in the breeze, their job in life,
and they are proud of it.
My Body Is a Mystery
My body is a mystery
a magical geography of skin
It keeps me in
And I travel in it everywhere
sometimes it seems to beat me there
and then we meet again
Oh my eyes are the windows
and my face is the sky
And my legs are the trees that hold me
My hands are the branches and my head is a box
and I spend my lifetime picking locks
My body is a symphony
a tuba and a piccolo and drum
I hear some drum
And it sometimes seems to beat so low
And other times it makes me want to run
and then I have to run
Oh my blood is the music
and my voice finds the notes
And my lungs are conductors singing One! Two!
And I sometimes lose the melody but I
never lose the dream
of the songs that might come through
Because my body is a mystery
a magical geography of skin
that keeps me in
And I travel in it everywhere
sometimes it seems to beat me there and then
We meet again
Oh we always meet again
Feeling Wise
A lady was quoted in the newspaper.
“It is not so hard to feel wise.
Just think of something dumb you could say,
then don’t say it.”
I like her.
I would take her gingerbread
if I knew where her house was.
Julia Child the famous chef said,
“I never feel lonely in the kitchen.
Food is very friendly.
Just looking at a potato, I like
to pat it.”
Staring down
makes you feel tall.
Staring into someone else’s eyes
makes you feel not alone.
Staring out the window during school,
you become the future,
smooth and large.
Sometimes I Pretend
I’m not me,
I only work for me.
This feels like
a secret motor
chirring inside my pocket.
I think, She will be so glad
when she sees the homework
neatly written.
She will be relieved
someone sharpened pencils,
folded clothes.
Poor Monday
At the stoplight
faces in the next window
are plaster-cast ceramics,
blank, unoriginal.
At school my friends drag in glumly.
Our teacher says, “What can you expect?
It’s Monday.”
So what?!
I’m Naomi!
You’re Rosa Lee!
Watermelon Truck
Today a truck heaped with watermelons
at the corner—
fat, stacked bodies
striped like animals
The sign said “75 cents and up”
An old man shaded his head with a newspaper
“And up”—the great American twist
You know he meant one midget for 75
The other hundred, $3.50
Margaret
May I describe the contents
of my grandmother’s kitchen
in Nova Scotia in 1949?
Grinding mill, butter churn,
hand-hemmed white cotton towels,
pale purple swatch of linen
spread diagonally
across a scarred wooden table
where Grandmother
kneaded and stirred.
A platter rimmed with violets,
some of the petals rubbed away.
And the crock of wooden spoons, of course,
the giant matches in a box . . .
There was something in the oven, always,
a streak of patience in the air.
My Sad Aunt
She sits in the living room,
mad at my parents
because they won’t let her
smoke in the house.
Maybe it’s not always easy
having a good imagination.
It follows you around
till you’re not sure who that is,
sitting in the living room.
She remembers a dream
that didn’t come true.
A riverbed
with no water in it.
Who did she want to be
when she was younger?
The List
A man told me he had calculated
the exact number of books
he would be able to read before he died
by figuring the average number
of books he read per month
and his probable earth span,
(averaging how long
his dad and grandpa had lived,
adding on a few years since he
exercised more than they did).
Then he made a list of necessary books,
nonfiction mostly, history, philosophy,
fiction and poetry from different time periods
so there wouldn’t be large gaps in his mind.
He had given up frivolous reading entirely.
There are only so many days.
Oh I felt sad to hear such an organized plan.
What about the books that aren’t written yet,
the books his friends might recommend
that aren’t on the list,
the yummy magazine that might fall
into his view at a silly moment after all?
What about the mystery search
through delectable library shelves?
I felt the heartbeat of forgotten precious books
calling for his hand.
You’re Welcome!
Where has courtesy gone?
(MY GRANDMOTHER’S CHANT)
People who don’t say “Thank you”
are a mysterious tribe.
Who do they think
they are?
People who say “No problem”
instead of “You’re welcome”
have a problem they don’t even
know about.
Moving House
A whole house traveled
down Broadway yesterday.
An old-fashioned white house
with green trim . . .
traffic stopped
so the house on wheels could pass.
You could almost hear
the lost family laughing,
clink of dishes,
swish of a screen door
in summer heat.
I wanted to follow the house,
to see where its new landing place would be,
but we were on a shopping trip
(faucets, tile, sinks)
for our very stationary house
that hasn’t gone anywhere
in a hundred years.
Actually, my mom and I were tired,
wishing we didn’t have to shop.
Seeing the moving house
changed us.
Everything felt easy after that.
Making a Mosaic
Some people begin at the center,
others at the outer edge,
pressing down chips
of lovely broken plates and cups.
Is this the story of days?
Arranged, glued down,
without much space between.
Here is the blue flowery fragment
from dinnerware
on a ship
that sank in 1780.
The antique green plate
Louise gave me
w
hen I finished fifth grade.
Side by side,
a nice time, a terrible time.
It’s a messy job,
glue stuck to fingertips.
You keep standing back
to see a pattern
emerge.
Necklace
I hope Sunday’s slow and long,
steeped like a pot of mint tea.
Soft sun and deep thinking.
Saturday was a crowded calendar page,
a mound of chores.
Could Monday be a porch?
Facing the week.
Wednesday a meadow?
Thursday, let’s leave
small baskets at everyone’s door.
Flowers, notes, stones.
No one does that anymore.
Could a week be strung on a silver chain?
A boat?
A tree?
Tuesday as a tree?
From Labrador, 1800s
“If you wish to know who I am, I am old Lydia Campbell, formerly Brooks, then Blake, after Blake now Campbell. So, you see, ups and downs has been my life all through. And now I am what I am . . .” (A CANADIAN ORAL HISTORY)
We are who we are.
