square television set with a scrappy picture,
and the streams of bees swooping
to the jasmine vine
right outside the window.
They dip into blossoms and fly away.
Never could she have imagined being jealous
of a bee.
She listens to the radio say there will be
more fighting
though no one she knows likes fighting.
Does anyone feel happy after fighting?
It’s a mystery.
She chews on a sesame cookie
very very slowly.
Staring at the sesame seeds
she could almost give them
names.
A Stone So Big You Could Live in It
It happens in the woods
A laugh just pops out
It happens with a stone so big you could live in it
Round mounds of soil and stone
Perfectly dressed in radiant moss
Blaze of bees around a single blooming branch
Path so quiet one foot answers the other
Charred ashes by Jericho Bay
Blue dots on trees lining the trail
Sudden sweetness of it
Someone was here before you
Didn’t want you to get lost
Thank you
Someone
Thank you
Blue
Museum
I was 17, my family had just moved to San Antonio. A local magazine featured an alluring article about a museum called the McNay, an old mansion once the home of an eccentric many-times-married watercolorist named Marian Koogler McNay. She had deeded it to the community to become a museum upon her death. I asked my friend Sally, who drove a cute little convertible and had moved to Texas a year before we did, if she wanted to go there. Sally said, “Sure.” She was a good friend that way. We had made up a few words in our own language and could dissolve into laughter just by saying them. Our mothers thought we were a bit odd. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, we drove over to Broadway. Sally asked, “Do you have the address of this place?” “No,” I said, “just drive very slowly and I’ll recognize it, there was a picture in the magazine.” I peered in both directions and pointed, saying, “There, there it is, pull in!” The parking lot under some palm trees was pretty empty. We entered, excited. The museum was free. Right away, the spirit of the arched doorways, carved window frames, and elegant artwork overtook us. Sally went left, I went right. A group of people seated in some chairs in the lobby stopped talking and stared at us.
“May I help you?” a man said. “No,” I said. “We’re fine.” I didn’t like to talk to people in museums. Tours and docents got on my nerves. What if they talked a long time about a painting you weren’t that interested in? I took a deep breath, moved on to another painting—fireworks over a patio in Mexico, maybe? There weren’t very good tags in this museum. In fact, there weren’t any. I stood back and gazed. Sally had gone upstairs. The people in the lobby had stopped chatting. They seemed very nosy, keeping their eyes on me with irritating curiosity. What was their problem? I turned down a hallway. Bougainvilleas and azaleas pressed up right against the windows. Maybe we should have brought a picnic. Where was the Moorish courtyard? I saw some nice sculptures in another room, and a small couch. This would be a great place for reading. Above the couch hung a radiant print by Paul Klee, my favorite artist, blues and pinks merging softly in his own wonderful way. I stepped closer. Suddenly I became aware of a man from the lobby standing behind me in the doorway. “Where do you think you are?” he asked. I turned sharply. “The McNay Art Museum!” He smiled then, and shook his head. “Sorry to tell you. The McNay is three blocks over, on New Braunfels Street. Take a right when you go out of our driveway, then another right.” “What is this place?” I asked, still confused. He said, “Well, we thought it was our home.” My heart jolted. I raced past him to the bottom of the staircase and called out, “Sally! Come down immediately! Urgent!” I remember being tempted to shout something in our private language, but we didn’t have a word for this. Sally came to the top of the stairs smiling happily and said, “You have to come up here, there’s some really good stuff! And there are old beds too!” “No, Sally, no,” I said, as if she were a dog, or a baby. “Get down here. Speed it up. This is an emergency.” She stepped elegantly down the stairs as if in a museum trance, looking puzzled. I just couldn’t tell her out loud in front of those people what we had done. I actually pushed her toward the front door, waving my hand at the family in the chairs, saying, “Sorry, ohmygod, please forgive us, you have a really nice place.” Sally stared at me in the parking lot. When I told her, she covered her mouth and doubled over with laughter, shaking. We were still in their yard. I imagined them inside looking out the windows at us. She couldn’t believe how long they let us look around without saying anything, either. “That was really friendly of them!” “Get in the car,” I said sternly. “This is mortifying.”
The real McNay was fabulous, splendid, but we felt a little nervous the whole time we were there. Van Gogh, Picasso, Tamayo. This time, there were tags. This time, we stayed together, in case anything else weird happened.
