Fuel (12 page)

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.

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.

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;

and the squirrel gathering what it needed,

scrambling high into the branches,

dropping shells on his face

as he stood under the tree looking up.

It's strange to think how letters used to be letters, letting you know someone liked you, saying pleasant dull things like,
How are you, we are fine
, making you wish for more but not weighing you, really. Now the letters are funnels of want, requests for favors, Please do what you can, Help me get into Yaddo (where I have never been), Tell my teachers I am a good student, Don't you think I would be excellent in that program overseas? I want to send everyone overseas. I want to be there myself, where my mail can't find me. It's startling to miss the sweet dim-witted reports of summers & boyfriends, journeys & pets, the scented lilac envelopes. Now the envelopes are long & white, letters begin
How long it has been since we really connected
& pole-vault into the request by the second paragraph. And no one ever says you have months to do this in. You have till tomorrow. I am lonely with my mail. Yesterday I went out walking before the mailman came, & the street was filled with carcasses of empty envelopes, dampened & tattered, the wings of exotic insects lost without their bodies. I wanted to bend & reclaim them, smooth them, fill them with unsigned notes, & drop them into my neighbor's shining boxes. One at a time.

What they say first, what they say next.

I never saw a public walking around anyway.

They throw it up in the air like a ball.

No one has her hands out.

If it hits you in the head, it hurts.

Bouncing, it dissolves.

I'm not worried about it.

Give me your pants,

and I'll hem them.

How long do you want them?

I work as hard as I can

to have nothing to do.

Birds climb their rich ladder

of choruses.

They have tasted the top of the tree,

but they are not staying.

The whole sky says,

Your move
.

A giant, puffed, and creamy cloud

ignited on the right-hand horizon

from Presidio to Marfa as the western sky

dropped solidly into deepest blue.

We who were driving north on that road

pulled the car over, pulled it over

because the grasses in their lanky goldenness

called for standing alongside them

while the whole sky

held.

Inside that lit stillness,

we drank the swelling breath that would

unfold on its own for months

whenever the cities pressed us,

rubbed us down, or called out

people, people, people
.

Build my home here

on the spot of old time.

I'm sure I have failed you

one thousand ways,

you ancient clock,

you stockpot of moments.

Look how the first thing I do

upon entering the house

is remove my watch.

It's in your honor.

How a single word

may shimmer and rise

off the page, a wafer of

syllabic light, a bulb

of glowing meaning,

whatever the word,

try “tempestuous” or “suffer,”

any word you have held

or traded so it lives a new life

the size of two worlds.

Say you carried it

up a hill and it helped you

move. Without this

the days would be thin sticks

thrown down in a clutter of leaves,

and where is the rake?