A Maze Me
POEMS FOR GIRLS
Naomi Shihab Nye
Dedication
In memory,
Precious Nina
Precious Rubina
And for Jamie and Lyra Iris Skye,
Jenny and Lyda Rose,
Daria and Josephine
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
SECTION ONE — Big Head
Rose
Mystery
Ringing
Toys on the Planet Earth
Every Cat Has a Story
Visiting My Old Kindergarten Teacher . . .
Worry
The Boys
Where Are You?
Ellipse
Big Head, Big Face
Supple Cord
Every Day
The Bucket
Little Chair
SECTION TWO — Secret Hum
Secret
Some Days
Eye
I Want to Meet the Girl
In the School Cafeteria
Crush
Where He Is
Groups of People Going Places Together
Sifter
I Said to Dana’s Mother
Because of Poems
Having Forgotten to Bring a Book . . .
If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit
On the Same Day My Parents Were Arguing
Changed
Hairdo
Message in the Thin Wind Before Bedtime
High Hopes
Bad Dream
SECTION THREE — Magical Geography
People I Admire
My Body Is a Mystery
Feeling Wise
Sometimes I Pretend
Poor Monday
Watermelon Truck
Margaret
My Sad Aunt
The List
You’re Welcome!
Moving House
Making a Mosaic
Necklace
From Labrador, 1800s
SECTION FOUR — Sweet Dreams Please
Historical Marker
Baby-sitting Should Not Be Called
Abandoned Homestead . . .
Turtle
Little Blanco River
The Bird Pose
Meteor Watch
Writing in a Silo
Finding a Pink Ribbon . . .
Bird in Hand
The Word PEACE
To the Tree Frogs Outside the Window
Messages from Everywhere
SECTION FIVE — Something True
Day After Halloween, Jack-o’-Lantern Candle . . .
What Travel Does
Abandoned Post Office, Big Bend
Learning to Talk
Over the Weather
On the Sunset Limited Train
Across the Aisle
Mona’s Taco
A Way Around
To My Texas Handbook
Thoughts That Came in Floating
Back Ad
About the Author
Books by Naomi Shihab Nye
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Lannan Foundation and the town of Marfa, Texas.
—N.S.N.
Introduction
At twelve, I worried about a skinny road between two precipices. Every day my mother drove on such a road, or so I imagined, to her job teaching school. I feared her car would slide off one side, into a ditch, or off the other edge, into a murky gray river. But I never told her what I was scared of. I worried day after day without mentioning my fear to anyone, till there was a fist in my stomach, punching me back again and again to check the clock. Wasn’t she late? I was a nervous wreck in secret.
I did not want to be thirteen, which cast me as something of an oddity among my friends, who were practicing with lipstick and the ratting hair comb deep into the belly of the night. Mary couldn’t wait to be thirteen. She stuffed her bra, packed away her dolls. Susie had been pretending she was thirteen for two years already. Kelly said thirteen was a lot more fun than anything that preceded it.
But I did not feel finished with childhood. I was hanging on like a desperado, traveling my own skinny road. The world of adults seemed grim to me. Chores and complicated relationships, checkbooks that needed balancing, oppressive daily schedules, and the worrisome car that always needed to have its oil or its tires changed (“bald tires” sounded so ominous) . . . Couldn’t I stay where I was a bit longer?
I stared at tiny children with envy and a sense of loss. They still had cozy, comfortable days ahead of them. I was plummeting into the dark void of adulthood against my will. I stared into the faces of all fretful, workaholic parents, thinking condescendingly, You have traveled too far from the source. Can’t you remember what it felt like to be fresh, waking up to the world, discovering new surprises every day? Adulthood is cluttered and pathetic. I will never forget.
I scribbled details in small notebooks—crumbs to help me find my way back, like Gretel in the darkening forest. Squirrels, silly friends, snoozing cats, violins, blue bicycles with wire baskets, pint boxes of blackberries, and random thoughts I had while weaving 199 multicolored potholders on a little red loom. I sold the potholders door to door for twenty-five cents each, stomping around the neighborhood, feeling absolutely and stubbornly as if I owned it. No one else had ever loved that neighborhood as much as I did.
If I wrote things down, I had a better chance of saving them.
Recently, a friend sent me an exquisite wreath in the mail. A tag was attached to it: A SMALL AMOUNT OF DEBRIS IS TO BE EXPECTED FROM THE VIBRATION OF SHIPPING.
Well, of course.
