ON THE RURAL ROUTE

 

We arrived in the heat-thrum of summer

without warning, two young towheaded aliens from

the land of housing projects and junk yards

commandeered as playgrounds, spent the newly

lengthening days wandering, seeking out box turtles

and toads, garter snakes, plucking fat shining ticks

and the dark tongues of slugs from our sunburned arms

and legs, setting out on small, rickety boats, each

painted a different shade of ever-peeling blue,

puffy orange life vests smelling of must,

of those thick, watery seasons long since passed.

In the winter months, the school bus sometimes

could not get through, and the snowplows were slow

to find us, scraping their stubborn way up that

narrow curve of road to our small scattering

of cabins barely visible, the deep-frozen lake on one

side and the deep hibernating fields on the other,

furrows grown hard as gravestone beneath.

The small black-and-white TV was mostly snow

as well, only one local channel's signal strong enough

to reach our clothes-hanger antenna, giving us

the news we could easily see for ourselves.

The weighted sky hung low, the white earth rising

to meet it, growing closer from all directions,

while all else in the world became hopelessly far away,

our lessons for the day stretched out before us,

waiting to be written, before the early fall of dark.

THE LOST CITY

 

We pondered the popular myths of our childhood,

large and small, the blurred and grainy image

of Bigfoot walking through the woods,

so alone that we felt more sympathy than fear;

considered whether to spend our weekly allowance

on those X-ray glasses or sea monkeys

advertised in the backs of our comic books,

those other worlds of myth and muscle,

where humanity, which had been so foolish,

was always saved at the last possible moment.

We wondered, too, where all those planes

and ships had vanished, their signals lost forever,

while attempting to cross the Bermuda Triangle.

Wondered how many miles into the ocean

the lost city of Atlantis -- which we knew to be

true -- could be, and if one of us ever traveled there

in this lifetime without the other, how we might

send word back to the bright world above.

It's the way I speak to you now, brother,

through the weight and distance of all these years,

your reply moving slowly through the waves

while I wonder at the beauty of that city,

sparks of ancient light flashing against its glass,

a story, like you, I am not willing to let go.

BETWEEN BURSTS OF THUNDER, WE HEAR ROBINS SINGING

If we cannot learn the song

of these birds, calling through

the shuddering dark, let us at least

better study their silence.

If we cannot know the secrets

of their flight, let us at least

acquire the stillness they have

perfected on thin air.

CIRCLE ROUTES

 

The Canada geese this morning

are plodding in weary circles

along the side of the road,

one after the other, waiting for

this gray Autumn rain to lift

to begin their long flight

back to where they started from.

TOBACCO

 

I never took up the family habit of smoking,

as my grandfathers did, both of them eaten away

by cancer -- or my grandmother Artie,

who spit that bug-colored juice into a milk jug

just off to the side of the open porch,

as discretely as one could manage, not wanting

the world to know that she chewed the stuff.

But when my mother was a girl of five

or six, she reminds me, she was startled and stung

by a wasp, and her blonde, skinny arm began

to balloon, her breathing soon reduced

to a labored wheeze, the blue sky wheeling

and the dark earth pulling its door

open beneath her, she remembers her uncles

running gangly-limbed out to the field

to snatch a few green and fragrant leaves,

dowsing them with well water and wrapping them,

gently, around her red and swollen skin.

"It must have worked," she smiled softly, her eyes

grown distant and wistful in her remembering,

"Because here I am." Did she mean merely

that we make do with the remedy we have on hand,

or that one poison sometimes erases another?

Some lessons, perhaps, are lost on a son

born and raised in the frozen north.

But I can kiss and wrap a wound, I can run

when my daughter is on the cusp of falling, or edges

too close toward the oncoming traffic.

We are both, to our occasional and mutual

wonder, stronger and faster than we could have

imagined only moments before.

MY DAUGHTER SPEAKS OF BIRDS

 

My daughter speaks of birds, speaks in wonder

of their sing-song call and response,

their endless reserve of resilience and guile

in the face of all manner of adversity,

the sudden and startling grace of their flight,

which, after all this time, continues to

amaze those of us standing

flat-footed on the earth below.

She asks which bird I might come back as

after I have departed from this life,

and how she will know it's me.