We never told anyone.
Thirty years later, a nice-looking woman approached me in a public place. “Excuse me,” she said. “I need to ask a strange question. Did you ever, by any chance, enter a residence, long ago, thinking it was the McNay Museum?”
Thirty years later, my cheeks still burned. “Yes. But how do you know? I never told anyone.”
“That was my home. I was a teenager sitting with my family talking in the living room. Before you came over, I never realized what a beautiful place I lived in. I never felt lucky before. You thought it was a museum. My feelings changed about my parents after that too. They had good taste. I have always wanted to thank you.”
For My Desk
We judge books
by their covers
every day.
You do, I do.
Human beings—
we’re stuck with ourselves.
Always working on
that new project.
Never keeping up or catching up
with what we miss.
Feeling remiss.
Each morning
birds speak first.
Sparrows gossip joyously.
Gray dove continues to land on a feeder
too small for her.
and purple martin father
solve it all.
Communication Skills
I am working on speaking to the ones
who haven’t spoken to us in years,
the ones swinging punches out of nowhere,
the ones who decided to shun us
for reasons unknown,
who wouldn’t greet our group
at the family reunion
but sat across the swimming pool
looking wounded.
The strength of strangers will
help us survive.
Strangers are so generous.
They don’t know our faults, our flaws,
so they hope for the best,
muttering good morning
when you pass at the bridge.
The consolation of strangers
is endless and forgiving.
But it takes all our courage
with close ones sometimes.
Families, neighbors, best friends…
Even if we believe in world peace,
they will find reasons to dislike us.
I think of Gandhi who said
he might never have become
an activist for nonviolence
if the neighbor boys had not
beaten him up.
The United States Is Not the World
and this I was reminded of by
mamas in silk saris
grandpas in burgundy turbans,
smoky overc
oats
Sikh boys with powder-puff topknots
braided girls munching Belgian chocolate
and a gloomy little lad with a strange
golden cone on his head
Thank you, I said. O thank you Gate
D-4, Amsterdam to Delhi
months of smug Americana dissolving
quickly
as tiny white no-jetlag pills
on the tongue
Taverne du Passage
Rush of rain,
ancient signature on earth.
In the old photographs, a boy with long hair
tips a basket of warm eggs toward the lens.
What do we retain?
There’s a stained baby shirt
in my drawer. A music box
with a baby lifting its hands.
I miss so many things,
the deep indentations
in each hen’s hay,
the way he said “precious”
and “gems,” two words no longer living
in his coop.
Wee Path
In the town of Robert Burns called Dumfries, one of the many towns in southern Scotland that claim the beloved bard who lived so large (many children, many loves), I took a wrong turn, walking. Missed the red sandstone landmark church, kept going by the River Nith, Robert’s river he tramped along regularly, never imagining (I would think not) a white statue of himself in the center square. I walked till it was clear I was not getting anywhere I needed to be. Got a little nervous. Stopped to ask two Scottish men in checkered shorts who chorused conflictingly go forward—nay, go back! I noticed you, said one, as I was driving home, and you looked lost. One said, go right, the other go left, go up, go in, go out, till the younger said, Okay listen to him. Him said, Take a wee path. You’ll barely see it. There’s a donkey in the field on the right. A donkey? Aye, a donkey. There are leaning trees, leaning like a cover for the path. Go between them. It’s truly wee, I tell ye. Look hard. Walk between the walls and the fence and you’ll find yourself right there, right there! They wished me well. Younger said, If you get lost, it’s all his fault. No donkey was spotted but dozens of rabbits cavorting on a wide flat green. And no single wee path but twenty perhaps and as for leaning trees, weren’t there groves in all directions? Oh Robert Burns, I got lost in your land, a little lonesome, but I felt your poems in the soles of my feet.
Password
I have made so many mistakes
you might think I would sit down
Here when it rains
the streets fill up like rivers
A woman swirls away in her Italian car
and the whole city mourns
They say she could sing
till something that might not have happened
had a chance again
You know, that gift we give
one another
How can we help someone else
want to live?
