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    Fuel


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      Copyright © 1998 by Naomi Shihab Nye

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      LC #: 97–74819

      ISBN: 978-1-880238-63-9

      13 14 15 16 12 11 10 09

      Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with the assistance of grants from the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation, the Eric Mathieu King Fund of The Academy of American Poets, as well as from the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust, the County of Monroe, NY, and from many individual supporters.

      Cover Design: Daphne Poulin-Stofer

      Cover Art: “Cantaloupes and Ants,” by James Cobb

      Author Photo: Michael Nye

      Typesetting: Richard Foerster

      Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn

      BOA Logo: Mirko

      BOA Editions, Ltd.

      A. Poulin, Jr., President & Founder (1938-1996)

      250 North Goodman Steet, Suite 306

      Rochester, NY 14607

      www.boaeditions.org

      With gratitude to many writers who left us in 1997,

      their voices ongoing, sustaining—

      F

      that the mind’s fire may not fail.

      The vowels of affliction, of unhealed

      not to feel it, uttered,

      transformed in utterance

      to song.

      Not farewell, not farewell, but faring

      —Denise Levertov

      CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Muchas Gracias por Todo

      Bill’s Beans

      Wedding Cake

      Genetics

      Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things

      Elevator

      Cape Cod

      Being from St. Louis

      Eye Test

      The Small Vases from Hebron

      Darling

      One Boy Told Me

      Boy and Mom at the Nutcracker Ballet

      Passing It On

      Always Bring a Pencil

      Your Name Engraved on a Grain of Rice

      San Antonio Mi Sangre: From the Hard Season

      Wind and the Sleeping Breath of Men

      What’s Here

      Waikiki

      Ongoing

      Boy’s Sleep

      Glint

      Early Riser

      Fundamentalism

      Ducks

      New Year

      My Friend’s Divorce

      Visit

      The Palestinians Have Given Up Parties

      Half-and-Half

      Butter Box

      Smoke

      Alone

      Alphabet

      Feather

      Hidden

      Waiting to Cross

      Estate Sale

      Lost

      Puff

      Snow

      Steps

      Books We Haven’t Touched in Years

      The Rider

      Solve Their Problems

      Messenger

      Living at the Airport

      String

      Fuel

      Coming Soon

      Pancakes with Santa

      Alaska

      So There

      Across the Bay

      My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop

      Enthusiasm in Two Parts

      Our Son Swears He Has 102 Gallons of Water in His Body

      Morning Glory

      Boy and Egg

      The Time

      Last Song for the Mend-it Shop

      How Far Is It to the Land We Left?

      Our Principal

      Point of Rocks, Texas

      Pause

      Luggage

      The Turtle Shrine Near Chittagong

      Keep Driving

      The Difficult Life of a Yokohama Leaf

      Listening to Poetry in a Language I Do Not Understand

      From This Distance

      Sad Mail

      Public Opinion

      Open House

      Quiet of the Mind

      Return

      Vocabulary of Dearness

      Pollen

      The Last Day of August

      I Still Have Everything You Gave Me

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      FUEL

      MUCHAS GRACIAS POR TODO

      This plane has landed thanks to God and his mercy.

      That’s what they say in Jordan when the plane sets down.

      What do they say in our country? Don’t stand up till we tell you.

      Stay in your seats. Things may have shifted.

      This river has not disappeared thanks to that one big storm

      when the water was almost finished.

      We used to say thanks to the springs

      but the springs dried up so we changed it.

      This rumor tells no truth thanks to people.

      This river walk used to be better when no one came.

      What about the grapes? Thanks to the grapes

      we have more than one story to tell.

      Thanks to a soft place in the middle of the evening.

      Thanks to three secret hours before dawn.

      These deer are seldom seen because of their shyness.

      If you see one you count yourselves among the lucky on the earth.

      Your eyes get quieter.

      These deer have nothing to say to us.

      Thanks to the fan, we are still breathing.

      Thanks to the small toad that lives in cool mud at the base of the zinnias.

      BILL’S BEANS

      for William Stafford

      Under the leaves, they’re long and curling.