"Fly close to me three times," she suggests,

"then give out one call." This seems

a reasonable request, provided my new

bird-self can remember the details.

Our ancestors, after all, believed that

the soul was carried in, and away,

on the wings of the sielulintu,

that the whole of earth and sky were formed

from the broken shell of a fallen egg.

We settle, for now, upon a common jay,

brightly handsome but unassuming,

vigilant in watching over its family, never

straying far from its wooded home.

We have, I hope, the better part of this life

to draw our fragile maps,

perfect our signals, our language

of mutual understanding.

DOG DAYS

 

Those long summer evenings of childhood,

when the air stilled, thick and sticky with heat,

and it became impossible to sleep,

my brother and I would bring our pillows

and bedclothes into the living room,

camping out on the floor like intrepid explorers,

stripped down to our white briefs,

our thin cotton sheets billowing like sails

toward the uncharted waters of sleep.

We could hear the chirr of crickets,

and the thump of moths against the screen,

dreading the high and tiny sirens

of thirsty mosquitoes circling the dark.

We would take turns getting up to readjust

the old box fan, which rattled and shook, never

quite staying put but pulling itself forward

bit by bit, or turning slowly to the opposite wall,

as if it knew a better way out of this misery,

this engine to our imaginary boats,

so clumsy and so stubborn, though it was

all we had, its rusted heart and grimy blades

slowing and sputtering to a stop, then

starting back up again, shaking off its own sleep

for our sake, and always -- we hoped --

strong enough to bring us home by morning.

DANDELIONS

 

Perhaps I have been too hard on the housing projects of my earliest years, as if they were merely prisons to be endured. We had yards, after all, as Louie Anderson reminded me. We had clean water and our own rooms, we had a washer and a dryer, and windows which kept out the winter air. We didn't even remember that we were trash, until someone at school reminded us. I learned to play soccer, albeit poorly, with the Vietnamese kids next door, only vaguely understanding the word refugee. We slurped our ramen at lunchtime, me inevitably making a mess with my chopsticks. I noticed that they laughed more easily than others around me, my family included. They grew their own vegetables in a small patch of earth out back, chomped on radishes and green onions right from the ground, washed clean with a garden hose. I loved most the dandelions which sprouted up everywhere overnight, like a thousand suns scattered across the sloping grass. I plucked and gathered them, careful in my choosing, brought them to the back door as a gift. But my mother refused them, saying they would only attract bees, and to throw them away outside. Many years later, when my little girl placed a small bunch of dandelions in my hand, something in me lifted and something in me mourned all over again. We brought them inside, placed them in a small vase, and the bees, busy with their tireless work elsewhere, paid us no mind at all.

THE UMBRELLA MAN

 

The umbrella repair man in West London

will fix yours for a modest fee,

set its broken spokes upright again,

turning expertly those pin-screws

too small for ordinary hands.

He knows all about your bad luck days,

the series of calamities that brought you here --

the time the cat ran away,

or when your car wouldn't start

and you were already late for the funeral,

the morning you were nearly blown

into oncoming traffic, your hat

carried somewhere down the road,

your flimsy umbrella turned inside out

against the maddening wind.

He's here to lift your humble sail,

to repair what otherwise would have been

tossed aside, to right and steady your course,

if only in this small, ordinary way,

to send you back into the next downpour,

calm and confident, gray rain falling

hard all around you in a nearly perfect circle,

while you remain unbothered,

as though you were some kind of royalty,

as if you were hardly there at all.

SEARCHING FOR THE POET'S GRAVE

 

They are searching for Lorca's remains again

today, their big yellow machinery

nudging and clawing at the silent earth,

scooping out rows and rows of doorways

along this withered patch of soil.

Though no one is here now to answer them,

no one to say, No thank you, sirs,

I'm not interested in returning,

and your Bible is no map for my soul.

But they have not questioned the cloud formations

in passing, nor the monuments of generals,

nor the crooked olive trees, unwaveringly lazy

in their beauty, witnesses to all.

No one has called in the sun and moon

to spit out their long and secret songs, explain

their absence when needed most.

No one has yet knocked upon my door,

demanding to peruse the shelves,

where they would surely find the one they seek,

still speaking, unafraid, his linen suit

not even wrinkled.