The man who sprays trees
stands beneath his hose
bathing in poison
He says a mask gets in his way
Here the roses stay on the branch
till sun steams their petals
like blackened collars
I miss the evenings
we walked among train tracks
reading messages in the weeds
even the strangest parts of ourselves
growing dear
A child awakens crying for candles
Those little tiny skinny ones he says
meaning incense sticks
He wants to clutch them in his bed
I have slept so many times
you might think I would really be awake
by now
The Frogs Did Not Forget
how to do what they do
through the huge dry days
where were they hiding?
one might lose a tune abandon a tradition
fall into a crack but the frogs after the rain
were singing on six notes
outside the bedroom window’s
tangle of vines
pleasure poking its throaty resonance
back into my brain
Missing It
When I was a teenager, my family drove hundreds of miles from Texas to the Grand Canyon, stopping at small Route 66 motels and diners, buying tea and lemonade in tall cups to keep us going. Seems to me we should have been reading Grand Canyon guidebooks in the car, but I think we were reading novels, newspapers, and magazines, and my mom kept doing crossword puzzles, constantly asking us for esoteric three-letter words. At a roadside stop, a wasp stung my brother in the neck. He said it was a bee, but I had seen it, A WASP. His neck swelled. Our parents worried. He had no experience of ecstasy, however, as I once had upon being stung in the neck vein by a WASP myself. By the time we arrived at our destination, I found myself wrapped around a squishy pillow in the backseat with a thunderous headache. My father woke me, told me to get out to look and see, and for a moment I couldn’t remember where we were or why. Astonishing grogginess and crumpled clothes. I stumbled toward the edge of the Great View and noticed a man farther down the line with a raccoon on a leash. This woke me up. The raccoon seemed to be looking into the canyon, nose tipped forward. He turned his head side to side and sniffed, sat back on his haunches thoughtfully, and put his little paws together. I quietly eased in their direction. The man made some comment to the raccoon, like “Have we ever seen anything better, pal?” And the raccoon looked up at him and smiled. Perhaps I was hallucinating from my headache. I motioned to my family to join me at my eavesdropper’s perch, but they had moved off toward a better angle between the trees. I could hear my mom’s voice exclaiming, “It’s so deep! Look how wide!” But I had so many questions I wanted to ask the man, like “How long have you been together, where did you get him, are you tempted to let him return to his own tribe, did he really just smile,” etc. I could only stare into their reverie from a distance. It didn’t seem right to break it. Later, driving home, as my family argued over whether they should have ridden down into the canyon on donkeys or not, whether we should have visited more vantage points or taken a guided hike, whether we should have stayed longer, found a motel room, blah blah. I realized I had not seen the layers of stone, the grandness of the Grand Canyon, at all. I had only seen the raccoon.
The Crickets Welcome Me to Japan
All night they strum
their tuneless tunes
cousins of the crickets I heard
long ago in the corners of my room
I know the stories
to carry them out, not to crush them
and the small cages they are kept in
for good luck
but tonight I understand them
for the first time
after all my flying over water
the long tipped hours, the stretched-out light
they’re saying, Slow down
slow down
We told you this long ago but
you forgot
Ted Kooser Is My President
When I travel abroad, I will invoke
Ted’s poems at checkpoints:
yes, barns, yes, memory, gentility,
the quiet little wind among stones.
If they ask, You are American?
I will say, Ted’s kind of American.
No, I carry no scissors or matches.
Yes, horizons, dinner tables.
Yes, weather, the honesty of it.
Buttons, chickens. Feel free
to dump my purse. I’ll wander
to the window, stare out for days.
Actually, I have never been
to Nebraska, except with Ted,
who hosted me dozens of times,
though we have never met.
His deep assurance comforts me.
He’s not big on torture at all.
He could probably sneak into your country
when you wer
en’t looking
and say something really good about it.
Have you noticed those purple blossoms
in a clump beside your wall?
How We Talk About It
She’s mourning her beloved lamb
found gutted and hanging from the rafters
of the high school barn.
How could anyone do such a thing?
Were they jealous of his prize?
He’s mourning his son,
number 3000 American dead in Iraq,
but as far as he can feel, the worst one.
She says, “The lamb would have been killed later
after winning more animal shows, but nicely.”
Now here is a place I pause
in wonder.
The father was grieved to see his son’s picture
on an antiwar website.
Each morning the brain struggles to stay focused
on ones in front of it, ones with names,
but some rebellious streak
keeps sweeping the fields for those we won’t hear
about,
ragged & bloodied & hurriedly buried
pressed & jumbled & missed by someone else
we also won’t know.