or their fathers and mothers thin as lace,
their own teachers remaining in front
of a class at the back of their minds.
So many seasons of rain, sun, wind
have crystallized their teachers.
They shine like something on a beach.
But we don’t see that yet.
We’re fat with binders and forgetting.
We’re shaping the name of a new love
on the underside of our thumb.
We’re diagnosing rumor and trouble
and fear. We hear the teachers
as if they were far off, speaking
down a tube. Sometimes
a whole sentence gets through.
But the teachers don’t give up.
They rise, dress, appear before us
crisp and hopeful. They have a plan.
If cranes can fly 1,000 miles
or that hummingbird return from Mexico
to find, curled on its crooked fence, a new vine,
surely. We may dip into the sweet
together, if we hover long enough.
BOY AND EGG
Every few minutes, he wants
to march the trail of flattened rye grass
back to the house of muttering
hens. He too could make
a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh
it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it
to his ear while the other children
laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him,
so little yet, too forgetful in games,
ready to cry if the ball brushed him,
riveted to the secret of birds
caught up inside his fist,
not ready to give it over
to the refrigerator
or the rest of the day.
THE TIME
Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this
in winter especially. Summer comes,
I want to tumble with the river
over rocks and mossy dams.
A fish drifting upside down.
Slow accordions sweeten the breeze.
The Sanitary Mattress Factory says,
“Sleep Is Life.”
Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?
Yesterday someone said, “It gets late so early.”
I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.
Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.
LAST SONG FOR THE MEND-IT SHOP
1.
Today some buildings were blown up,
rounded shoulders, the shoulders
of women no one has touched for a long time.
Men and women watched from their offices
then went back to filing papers.
A drinking fountain hummed.
I translate this from the deep love
I feel for old buildings.
I translate this from my scream.
2.
The rosebushes held on so tightly
we could not get them out.
Under the sign that promised
to stitch things together,
the thorny weathered MEND-IT
fading fast now
fading hard,
Jim heaved his shovel.
We were loosening dirt
around the heavy central roots,
trespassing, trying to save
at least the roses
before bulldozers came,
before the land was shaved
and the Mexican men and women
who tend with such a gracious bending
disappeared. They were already gone
and their roses would not let go.
We bit hard on the sweetness,
snipping, in all our names,
the last lavish orange heads,
our teeth pressed tightly together.
3.
This looks like a good place
to build something ugly.
Let’s do it. A snack
shop. Let’s erase
the board. Who can build
faster? You could fit
a hundred cars here.
It’s only a house
some guy lived in
ninety years. And it’s so
convenient to downtown.
That old theater nobody goes to
anymore, who cares if it’s
the last theater like that
in the United States?
Knock it out so we can build
a bank that goes bankrupt
in two years. Don’t hang
on.
4.
Some days I can’t lift
the glint of worry.
Soon we will wear
each other’s names.
Already we bathe
in the river of lost shoes.
I fall into photographs.
Someone lives inside
those windows.
Before they demolish
the Honolulu bakery,
women in hair nets
and white dresses
lock arms on the counter.
Someone buys
their last world-famous
golden lemon cake.
Take a card, any card.
The magic dissolving recipe
for buildings with frills?
We will not know what
it tasted like.
HOW FAR IS IT TO THE LAND WE LEFT?
On the first day of his life
the baby opens his eyes
and gets tired doing even that.
He cries when they place a cap on his head.
Too much, too much!
Later the whole world will touch him
and he won’t even flinch.
OUR PRINCIPAL
beat his wife.
We did not know it then.
We knew his slanted-stripe
ties.
We said, “Good morning”
in our cleanest voices.
He stood beside the door
of the office
where all our unborn
report cards lived.
He had twins
and reddish hair.
Later the news
would seep
along the gutters,
chilly stream
of autumn rain.
My mother,
newspaper dropped down
on the couch, staring
out the window—
All those years I told you
pay good attention to
what he says.
POINT OF ROCKS, TEXAS
The stones in my heart
do not recognize your name.
Lizard poking his nose from a crack
considers us both strangers.
This wide terrain,
like a gray-green bottom of an ocean,
gives no sign.
If we have been here since whatever blow it was
toppled these boulders,
if we are brief as lightning in the arrow-shaped
wisp of cloud—
on top of this peak, there are no years.
A single mound rises off the plain.
There I would make my house, you say, pointing.
And I want to take the hand that points
and build with it. Place it against my eyes,
lips, heart, make a roof.
If each day, history were a new sentence—
but then what would happen to
the rocks, the trees?
From this distance every storm
looks like a simple stripe.
PAUSE
The boy needed
to stop by the road.
What pleasure to let
the engine quit droning
inside the long heat,
to feel where they were.
Sometimes
she was struck by this
as if a plank had slapped
the back of her head.
They were thirsty
as grasses
leaning sideways
in the ditch,
Big Bluestem
and Little Barley,
Texas Cupgrass,
Hairy Crabgrass,
Green Sprangletop.
She could stop at a store
selling only grass names
and be happy.
They would pause
and the pause
seep into them,
fence post,
twisted wire,
brick chimney
without its house,
pollen taking flight
toward the cities.
Something would gather
back into place.
Take the word “home”
for example,
often considered
to have an address.
How it could sweep across you
miles beyond the last
neat packages of ice
and nothing be wider
than its pulse.
Out here,
everywhere,
the boy looking away from her
across the fields.
