SENSITIVE

 

I have never wanted for you, dearest daughter,

to be anything other than the beautiful and sensitive

soul you have always been, collecting oak seeds

to watch them spin back down to earth,

those long-stemmed dandelions bent over, as if in prayer,

deciphering the forms of strange new animals

among the clouds, where the ancestors sleep,

faces smiling back from the most ordinary of stone.

I have admired, as an outsider, the special language

you share with birds and trees, how the cats

in the neighborhood all come to you, unafraid,

knowing you already, and how you mourned deeply

the death of your beta fish, the one you called

your sister and confided your worries to.

I have heard you choosing each word for a poem

or song, tapping them against the roof

of your mouth, letting the new sounds settle,

until they filled your ears as perfectly as the silence,

watched you conduct, with arms gently waving,

a string concerto constructed in your mind;

and when bullies have thrown their sharpened words

like so many stones, I have sat within your sorrow,

unable to offer an answer as to why some, young

or old, simply enjoy the act of causing harm.

These are the times when I want nothing more than to

protect you from the inclement elements of self,

the ever-shifting atmosphere of your inner world

overwhelming you, to close, temporarily, the windows

against the sudden rain of summer, until the sun

again finds its way, small enough to tuck into

your pocket like a coin, thin and hot to the touch,

rubbed smooth at the center, reflecting.

CARRYING MY DAUGHTER TO BED

 

My daughter, so proud lately of her lengthening limbs

and muscles, still asks, on most evenings,

to be carried to bed, which -- amazingly, though

with no small effort -- I am still able to do.

Long gone are the days of lifting her with ease,

as though moving one of my own limbs,

absentmindedly, up or down, gone now the special hold

I somehow stumbled upon when her wailing --

as if the entire anguish of the world had

been condensed into one elongated vowel --

simply could not be consoled, her small and fragile

body held out before me, head resting snugly

in the palm of my hand, her torso fitting perfectly

into my forearm, her flat and skinny feet,

not yet having touched upon earth

or grass, reaching out into the air, unafraid,

and we swayed that way, gently, almost imperceptibly,

upon the kitchen linoleum, until her cries

drifted slowly into coos and gurgles, and at last

into the welcome silence of sleep.

Tonight, I carry her down the narrow hallway,

turning sideways, and with little grace on my part,

dropping her into the soft familiarity of

bedsheets and blankets that bear her fragrance,

her shape still faintly visible from the night before,

where she will drift again into weightlessness,

her body building itself even when she

is seemingly gone, as the map behind her eyelids,

the one only she can read, draws her

forward, relentlessly forward.

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.

LAYOVER

 

When I find myself walking through the airport,

the enormous glass walls filled with sky

and my own meager reflection, ostensibly

just another middle-aged traveler wandering lost,

I am, unbeknownst to others, suddenly

thirteen years old again, traversing that strange city

of flight alone, disregarding the instructions given

to me by the kindly airport attendant, a young woman

in a wine-colored smock and neatly-tied scarf

smelling vaguely of vanilla and lavender.

I had never flown, and found myself suddenly

on a solo endeavor, anxiously en route

to stay with my brother or sister out west --

no one had quite determined where

I would end up -- the quietly stubborn kid

enamored with music and poetry, the mysterious world

of girls from which they all seemed to emanate.

My mother, who no longer wanted the job,

would be staying where she was, taking yet another

sabbatical from her parenting career.

So, I found myself on layover, hovering between

cities, and between lives, daydreaming past

the gift shops and baggage carousels,

the lounges overflowing with beery conversation

as the Cubs struggled to pull out a win.

I suppose my mother meant to impart a lesson,

but I already knew how to leave

and not look back, knew how to get lost

in the secret rooms of self, or deep within a crowd.

Overhead, I could hear the formless voice

calling out gate numbers and departure times,

the soft-spoken warnings, as if this were all merely

a game of chance, some tickets better than

others. Who could say which was which?

I walked on, only half listening, for something

that sounded vaguely familiar, the right combination

coupled with a bit of urgency, something that

would lead me, for now, homeward.

AN AFTERNOON IN EARLY JUNE

 

It was the day of our neighborhood fair, the street closed from one end to the other to make room for carnival rides, local food vendors, and musicians. Kids with faces painted as jungle cats or superheroes strode up and down, panting dogs lapped up the water left out for them. Someone at the coffee shop had paid in advance for the next person's order, a gesture which was quickly taken up by the next, and the next, on and on, each new customer surprised by this mild act of generosity. The cash register grew quiet, the tip jar was emptied and filled again. I like to think this small, impromptu ritual went on long after I left, their smiles and nods, the polite raising of their glasses, stranger to stranger. "Kippis!," as my daughter and I say at home, a Finnish toast I first heard as "keep us" -- as in, keep us well, keep us together, keep us close to the source of this love, whatever the name. Keep us here, savoring that first sweet sip the whole length of the day.

BREAKDOWN

 

When my mother returned from the hospital -- the place where I was born a few short years before -- came back after several rounds of what were then known as shock treatments, she didn't come back all the way. Her cool blue eyes seemed to be somewhere else, her words slower and distant, as if trailing behind her from the next room. When she would occasionally forget the names of my brother and me, or get us mixed up, I didn't understand. I wondered who this woman was, and whether the right mother had been sent home to us. She spent much of her time in bed, unread magazines and bottles of pills balanced beside her, monotonous flicker of the black-and-white TV her only window to the outside. But I liked when she played her guitar for us, when whatever had been taken from her seemed to return, at least in part, her voice becoming almost a smile. She would sing those old country hymns and children's songs, murder ballads which I later found she had changed the words to, for our sake. Even within the beauty of such music, she seemed to be saying, the world was a frightening place, violent without warning, and whatever path you chose was yours to walk, and walk alone.

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.