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)
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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,