Lydia, we send you light
from far away.
We send you green from a warm place.
You who knew the ice and cold,
who grew old inside your many names,
what were you like
before it all happened?
What did you hope
and where would you have
wandered?
Did you ride on a sled pulled by dogs?
When you stared into the swirl
of green northern lights in a midnight sky,
did you think those icy fingers
were pointing at you,
did you whisper, “Hi there,”
feeling the little hairs
on your skin
stand straight up?
SECTION FOUR
Sweet Dreams Please
Historical Marker
out here in the land of wind
little purple flowers
where people once fought
it’s hard to imagine
people finding one another
in this huge space
and having something to fight about
Baby-sitting Should Not Be Called
sitting. Because it is chasing, bending,
picking up, and major play.
It is helping Wiley throw eight basketballs
into a green wheelbarrow and getting them out
again and doing this one hundred
times. Then he sits on the second step
to roll basketballs off the edge.
He waves at me to give them back.
Then he pitches pecans
at the tree trunk and wants me
to retrieve them.
They are small and
hide in the leaves.
But he knows if I find the right one.
Also he wants me to climb the ladder
(only to the third step)
holding him under one arm
so he can poke the fat basketball
through the lowered hoop.
Sitting? That’s a joke.
He wraps the baby doll
in a piece of green tissue paper
and eats Cheerios at the same time.
No! He doesn’t want me to
give the baby doll a Cheerio!
He wants to roll cars into
a parking lot in the corner
and speed them over my feet.
Wiley helps me remember
where I came from. I love him for
more than one reason.
I love his clean purpose,
his careful eye.
His pure glee when the pecan hits hard
and bounces off.
I love baby-sitting
even though I have to sleep
stretched out flat
like the monkey without stuffing
afterwards.
Abandoned Homestead, Big Bend National Park
Gilberto Luna and his wife
raised nine children
in this stone house
off the gravel canyon road.
They grew corn and peppers
between the dry lips of the desert.
Did his children ever fight?
What did they dream of,
so far from any city or train?
I think they dreamed of a fossil
full of clouds.
Gilberto lived to be extremely old.
Deserts will do that.
What about his wife?
The walls tipped in soon after they died.
Houses miss their people too.
A hundred years later, thin slits of light
sneak into three crooked rooms.
Turtle
Tonight I read a newspaper story
about a turtle found in Virginia
key on a key chain
looped through a hole in his shell
a number engraved on the key
the man who found him called the number
far away in Pennsylvania
learned that turtle was let loose twenty years before
Ho!
Think about it:
all these years of our lives,
he’s been walking.
Little Blanco River
You’re only a foot deep
under green water
your smooth shale skull
is slick & cool
blue dragonfly
skims you
like a stone
skipping
skipping
it never goes under
you square-dance with boulders
make a clean swishing sound
centuries of skirts
lifting & falling in delicate rounds
you’re not deep enough
little blanco river
don’t ever get too big
The Bird Pose
For two months I examined
the photo in my mom’s yoga book.
It looked so easy,
balancing your knees
on your elbows.
But mine kept collapsing
like portable chairs.
My mom said, Remember, you
have to start slow.
How slow is slow? I said.
This feels slow to me.
Nothing helped so I threw the book
back on my mom’s bed.
What a dumb thing I tried to do.
That night I dreamed I flew.
Meteor Watch
Leaving the car on a high hill in the dark,
we spread a tablecloth on the ground
and eat with our fingers—
grapes, gingersnaps, cheese—
staring at the huge sky.
This night feels ripe.
What will flash by?
We want stars to surprise us.
We want to be
amazed.
Each streak of light, we cry out.
If you turn your head
for just a minute, you can miss one.
Focus on east,
you lose the ones in the west.
I think of people knowing one another
in the great spaces,
the brave arc of connection
between friends, lit up.
And all the quiet stars
holding their places in between.
Writing in a Silo
I used to translate what a hen said.
Little kids believed me.
I looked deep into a cat’s eyes
to speak her language.
Memory is a silo
—what’s stocked
up?—
Corn or sorrow?
Crumbs of wheat
spe
ckled hope?
1 door
2 windows
is this
a blossom
or a day?
What would I dream if I slept in a silo?
Standing by the train track
I wrote something different
than I might write
in a library.
When I sat by the river
my words became brown ducks
dipping their heads.
Finding a Pink Ribbon on the Wilderness Trail
We went hiking on the edge of town,
saw three deer, an armadillo
with coarse hairs on his belly when
my dad turned him over.
He snorted like a little pig.
Golden eagles flew huge circles
around their nests.
Then I found a lost ribbon on the trail,
the kind I would be sad to lose,
satiny smooth, with no rips
or blemishes.
I picked it up and put it in my pocket.
Later I worried.
What if the girl who lost it came back
looking for it?
We are tied by a trail,
tied by a ribbon.
I hope someone nice
finds the things I lose.
Bird in Hand
She was trying to show
the baby bird to her older sister
but the big girl said, “Yeccccch!
Put it down!”
The smaller girl kept holding it out,
shielding it from sun
with her other hand
and the big girl shouted, “I told you,
get rid of it!”
—squirting water
from a plastic bottle
on her sister and the bird.
The face of the younger girl,
stunned in the courthouse square.
Pressed-in pair of wings.
Scared heart pounding.
The Word PEACE
We could find words or parts of words
inside other words, it was always a game.
PEACE for example contained the crucial vowels of
EAT and EASY. If people ATE together
they would be less likely to KILL one another
especially if one were responsible for
shopping & cooking