      I pull a perfect question mark and two lean twins,

      feeling the magnetic snap of stem, the ripened weight.

      At the end of a day, the earth smells thirsty.

      He left his brown hat, his shovel, and his pen.

      I don’t know how deep bean roots go.

      We could experiment.

      He left the sky over Oregon and the fluent trees.

      He gave us our lives that were hiding under our feet,

      saying, You know what to do.

      So we’ll take these beans

      back into the house and steam them.

      We’ll eat them one by one with our fingers,

      the clean click and freshness.

      We’ll thank him forever for our breath,

      and the brevity of bean.

      WEDDING CAKE

      Once on a plane

      a woman asked me to hold her baby

      and disappeared.

      I figured it was safe,

      our being on a plane and all.

      How far could she go?

      She returned one hour later,

      having changed her clothes

      and washed her hair.

      I didn’t recognize her.

      By this time the baby

      and I had examined

      each other’s necks.

      We had cried a little.

      I had a silver bracelet

      and a watch.

      Gold studs glittered

      in the baby’s ears.

      She wore a tiny white dress

      leafed with layers

      like a wedding cake.

      I did not want

      to give her back.

      The baby’s curls coiled tightly

      against her scalp,

      another alphabet.

      I read new new new.

      My mother gets tired.

      I’ll chew your hand.

      The baby left my skirt crumpled,

      my la
    p aching.

      Now I’m her secret guardian,

      the little nub of dream

      that rises slightly

      but won’t come clear.

      As she grows,

      as she feels ill at ease,

      I’ll bob my knee.

      What will she forget?

      Whom will she marry?

      He’d better check with me.

      I’ll say once she flew

      dressed like a cake

      between two doilies of cloud.

      She could slip the card into a pocket,

      pull it out.

      Already she knew the small finger

      was funnier than the whole arm.

      GENETICS

      From my father I have inherited the ability

      to stand in a field and stare.

      Look, look at that gray dot by the fence.

      It’s his donkey. My father doesn’t have

      a deep interest in donkeys, more a figurative one.

      To know it’s out there nuzzling the ground.

      That’s how I feel about my life.

      I like to skirt the edges. There it is in the field.

      Feeding itself.

      *

      From my mother, an obsession about the stove

      and correct spelling. The red stove, old as I am, must be

      polished at all times. You don’t know this about me.

      I do it when you’re not home.

      The Magic Chef gleams in his tipped hat.

      Oven shoots to 500 when you set it low.

      Then fluctuates. Like a personality.

      Thanks to my mother I now have an oven thermometer

      but must open the oven door to check it.

      Even when a cake’s in there. Isn’t this supposed to be

      disaster for a cake?

      My mother does crosswords, which I will never do.

      But a word spelled wrongly anywhere

      prickles my skin. Return to beginning

      with pencil, black ink.

      Cross you at the “a.” Rearrange.

      We had family discussions

      about a preference for the British grey.

      In the spelling bee I tripped on reveille,

      a bugle call, a signal at dawn.

      I have risen early

      ever since.

      BECAUSE OF LIBRARIES WE CAN SAY THESE THINGS

      She is holding the book close to her body,

      carrying it home on the cracked sidewalk,

      down the tangled hill.

      If a dog runs at her again, she will use the book as a shield.

      She looked hard among the long lines

      of books to find this one.

      When they start talking about money,

      when the day contains such long and hot places,

      she will go inside.

      An orange bed is waiting.

      Story without corners.

      She will have two families.

      They will eat at different hours.

      She is carrying a book past the fire station

      and the five-and-dime.

      What this town has not given her

      the book will provide; a sheep,

      a wilderness of new solutions.

      The book has already lived through its troubles.

      The book has a calm cover, a straight spine.

      When the step returns to itself

      as the best place for sitting,

      and the old men up and down the street

      are latching their clippers,

      she will not be alone.

      She will have a book to open

      and open and open.

      Her life starts here.

      ELEVATOR

      We jumped in, trusting

      the slow swish of heavy doors,

      punching 7, 9, 12.

      O swoon of rising stomach! Then a sudden drop.