But the workers, naturally, will go on

with their labors, long past sunset,

coming back empty handed, the shapes of

new countries emerging through their shirt-sweat,

while the poet just goes on dreaming,

as he did a hundred years ago,

the witnesses to his whereabouts

now seemingly everywhere.

THE FAWN

 

Walking to work through the half-dark soot of early morning, chemicals still clinging to the damp air, I am startled by the motionless gaze of a young deer, peering through the cemetery's black iron fence, solitary, unimpressed and unafraid by my presence. White mist, like the small splashes along her ribs, hovers around her. For the past two nights, whole blocks of this street have gone up in flames, set off by protestors or outside agitators, blackened brick and the empty easels of storefronts now waiting for whatever sunlight can break through. And on the opposite side of the street, this thin-legged beauty nibbles calmly at the grass and flowers, as if saying plainly, "This land was here long before you and your dead arrived." Having satisfied her belly and curiosity, she is gone seemingly in the flash of a single leap, an agility reserved for the eternally hunted. While I continue on, the interloper in this scene, my own awkward frame lumbering along, moving further and further out of view.

FRUIT FLY

 

I peel a Clementine tangerine for

my young daughter, and immediately,

seemingly willed into existence

from thin air, there you are, circling,

assessing, navigating the smoothest

possible surface on which to land.

No time, I suppose, for introductions,

or easing your way into a room.

Your lifespan here, after all, is so brief,

and your thirst relentless, ancestral.

Strange, then, to consider our shared DNA,

invisible ladder reaching between us,

the opposing engines of our bodies,

our separate intuitions and needs,

ostensibly whole worlds apart.

Yet you are somehow always familiar,

inventing and erasing yourself on

the shifting periphery, bumping into

the white plastered walls, as if motion

itself were the only true means

of survival, and sweetness -- the very

sweetness of this world -- worthy

of every possible risk.

MYSTERY GIRL

 

She said her name was

Silence, and to call whenever

I wanted to talk, or even

if I didn't -- and sometimes

especially if I didn't. I have been

doing so religiously for all

these years, with little to show

now but these lines written

to and from myself, and to the

nameless gods who hide

amongst the bruise-colored

clouds and answer, in their way,

only when it rains.

COUSTEAU

 

We liked the sound of his voice, balanced

somewhere between childlike wonder

and the calm certainty of knowing,

filtering through the small television speaker.

We liked his red cap bobbing against

the shifting blue, his sun-weathered skin,

hands gently cradling one alien lifeform

or another, startled into being, reaching out

in all directions at the expanse of air.

We loved most the strangeness of it all,

every new thing in search of a name,

this kingdom so far removed from the drab

certainty of classrooms and housing projects.

How else could we have known that

the world, like us, was made mostly of water,

how else to imagine our small bodies

descending into darkness unafraid,

suddenly weightless among the current,

how else could we have ever believed

in all the beauty we could not see?

GHAZAL LOOKING EAST, THEN WEST

I come from a language that has no future tense,

where love itself is measured simply by standing still.

My mother's ancestors brought bad habits but good songs,

their hungry ghosts lingering around the whiskey still.

You told me once that loyalty was a defect of character.

My heart is a three-legged dog following you still.

Perhaps it's not love if something doesn't get broken.

When everything shatters, even the world becomes still.

My daughter spied a dolphin in the Mississippi last week.

A child's eye can do that, can hold a great river still.

We listen closely to the arguments of winter crows,

the air between each shriek all the more still.

My thoughts weren't all that interesting, so I let them go.

They wore themselves out, pretending to be still.

THE NAMELESS BIRD

 

So often we mistake beauty for the light behind it.

We know better, but it's one of our favorite lies.

We long for clarity, seen through the lens of unreason.

Love itself walks between, where all hope lies.

I don't know how the geese find their way back every year,

or what causes two lovers to agree upon the same lie.

These winter crows don't care to know your name;

but they recognize friend from foe, and they never lie.

The bird in your heart doesn't understand that it's caged.

It sings when spoken to, sleeps where its shadow lies.

Death wins the final argument; we understand this.

But that doesn't make the songs we sang suddenly lies.

It's true, brother, that I should visit more often than I do;

but the grave is not where any of our memories lie.

It's no use asking me who is living and who has gone.

If you want the truth, let me begin with this lie.