A Maze Me (4 page)

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

when 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.

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?

“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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

no one makes a state park out of you

you're not deep enough

little blanco river

don't ever get too big

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.

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.

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
speckled 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.

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.

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.

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

& the other for serving & cleaning
& you took turns.

Then you started thinking,
What does he like?

What might suit his fancy?

There should of course be meals

at all peace talks,

as there is eating at festivals & birthdays,

the generous platter, the giant bowl.

Those who placed a minor faith in rhyme,

might try PEACE & CEASE, as in,

could you please CEASE this hideous

waste of time & resources, world?

Had some people forgotten

just how lucky we are

to be BORN? People had grown too far

from the source, that's for sure.

A man said ETHICS as if it were

a dirty word.

And what about apologizing to kids?

After TEACHing us to use words to solve

our differences, what did adults do?

People two years old were starting to look

a lot better than anyone else

& consider their vocabularies.

EAT was probably in there.

Sweet DREAMS & PLEASE which also contained

those crucial vowels found in PEACE

if anyone were still thinking about it.

This didn't always work though,

because some might say WAR contained

the first two letters of ART

& you would not want them

for one minute to believe that.