LUGGAGE
she carries her eyes from country to country
in Rome adding the crisp slant of sky
as earlier she gathered crowds of coffee cups
frothing hot miles a scared man with a name tag
planted firmly on one shoulder
rows of empty chairs buckled cases
and the bags from India tied and tied with rope
as she gets older the luggage grows
lighter and heavier together
strange how the soil absorbs water
and is quickly dry again
how the filled room points to the window
haggard smiles of waiting strangers
brief flash and falling back to separateness
how much everyone is carrying
moving belt the artifacts expand
now a basket of apricots
a mini-stove from England
an Italian grandfather weeps on the shoulder
of his glorious departing girl
the woman takes it in thinking
how this world has everything and offers it
how it is good we only have two hands
THE TURTLE SHRINE NEAR CHITTAGONG
Humps of shell emerge from dark water.
Believers toss hunks of bread,
hoping the fat reptilian heads
will loom forth from the murk
and eat. Meaning: you have been
heard.
I stood, breathing the stench of mud
and rotten dough, and could not feel
encouraged. Climbed the pilgrim hill
where prayers in tissue radiant tubes
were looped to a tree. Caught in
their light, a hope washed over me
small as the hope of stumbling feet
but did not hold long enough
to get me down.
Rickshas crowded the field,
announced by tinny bells.
The friend beside me, whose bread
floated and bobbed,
grew grim. They’re full, I told him.
But they always eat mine.
That night I told the man I love most
he came from hell. It was also
his birthday. We gulped lobster
over a white tablecloth in a country
where waves erase whole villages, annually,
and don’t even make our front page.
Waiters forded the lulling currents
of heat. Later, my mosquito net
had holes.
All night, I was pitching something,
crumbs or crusts, into that bottomless pool
where the spaces between our worlds take root.
He would forgive me tomorrow.
But I wanted a mouth to rise up
from the dark, a hand,
any declarable body part, to swallow
or say, This is water, that is land.
KEEP DRIVING
Atsuko
steering her smooth burgundy car
past orange cranes
and complicated shipyards
has always lived in Yokohama,
but possibly this neighborhood
sprang up over the weekend
when we were off beside the sea.
Massive concrete, tones of gray.
Every day something changes in a city.
A woman pulls groceries home
in a metallic cart past five thousand
beige apartments,
but she will find her own
and twist the key.
We respect her.
Iron girders for a new
construction.
Rafters. Pipes.
Legions of coordinated
stoplights.
Atsuko cannot see any street
she recognizes,
one roadside tree
staked to bamboo
looks vaguely familiar.
She has seen other trees like that.
Will I keep my eyes open please?
Let her know if I spot any clues?
Remember who
you are talking to, I say,
and we both laugh very loudly,
which is not something
I thought I would get to do
in Japan this soon.
We veer under highways,
elevated tracks, clouds.
The red train zips by smoothly overhead,
but all our streets go one way the wrong way
and I’m still confused by her steering wheel
on the right side, my foot punching
an invisible clutch.
What has she done?
Atsuko keeps apologizing
as we circle shoe shops dress shops party shops—
obviously her city is bigger
than she thought it was.
We must get gas.
Another day Mount Fuji-san looming
on the horizon
might help us gain our bearings,
but it’s invisible today.
Right now
everything is gray.
Only the red train for punctuation.
She has never been more lost.
Keep driving, I whisper,
Kyoto, Hokkaido,
villages, rice fields,
how can I be lost or found
if I have never been here before?
Your hotel is hiding, she groans.
Instead we find the Toyota dock
for the third time
in three hours.
Tricky city clicking its rhythms
into each U-turn, crosswalk,
the intricate red blood
networks of people,
into the secret hidden dirt.
Soon I will feel as grounded
as the citizens of the foreign cemetery
on the one high hill
who came here planning to
leave.
THE DIFFICULT LIFE OF A YOKOHAMA LEAF
Each train that passes
whips a gust of wind
a heavy heat.
Each car,
each choke of pavement,
every new building
with two hundred windows,
every metal edge.
They don’t say “smog” here,
they say, “It’s a cloudy day.”
The leaf is supposed to remember
what a leaf does:
green code of leaf language,
shapely grace & frill.
Beyond the city
green hills shimmer & float.
They disappear
in the steamy heat.
; But they give courage to the single leaf
on the tightly propped branch
by the Delightful Discovery Drugstore.
LISTENING TO POETRY IN A LANGUAGE I DO NOT UNDERSTAND
Picture a blue door,
a shiny pipe the rain runs through.
Yellow flower
with twenty supple lips.
I like how you move your hands.
The black T-shirt you have worn
for the last three days
drapes over baggy blue pants.
You stop so abruptly,
I fall into the breath
of the person next to me.
We may look at this poem
from the mountain above the roof
or stand under it
where it casts a cool shadow.
Is this your family home?
Your grandfather’s tiny Buddha?
One word rolls across the floor,
lodging under the slipper
of the man who has felt uncomfortable
all day.
Now he knows what to say.
FROM THIS DISTANCE
He would take a small folded paper from his pocket—
“I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia”—
the same moment you wanted to kiss him.
What was he wringing in his hands all those years?
The chicken refused to smoke a cigarette.
Seven white stones circled a thistle.
You would have gone with him,
but he climbed a high fence.
There was always this Y in the road.
Red checkered jacket draped
over picnic table.
Arrangement of broken bottles
in the doorway of the Paris Hatters.
He would take a word and remove its shirt.
The open heart of the o, the wink of an e,
the long trapped mystery of the crossed t;