to save

  at least the roses

  before bulldozers came,

  before the land was shaved

  and the Mexican men and women

  who tend with such a gracious bending

  disappeared. They were already gone

  and their roses would not let go.

  We bit hard on the sweetness,

  snipping, in all our names,

  the last lavish orange heads,

  our teeth pressed tightly together.

  3.

  This looks like a good place

  to build something ugly.

  Let’s do it. A snack

  shop. Let’s erase

  the board. Who can build

  faster? You could fit

  a hundred cars here.

  It’s only a house

  some guy lived in

  ninety years. And it’s so

  convenient to downtown.

  That old theater nobody goes to

  anymore, who cares if it’s

  the last theater like that

  in the United States?

  Knock it out so we can build

  a bank that goes bankrupt

  in two years. Don’t hang

  on.

  4.

  Some days I can’t lift

  the glint of worry.

  We go around together.

  Soon we will wear

  each other’s names.

  Already we bathe

  in the river of lost shoes.

  I fall into photographs.

  Someone lives inside

  those windows.

  Before they demolish

  the Honolulu bakery,

  women in hair nets

  and white dresses

  lock arms on the counter.

  Someone buys

  their last world-famous

  golden lemon cake.

  Take a card, any card.

  The magic dissolving recipe

  for buildings with frills?

  We will not know what

  it tasted like.

  HOW FAR IS IT TO THE LAND WE LEFT?

  On the first day of his life

  the baby opens his eyes

  and gets tired doing even that.

  He cries when they place a cap on his head.

  Too much, too much!

  Later the whole world will touch him

  and he won’t even flinch.

  OUR PRINCIPAL

  beat his wife.

  We did not know it then.

  We knew his slanted-stripe

  ties.

  We said, “Good morning”

  in our cleanest voices.

  He stood beside the door

  of the office

  where all our unborn

  report cards lived.

  He had twins

  and reddish hair.

  Later the news

  would seep

  along the gutters,

  chilly stream

  of autumn rain.

  My mother,

  newspaper dropped down

  on the couch, staring

  out the window—

  All those years I told you

  pay good attention to

  what he says.

  POINT OF ROCKS, TEXAS

  The stones in my heart

  do not recognize your name.

  Lizard poking his nose from a crack

  considers us both strangers.

  This wide terrain,

  like a gray-green bottom of an ocean,

  gives no sign.

  If we have been here since whatever blow it was

  toppled these boulders,

  if we are brief as lightning in the arrow-shaped

  wisp of cloud—

  on top of this peak, there are no years.

  A single mound rises off the plain.

  There I would make my house, you say, pointing.

  And I want to take the hand that points

  and build with it. Place it against my eyes,

  lips, heart, make a roof.

  If each day, history were a new sentence—

  but then what would happen to

  the rocks, the trees?

  From this distance every storm

  looks like a simple stripe.

  PAUSE

  The boy needed

  to stop by the road.

  What pleasure to let

  the engine quit droning

  inside the long heat,

  to feel where they were.

  Sometimes

>   she was struck by this

  as if a plank had slapped

  the back of her head.

  They were thirsty

  as grasses

  leaning sideways

  in the ditch,

  Big Bluestem

  and Little Barley,

  Texas Cupgrass,

  Hairy Crabgrass,

  Green Sprangletop.

  She could stop at a store

  selling only grass names

  and be happy.

  They would pause

  and the pause

  seep into them,

  fence post,

  twisted wire,

  brick chimney

  without its house,

  pollen taking flight

  toward the cities.

  Something would gather

  back into place.

  Take the word “home”

  for example,

  often considered

  to have an address.

  How it could sweep across you

  miles beyond the last

  neat packages of ice

  and nothing be wider

  than its pulse.

  Out here,

  everywhere,

  the boy looking away from her

  across the fields.

  LUGGAGE

  she carries her eyes from country to country

  in Rome adding the crisp slant of sky

  as earlier she gathered crowds of coffee cups

  frothing hot miles a scared man with a name tag

  planted firmly on one shoulder

  rows of empty chairs buckled cases

  and the bags from India tied and tied with rope

  as she gets older the luggage grows

  lighter and heavier together

  strange how the soil absorbs water

  and is quickly dry again

  how the filled room points to the window

  haggard smiles of waiting strangers

  brief flash and falling back to separateness

  how much everyone is carrying

  moving belt the artifacts expand

  now a basket of apricots

  a mini-stove from England

  an Italian grandfather weeps on the shoulder

  of his glorious departing girl

  the woman takes it in thinking

  how this world has everything and offers it

  how it is good we only have two hands

  THE TURTLE SHRINE NEAR CHITTAGONG

  Humps of shell emerge from dark water.

  Believers toss hunks of bread,

  hoping the fat reptilian heads

  will loom forth from the murk

  and eat. Meaning: you have been

  heard.