But who tells us this when we are twelve? Who mentions that the passage from one era into another can make us feel as if we are being shaken up, as if our contents are shifting and sifting into new alignments?
Earliest childhood: skillets and a fat soup pot and two cake pans and a funny double boiler with lots of little holes in one pan, lids and a muffin tin and two blue enamel spoons and an aluminum sifter with a small wooden knob on its handle, all living together in the low cupboard next to the stove.
A trove of wonders! Daily I was amazed and happy to take them out, stack them on the floor, bang them together a little, make a loud noise. Then I could put them back. There were ways they fit and ways they didn’t. The door to the cabinet never shut perfectly. I can close my eyes even today and feel its crooked wood, its metal latch, and the lovely mystery of the implements living in silence inside.
My mother worked at the sink nearby, peeling potatoes, running water over their smooth, naked bodies. I felt safe. My whole job was looking around.
It strikes me as odd: I cannot remember the name of a single junior high school teacher. I cannot remember any of their faces either. Yet I recall all my elementary and most of my high school teachers very clearly. What happened in between?
In junior high, I stood proudly in the percussion section in the school band, smooth wooden drumsticks in my hands. I clearly recall the snappy beats we played to warm up. I still feel my cheeks flaming when I was forced to sit down, runner-up in the spelling bee, because they gave me a military word. I remember the smooth shiny hair on the back of the head of the girl in front of me in Spanish class better than the subjunctive tense in Spanish. Some things stayed, during those rough years of transition, but not the things I might have dreamed.
What do you want to be? people always ask. They don’t ask who or how do you want to be?
I might have said, amazed forever. I wanted to be curious, interested, interesting, hopeful—and a little bit odd was okay too. I did not know
if I wanted to run a bakery, be a postal worker, play a violin or the timpani drum in an orchestra. That part was unknown.
Thankfully, after turning seventeen I started feeling as if my soul fit my age again, or my body had grown to fit my brain. But things felt a little rugged in between.
In college I met Nelle Lucas, who wore billowing bright cotton skirts and lavish turquoise-and-silver Native American jewelry. She taught ceramics (favoring hand-building techniques—coiling, rolling, smoothing) and showed us how to prepare our own basic handmixed glazes. I think I took her class three times.
Nelle and her husband had built some modest, rounded Navajo-style hogans out in the Texas hills, and on weekends, they shepherded little flocks of art students to the country. We dug a big hole in the ground to fire our pots and sang songs while the pots baked under the earth. Sometimes the pots disappointed us— blowing up, or cracking. One person’s pot might compromise someone else’s—after exploding, fragments stuck to your own precious glaze. Or someone’s glaze would drip strange configurations onto your perfect iron oxide surface. It was a tricky operation. Nelle sneaked wisdoms into every line of art instruction. She wasn’t terribly impressed with anyone’s pots, but she loved the process and she loved us all. Also, she made us laugh. She experimented. We slept in a circle, head to toe. We patted whole-wheat chapatis, cooking them over an open fire for our breakfast. Nelle loved freshly mixed granola, wild deer, and patience. She urged us to slow down and to pay better attention to everything. She was radiant, enthusiastic, unpredictable. And she was older than all our parents.
Somehow, knowing Nelle when I was in college gave me all the faith about “growing up” I needed. At every age, a person could still be whimsical, eccentric. A person could do and think whatever she wanted. She could be as spontaneous at seventy as at seven. I felt incredibly relieved.
Midway between Brady and Mason, Texas—two wonderful hill-country towns—there’s a mysterious general store called Camp Air. A small red stagecoach sits out front, and a little sign says the store is closed on Fridays and Saturdays, but I have never seen it open. Some cows with very short legs are penned up nearby, next to a “watermelon shed.” There’s a larger sign: HEY IF YOU NEVER STOP YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU MISSED. I always stop. And I still don’t know. But I like it. I like it a lot. “Camp Air” has a good ring to it. That’s where I want to live, every day, inside my timeless brain.
If you have a voice, and aren’t afraid to spend it . . .
If you have many voices and let them speak to one another in a friendly fashion . . .
If you’re not too proud to talk to yourself out loud . . .
If you will ask the questions pressing against your forehead from the inside . . .
you’ll be okay.
If you write three lines down in a notebook every day (they don’t have to be great or important, they don’t have to relate to one another, you don’t have to show them to anyone) . . .
you will find out what you notice. Uncanny connections will be made visible to you. That’s what I started learning when I was twelve, and I never stopped learning it.
