Fuel (13 page)

When weeds eat the playhouse

what does that say about the family?

The ball left at the base of the tree

loses its breath shrinking into

a stump or clump of dirt and the mole comes

and the earth drums up into little mounds

nobody kicks. Then what year is it?

Maybe the door to the big house opens and a man comes out.

A woman comes out drying her hands.

Dinner is almost ready but there's no one else

to eat it. Besides the man and the woman.

Maybe only the woman.

Or there's no dinner.

The door to the playhouse stuck open not swinging

and light comes through

replete with pollen of cedar and foxglove

and something else is going to be planted

in the ditch by the road

on the bank of the river but there will not be

a child to tell its story. How will that change the story?

If the fox puts on her lavender gloves just as you shut your eyes.

If in the night something touches your sleeping cheek

and startles you and it is the fox

but you forget to offer her tea in the playhouse

then what year would you be sipping?

What would that say about the person you became?

A man in a lawn chair

with a book on his lap

realizes pears are falling

from the tree right beside him.

Each makes a round,

full sound in the grass.

Perhaps the stem takes an hour

to loosen and let go.

This man who has recently written words

to his father forty years in the birthing:

I was always afraid of you
.

When would you explode next?

has sudden reverence for the pears.

If a dark bruise rises,

if ants inhabit the juicy crack,

or the body remains firm, unscarred,

remains secret till tomorrow . . .

By then the letter to his father

may be lying open on a table.

We gather pears in baskets, sacks.

What will we do with everything

that has been given us? Ginger pears, pear pies,

fingers weighing flesh.

Which will be perfect under the skin?

It is hard not to love the pile of peelings

growing on the counter next to the knife.

It is dusty on the edges.

Slightly rotten.

I guard it without thinking.

Focus on it once a year

when I shake it out in the wind.

I do not ache.

I would not trade.

Thanks to the editors of the following journals where some of these poems first appeared:

Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Cat's Ear, Chaminade Literary Review, Chili Verde Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Fine Madness, Five Points, Grafitti Rag, Green Mountains Review, Hawai'i Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Herman Review, Hurakan, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, Many Mountains Moving, The New York Times, One Trick Pony, Paragraph, Poetry Kanto (Japan), Rain City Review, Rio Grande Review, Solo, Tampa Review, ¡TEX!, Two Rivers Review
.

Individual poems appeared in the following books:

“Elevator” appeared in
I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You
, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye and Paul B. Janeczko (Simon & Schuster, 1996);

“The Small Vases from Hebron” appeared in
The Best American Poetry 1996
, edited by Adrienne Rich (Scribner, 1996);

“Darling” appeared in
Contemporary American Poetry
, Sixth Edition, edited by A. Poulin, Jr. (Houghton Mifflin, 1996);

“Always Bring a Pencil” appeared in
Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club
, edited by Bill Henderson (Pushcart Press, 1996);

“The Rider” appeared in
The Place My Words Are Looking For
, edited by Paul B. Janeczko (Bradbury Press, 1990);

“My Uncle's Favorite Coffee Shop” appeared in
Written with a Spoon: A Poet's Cookbook
, edited by Nancy Fay and Judith Rafaela Sherman (Asher Publishing, New Mexico, 1995);

“Last Song for the Mend-It Shop” appeared in
Travel Alarm
(a chapbook), (Wings Press, Houston, 1993);

“The Time” appeared in
Invisible
, a chapbook, (Trilobite Press, Denton, 1989).

Deep thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for their heartening support.

Also I am grateful to Madison, without whom it would be Ticonderoga #1 pencils all the way.

“Listening to Poetry in a Language I Do Not Understand” is for Shuntarō Tanikawa.

“How Far is it to the Land We Left?” is for Aidan Artemus Gurovitsch.

“String” is for Phyllis Theroux.

“F” by Denise Levertov, from
Poems 1968-1972
. Copyright © 1970 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Naomi Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio, Texas. Her recent books include
Habibi
(a novel for teens),
Lullaby Raft
(a picture book) and
Never in a Hurry
(essays). Her books of poems are
Red Suitcase
(BOA) and
Words under the Words: Selected Poems
. She has edited four prize-winning anthologies of poetry for young readers and is a Guggenheim Fellow for 1997–1998.