  I stood, breathing the stench of mud

  and rotten dough, and could not feel

  encouraged. Climbed the pilgrim hill

  where prayers in tissue radiant tubes

  were looped to a tree. Caught in

  their light, a hope washed over me

  small as the hope of stumbling feet

  but did not hold long enough

  to get me down.

  Rickshas crowded the field,

  announced by tinny bells.

  The friend beside me, whose bread

  floated and bobbed,

  grew grim. They’re full, I told him.

  But they always eat mine.

  That night I told the man I love most

  he came from hell. It was also

  his birthday. We gulped lobster

  over a white tablecloth in a country

  where waves erase whole villages, annually,

  and don’t even make our front page.

  Waiters forded the lulling currents

  of heat. Later, my mosquito net

  had holes.

  All night, I was pitching something,

  crumbs or crusts, into that bottomless pool

  where the spaces between our worlds take root.

  He would forgive me tomorrow.

  But I wanted a mouth to rise up

  from the dark, a hand,

  any declarable body part, to swallow

  or say, This is water, that is land.

  KEEP DRIVING

  Atsuko

  steering her smooth burgundy car

  past orange cranes

  and complicated shipyards

  has always lived in Yokohama,

  but possibly this neighborhood

  sprang up over the weekend

  when we were off beside the sea.

  Massive concrete, tones of gray.

  Every day something changes in a city.

  A woman pulls groceries home

  in a metallic cart past five thousand

  beige apartments,

  but she will find her own

  and twist the key.

  We respect her.

  Iron girders for a new

  construction.

  Rafters. Pipes.

  Legions of coordinated

  stoplights.

  Atsuko cannot see any street

  she recognizes,

  one roadside tree

  staked to bamboo

  looks vaguely familiar.

  She has seen other trees like that.

  Will I keep my eyes open please?

  Let her know if I spot any clues?

  Remember who

  you are talking to, I say,

  and we both laugh very loudly,

  which is not something

  I thought I would get to do

  in Japan this soon.

  We veer under highways,

  elevated tracks, clouds.

  The red train zips by smoothly overhead,

  but all our streets go one way the wrong way

  and I’m still confused by her steering wheel

  on the right side, my foot punching

  an invisible clutch.

  What has she done?

  Atsuko keeps apologizing

  as we circle shoe shops dress shops party shops—

  obviously her city is bigger

  than she thought it was.

  We must get gas.

  Another day Mount Fuji-san looming

  on the horizon

  might help us gain our bearings,

  but it’s invisible today.

  Right now

  everything is gray.

  Only the red train for punctuation.

  She has never been more lost.

  Keep driving, I whisper,

  Kyoto, Hokkaido,

  villages, rice fields,

  how can I be lost or found

  if I have never been here before?

  Your hotel is hiding, she groans.

  Instead we find the Toyota dock

  for the third time

  in three hours.

  Tricky city clicking its rhythms

  into each U-turn, crosswalk,

  the intricate red blood

  networks of people,

  into the secret hidden dirt.

  Soon I will feel as grounded

  as the citizens of the foreign cemetery

  on the one high hill

  who came here planning to

  leave.

  THE DIFFICULT LIFE OF A YOKOHAMA LEAF

  Each train that passes

  whips a gust of wind

  a heavy heat.

  Each car,

  each choke of pavement,

  every new building

  with two hundred windows,

  every metal edge.

  They don’t say “smog” here,

  they say, “It’s a cloudy day.”

  The leaf is supposed to remember

  what a leaf does:

  green code of leaf language,

  shapely grace & frill.

  Beyond the city

  green hills shimmer & float.

  They disappear

  in the steamy heat.

 
; But they give courage to the single leaf

  on the tightly propped branch

  by the Delightful Discovery Drugstore.

  LISTENING TO POETRY IN A LANGUAGE I DO NOT UNDERSTAND

  Picture a blue door,

  a shiny pipe the rain runs through.

  Yellow flower

  with twenty supple lips.

  I like how you move your hands.

  The black T-shirt you have worn

  for the last three days

  drapes over baggy blue pants.

  You stop so abruptly,

  I fall into the breath

  of the person next to me.

  We may look at this poem

  from the mountain above the roof

  or stand under it

  where it casts a cool shadow.

  Is this your family home?

  Your grandfather’s tiny Buddha?

  One word rolls across the floor,

  lodging under the slipper

  of the man who has felt uncomfortable

  all day.

  Now he knows what to say.

  FROM THIS DISTANCE

  He would take a small folded paper from his pocket—

  “I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia”—

  the same moment you wanted to kiss him.

  What was he wringing in his hands all those years?

  The chicken refused to smoke a cigarette.

  Seven white stones circled a thistle.

  You would have gone with him,

  but he climbed a high fence.

  There was always this Y in the road.

  Red checkered jacket draped

  over picnic table.

  Arrangement of broken bottles

  in the doorway of the Paris Hatters.

  He would take a word and remove its shirt.

  The open heart of the o, the wink of an e,

  the long trapped mystery of the crossed t;