Maybe we should just wander around other countries carrying books.
The First Time I Was Old
The sky crackled
with scary lightning.
Our fuel tank
had to be drained and refilled
before the plane could fly.
I said “Hi” to the 20-ish guy
taking the next seat.
He had bumped a woman
across the aisle
saying, “Sorry! My elbow,”
so I know he spoke English.
He took one long look at me
and decidedly
didn’t answer.
Useless
Threat alert at airport is
ORANGE
Okay
I’ll put on my orange personality
orange gaze
for faces all around me
for paper bags stashed next to
not in
the rubbish bin
Jonathan’s Kiwi Cake
From the side it’s a sculpture
arcs of kiwi
small green doors
almond glaze streaking across top
He’s a genius
but don’t tell him that
They say he doesn’t like to be noticed
Could that be true?
I love his photographs, too
layerings of people
rich icings of city crowds
“shot from the hip” he says
“rather literally”
He doesn’t say much more
The cakes were lined up on the dessert table
when we came to lunch
Jonathan had disappeared
gone back to the small cottage he lives in
so he wouldn’t have to say
you’re welcome you’re welcome you’re welcome
Consolation
This morning the newspaper
was too terrible to deliver
so the newsboy just pitched out
a little sheaf
of Kleenex.
For Rudolf Staffel
Your trough was crammed with chips & bits,
pieces of fired porcelain, broken things.
“They’re my teachers,” you said kindly,
tipping your hat.
On any street, in any crowded room,
you saw beyond the visible shapes.
“Where are you from?” It was always earth
we are all from, but forget—
you held it, listened to its breath,
found its fluent curve.
And what you became was a new way of being.
What you touched, the openhearted vessels
brilliant, bold, and true.
You weren’t afraid to experiment,
swerve. Giving freely, translating radiance,
all you knew. Conveying it
so anyone in your presence loved their own lives
and anything they had seen or might be, more.
You were the window the light came through.
Hot Stone Massage
Because my body has been
rubbed with hot black stones
I will now be able to grow older
with dignity.
It was easy to sense
the soil and dust
we all become
somewhere in the hot heart
of stone memory
and it wasn’t scary at all.
It was more home than home.
There were no chores.
Regular Days
Look at those mansions,
don’t you wish one was yours?
Actually, I like little houses,
less to clean. I wanted to live under the roots
of a tree, like the squirrel family in a picture book,
when I was small.
I’m still the kid dreaming of the lives she’ll never have
but guess what?
Maybe she doesn’t want them.
Some houses wear their Christmas lights
till February 6. I always feel like celebrating
when everything is over. I belong to
the secret clot of renegades
that prefers regular days. Trash days
really excite me.
Last Day of School
The long yellow pencils with promising pointed tips, shrunken to nubs. Trash cans overflow. We’ve turned in the thick books, though we know there was a lot we skimmed over quickly. Those final chapters, the modern days. We’re feeling fond of the grumpy teacher, the smoky chalk groove along the blackboard’s rim. Running our fingers along everything we can—nicks in the wooden tops of our desks, snappy rings of a crowded notebook, as we stuff the final papers in, the cool edge of the metal chair. Our many minor mistakes erased the high hopes of far-gone September. We were going to be perfect. We were going to make all A s. Today someone who didn’t speak to us all year—Freddy? Steve?—speaks suddenly, comfortably, and it is so clear—we could have been friends. We were here all along. The black and white marquee at the edge of the schoolyard says LAST DAY OF SCHOOL JUNE 2. We pin things to that date. A deeper breath, gulp of finer air, extended evenings in the back lot playing Lost in the Forest, or Gone from Here. I’m fond of the game called Families Getting Along. Soft light, peach cobbler, fireflies, a colander of fresh-picked cherries. Our school paintings return to us slightly battered. We smooth their corners. The classroom walls grow emptier by the hour. Someone agrees to take the turtle home.
There are moments we stand back from our classmates and teacher and familiar territory as if trying to contain the details of the scene precisely, in case we need to find our ways here again. Central School, you will remain central in my compass, your red-brick certitude, your polished ancient halls. I have marched and circled and bent my head inside you. I have wandered and lost my way. I have been proud, been locked in, been shy, been wounded by a vagrant strip of metal in a doorway, and stitched back together, been punished. In second grade I spoke into the recently installed intercom, to say my first published poem to the whole school at once, and this phenomenon was more exciting than seeing the poem in the magazine. If my lips touched the silver microphone I might be electrocuted. I was never invited to speak into it again though there were many other things I might have said. I pray to Central School as much as I pray to any God or gods. I believe in the tall windows, the rounded porcelain drinking trough. I love eating on a tray. When my parents fight, when my mother locks herself in her bedroom for hours, sobbing, and I press my ear to the door to make sure she is still alive, when my father disappears into the city, I know the school building five blocks from our house has not changed a bit. It would still comfort me if I stepped into it.
It is true I have little interest in the future. When teachers speak of ambition, college, goals, careers, success, my eyes are trailing dust motes in a beam of sun. I want everyone to leave the room so I can go through the trash. Maybe there is something in there I could use right now.
Kindergarten through sixth grade, the school knows us. The school is our stable and we are little horses dashing up the hill to beat the bell every morning. My father is the only Arab father, but he runs for PTA president and is elected. The French Canadian and Italian parents vote for him. He runs for school board later and loses. “I think that was pushing it,” says my mother. What does “pushing it” mean? Thinking about the future is pushing it. I would hold us here even when Here hurts, but nothing gives me that power. Only in words on a page can it still be yesterday. Still Walt Whitman, still Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, only in words. There were more chapters in that book, I’m sure of it. More tribes and countries we had not discussed.