Every year unfolds like a petal inside all the years that preceded it. You will feel your thinking springing up and layering inside your huge mind a little differently. Your thinking will befriend you. Words will befriend you. You will be given more than you could ever dream.
—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
San Antonio, Texas, 2004
SECTION ONE
Big Head
Rose
A very large spider
wove her fancy web
between the Don Juan rosebush
and the Queen’s Crown vine.
We greeted her every day
going in and out.
We had so many destinations
but she just swung there
in the air
in the day’s long stare
that grows so hot by four o’clock
we boycott the whole front yard.
By evening we’d be outside again
breathing jasmine
watering honeysuckle
plucking mint
and she’d be wrapping
her little flies and wasps
in sticky sacks.
The trolley rang its bell at us
and we waved back.
It was nice living with Rose.
Living our different lives
side by side.
One night wild thunder
shook the trees,
the sky crackled and split,
the winds blew hard
and by morning
Rose was gone.
Did she wash away?
Did she find a safer home?
She keeps spinning her elegant web
inside us
so long
so long
after the light made it shine.
Mystery
When I was two
I said to my mother
I don’t like you, but I like you.
She laughed a long time.
I will spend the rest of my life
trying to figure this out.
Ringing
A baby, I stood in my crib to hear
the dingy-ding of a vegetable truck approaching.
When I was bigger, my mom took me out
to the street
to meet the man who rang the bell and
he tossed me
a tangerine . . . the first thing I ever caught.
I thought he was
a magic man.
My mom said there used to be milk trucks too.
She said, Look hard, he’ll be gone soon.
And she was right. He disappeared.
Now, when I hear an ice-cream truck chiming
its bells, I fly.
Even if I’m not hungry—just to watch it pass.
Mailmen with their chime of dogs barking
up and down the street are magic too.
They are all bringers.
I want to be a bringer.
I want to drive a truck full of eggplants
down the smallest street.
I want to be someone making music
with my coming.
Toys on the Planet Earth
We need carved wooden cows, kites,
small dolls with flexible limbs.
I vote for the sponge in the shape of a sandwich.
Keep your bad news, world.
Dream of something better.
A triangle mobile spinning in the wind.
Furry monkeys hugging.
When my dad was small,
his only toy was an acorn and a stick.
That’s what he told me.
So he carved the acorn into a spinning top
and wrote in the dirt.
And that’s what made him
the man he is today.
Every Cat Has a Story
“British researchers found that a sheep can distinguish and recognize as many as 50 other sheep’s faces for up to two years, even in silhouette.” (NEWSPAPER REPORT)
The yellow cat from the bakery
smelled like a cream puff.
She followed us home.
We buried our faces
in her sweet fur.
One cat hid her head
when I practiced violin.
But she came out for piano.
At night she played sonatas on my quilt.
One cat built a nest in my socks.
One inhabited the windowsill
staring mournfully up the street all day
while I was at school.
One cat pressed the radio dial,
heard a voice come out, and smiled.
Visiting My Old Kindergarten Teacher, Last Day of School
She’s packed the brown bear puppet
in the cupboard and distributed
the Self-Portraits with Hats.
I remember those.
She says, “You look just the same
but bigger! I would know you anywhere!”
I would know her too.
Someone’s crying.
He doesn’t like the little holes
in the corner of his painting
from hanging on display.
I help her gather stubs of crayons
from the table grooves.
Do the plans she made on the first day
seem far away
as pebbles dropped into a stream?
The ones whose names she calls in her sleep
gather rumpled papers into their bags,
hug her and fly.
It is a big wind blowing
after they all go home.
Worry
My mother’s braid
is wrapped in soft tissue
and stored in a shoebox
in the attic.
I don’t want to be
eighty years old
looking at that braid
all by myself.
The Boys
I played with the boys till I felt blurry.
Minicars, fast cars,
the model ship constructed with toothpicks and glue.
WHOOOOOOOOO-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
(that was boring)
The boys went running into the field waving sticks!
The boys hit a fire hydrant with a stick and laughed!
Where Are You?
When I was small,
I called out through the house.
I’m here, said my mother and dad.
I’m here, said my brother,
and the bear on my bed
said it too.
In your bones
in your memory
trust me
I’m tucked inside each fresh paper page
you’ll write on.
Each hour you don’t see me, I’m still there.
How many things add up the same?
Your life, my life,
the bucket, the sea.
Ellipse
My father has a parenthesis
on either side of his mouth.
His new words
live inside his old words.
And there’s a strange semicolon
birthmark on my neck—
what does it mean,
A Maze Me Page 1