      We took turns popping envelopes into the mail chute

      & watching them whiz by from a lower floor.

      Where are you? Calling down the tunnel,

      sweet high ding, nobody’s dinnerbell.

      In stepped the lady with a fur muff,

      her elegant gentleman smelling of New York.

      We sobered our faces, bit the glinting arrows

      while our father sorted receipts off the lobby.

      Good-bye! we called to him again & again.

      His desk wore a little spike.

      Where are you going?

      We are going!

      Breathing rich perfume & dust

      ground into burgundy carpet,

      we glistened in the polished edge

      of everything that didn’t belong to us,

      suitcases, humming radios,

      brass locks, canisters for ash.

      With nowhere to go we became

      specialists in Ups & Downs.

      Brother! I cried, as he rose to the penthouse without me.

      Sister! He wailed, as I sank deep into the ground.

      CAPE COD

      The graves of Desire Nye and Patty Nye (1794)

      and the two Mehitabels who lived one year each.

      William and Ebenezer and Samuel Nye

      and the wives and cousins and the one with no hands.

      Deep, deep in the ground that is cracking.

      We jog and skip the ditch.

      Your red shirt, your tipped cap.

      Is it strange to see your name

      on so many stones? I am not alone.

      A riddle hangs by a single corner

      like a towel pinned on a line.

      We forget to bring it in for days.

      It barely waves, taking on

      the shape of the sea.

      Whose towel was it?

      In the sun a pebble glitters.

      A hundred thousand pebbles line the sand

      where Henry David Thoreau

      ate a giant clam and threw it up.

      Ebenezer fell into the mouth of the whale.

      Henry was sad here.

      He wrote his gloomiest essay

      after a shipwreck, all the ladies

      floating dead into shore.

      That’s what you get for traveling.

      But this other lady with no hands

      stayed close to home sewing quilts.

      How? The riddle blinks.

      Tiny green triangles poked nose-to-nose.

      We saw them in the house

      down the road.

      Can we find a silver needle

      in her hem?

      BEING FROM ST. LOUIS

      Under the nickel-gray bridges

      the rumbling trains snaked over,

      and the bitter gray rain

      draining toward holes in the streets,

      beneath buildings with teeth for windows,

      the Veiled Prophet floated past

      in his strange parade. No one knew who he was.

      I cracked my head on cement when the giant lion

      opened his jaws to roar NO always NO

      but we were going to do it anyway.

      Over the scum of the fallen gray leaves

      and winter’s fist that held and held

      till every secret tip of the tree was frozen,

      beside the gray river that marked us off—

      what did east or west mean if you were in the center?—

      and its splintered, floating debris,

      we left our smallest clothes behind.

      Under the bent gray sky and its month-long frown,

      the gloomy wisdom of red brick and the silver Arch

      that would surely fall, we said,

      standing nervously off to one side

      as the last gleaming segment swung into place

      on the hook of a giant crane—

      That would surely fall.

      Come tumbling down.

      Since those days we became people

      who blink harder in sunlight,

      flying into our old city

      staring from the plane

      It didn’t fall after al
    l

      who have become the gray rain

      in a quiet place under our skins,

      returning to the house still standing,

      to the trees who do not see us,

      to the schoolyard to pick up

      one pencil-sized stick from the rich gravel.

      Who carry it home as we would have done

      in another life when the earth was still writing

      its name on our knees.

      EYE TEST

      The D is desperate.

      The B wants to take a vacation,

      live on a billboard, be broad and brave.

      The E is mad at the R for upstaging him.

      The little c wants to be a big C if possible,

      and the P pauses long between thoughts.

      How much better to be a story, story.

      Can you read me?

      We have to live on this white board

      together like a neighborhood.

      We would rather be the tail of a cloud,

      one letter becoming another,

      or lost in a boy’s pocket

      shapeless as lint,

      the same boy who squints to read us

      believing we convey a secret message.

      Be his friend.

      We are so tired of meaning nothing.

      THE SMALL VASES FROM HEBRON

      Tip their mouths open to the sky.

      Turquoise, amber,

     

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