What I cannot dream then is how I will come back to Central School on the day after the Last Day, 40 years later. The custodian pausing in the same front doorway with his wide broom, a dreamy relaxed look on his face. He says, Go right in, it’s still there. Look around. Don’t te
ll anyone I haven’t emptied the trash cans yet.
I take my time. It’s summer, so that’s all there is. Because Central School is a historic monument to more people than me, nothing really has changed. Same drinking trough. Same banister and wide stairs. I paw through the trash can in my second grade classroom and claim My Personal Dictionary by Eric—the “L” page lists “Light, Love, Laugh, Lift, Lose, Little, Loose, Labor.” Okay Eric, I say out Loud. A+, man. Everything you’ll need for the Life, man, right there on one page. I stick his dictionary in my waistband under my T-shirt, feeling like a pirate, press my forehead against the white bathroom wall tile, down low, where I would have reached in third grade. I did not mean to break John’s nose or drive Miss Dreon crazy. I should never ever have told Karen to pull down her underpants on the playground. In the gymnasium, the same stage I stood on, could it be, the same burgundy draperies? I shoot a few free throws and make them. I never made them back then. A ring of ghostly girls dances a Gypsy dance. Didn’t we wear our grandmothers’ scarves? And didn’t we pledge, pledge, pledge, palms on our chests, every day we lived, pledge to the one nation, the freedom we believed in, didn’t we? Fat lot of good.
Forty years later I want to be true to that oddball in a golden gunny-sack dress with purple sleeves. What history taught us, we promised to learn. We would be braver, wiser, than ones who came before. We pledged, and felt proud in the pledging. There would be no more war because the world had seen war, it was terrible and now we knew better things. We would always be rich in our knowing, even if our velvet sacks of quarters gave out, and our mothers’ sorrow turned to anger, and our principal went to jail. There were extra red bricks stacked in the corners of our yard, same color as the school. There could still be a project. We would do better this time.
Slow time rapidly passing, watch it, the time we can’t believe till a few years after my return to Central School, we’re sitting in another auditorium clapping for our own boy crossing a stage on his high school graduation day. He could not find the red tassel for his flat hat, so he is wearing my old black one, the only graduate with a black one. Tomorrow I will find the red tassel in the trash, still in the plastic, at home. Care in the details, I always told him. It didn’t take. I was a better student than mother, maybe. And now it is too late for new habits. And the headlines count the boys, the men, the women, fallen every day for stupid reasons, cycles of falling, the headlines count and they do not count, and I despise them. Pledging to nothing but what can’t be said, to Lost Labor and the Light we smother, for what? We’re pushing it.
A thousand miles from the first city, and the parents still fighting in the foyer of my boy’s graduation hall, who could believe it? The parents still fighting, like history I guess, old repetitions unresolved, and the books still closing and history’s oiled engine clicking and spinning. All over the city of my grown-up years, marquees announcing farewell at every front gate and playground, wishing us well, wishing us a good summer even though you have to look really hard for a firefly now. I blow kisses to every one of them, tears in my eyes and throat and nose, I was a fool, and I will always be a fool, and there will never, never, be a last day of school.
Young Drummer Leaving Alamo Music Company
Slapping wooden sticks against your hand
with the pride that says, “These are mine,
I know how to use them,” walking beside your father
and brother in the stark July heat one early evening,
and I felt the lost sticks inside my own heart rat-a-tat
a little beat
back over to you though of course you didn’t hear it
thinking about fathers and mothers who are nice
enough
to let their kids take drum lessons even when it is
the last instrument
they would like to hear inside their house and I heard
your daddy say,
“You gotta practice, son, I really mean practice”
and I wondered, was that your first lesson? Are you
still full of the hope
of becoming a great drummer or was that
your 20th lesson
and the teacher just said, “Where’s that riff I told you
to learn?”
You looked proud. Drummers are always proud.
I was so proud
even though I only had a practice pad and got kicked
out of marching band
for some forgotten reason (may you have a better
career),
but hear me now. Even if you give it all up, as I did,
even if you don’t hold sticks for twenty years,
on some steamy night in Texas long down the road
when you’ve lost two friends in a week and didn’t say
good-bye
to either of them, when you’re staring straight ahead
at things getting worse in the world, wishing
everybody could hear
their own distant drummer playing anything better,
you realize, you are still hitting odd rhythmic patterns
on the skin of this world and in all the strange,
familiar ways,
it is still hitting you.
The Room in Which We Are Every Age at Once
As if there were
a home in the air around us from birth,
spaciousness bidding us enter,
we live inside the long story of time.
And it was language giving us bearing,
letting in light.
When I was 3, sky rimming pink
above rooftops,
Grandpa planted a redbud tree
that would bloom for years beyond us.
Each year it would say spring first.
Vocabulary falling into place,
we were always old and young
feeling familiar lines resound,
my favorite Margaret Wise Brown,
who died right before I was born,
and precious solitary Emily D.,
the words of all time waiting,
latched together like small huts,
stories of wise animals
and human beings
rising up inside us
to shelter our days.
Gate A-4
Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”
Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. “Help,” said the flight service person. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”
I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. “Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”
We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all th
e women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.
And then the airline broke out free beverages from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
About the Author
Honeybee Page 7