Fuel (7 page)

If you place a fern

under a stone

the next day it will be

nearly invisible

as if the stone has

swallowed it.

If you tuck the name of a loved one

under your tongue too long

without speaking it

it becomes blood

sigh

the little sucked-in breath of air

hiding everywhere

beneath your words.

No one sees

the fuel that feeds you.

One man closes his hand.

He will not show us

the silver buckle

he uncovered in his garden.

One man reads houses.

They make sense to him,

grammar of lights in windows.

He looks for a story to be part of.

One man has no friends.

His mother is shrinking

at a table with one chair.

She dreams a mouse

with her son's small head.

One man feels right.

The others must be wrong.

And the world? It does not touch him.

One man stares hard

at the other men's profiles

against the sky.

He knows he is one of five men

standing on a corner.

A crowd of strangers flies over your life

picking out landmarks—stainless steel

cake pan, jello mold, pastel box of

thank you notes. Someone's even put

a 25-cent price tag on the coffin

of Kleenex in the bathroom.

I'm a prowler, unable to smile back

at the bouyant women hired to coordinate

this last event.

Beside the dismantled bedframe,

a telephone with scrawled number of

SON DAVID EVANS
taped to the side.

You intended it to be read by someone else.

I hope he came by often including you

in his regular weeks, not just his holidays.

Your angels with lace collars.

Christmas cookie plate

and rattled tea towels.

How big we are, the living.

We stomp between your flexible curtain road

and the dictionary with a chunk torn out.

I'm caught in the kitchen with a sadness

flat as the icebox door.

Considering reductions: your horizon,

your hope. Antique wooden wardrobes

stuffed into three tight rooms.

Carrying the stack of blank typing paper

and the Scrabble game with the Santa sticker

circa 1950.

Now we're stuck together.

Wooden letters click in our hands.

We make
ABLE, ADEPT
.

Someone's
JIG
turns into
JIGSAW
.

Someone's
HUNCH
remains just that,

though we keep flying over it from different angles,

trying to make it larger,

trying to give it feet or hands or another ground

to stand on.

notices  flutter

OUR SWEET TABBY    AFRAID OF EVERYTHING

BIG GRAY CAT           HE IS OUR ONLY CHILD

SIBERIAN HUSKY           NEEDS HIS MEDICINE

FEMALE SCHNAUZER      WE ARE SICK WITH WORRY

OUR BELOVED TURTLE    RED DOT ON FOREHEAD

VEGETARIAN              NAME OF KALI

please      please      please

call me      call me      call me

Somehow our grandfather's old smoking cabinet

which held playing cards and pipes

has ended up in my brother's guest bedroom

a thousand miles from Union Boulevard

where men dragged bundled laundry

in heavy carts down the street before dawn.

I feel startled each time I see it, expecting

the crisp dachshund who lived inside

and puffed smoke rings, doughnuts rising

from his tiny white cigarette—how did he get away?

Our grandfather's only toy.

They all ran, the gingham aprons and funnels,

the clock with an honest face.

Now we weigh an hour for a space

belonging to us.

Once it all belonged to us.

Our grandfather's long chair, the slope

of his arm resting as he slept.

He had German words inside his tongue.

He lit a cigarette for the dog with a squat body

and leaned back.

The rings said Zero Zero Zero

rising into the shades

drawn shut in the daytime.

Zero against tears.

Zero against assorted sandwich cookies

in frilled cups.

Zero against the broom and the saltshaker

and the Dutch cleanser aching in the cracks of the tiles.

We went home to a street called Harvey

wanting the thing which could not happen.

Everyone to get along
.

The dog thought it could happen.

Our grandfather who lit the match

carried a hat in his hands.

Where is his bed? His lamp?

*

I am confident the street called Harvey

lives in the zippered compartment of my purse.

It is mine forever. No one could steal it.

Giving me everything I go by,

my dictionary for
pine
and
blame
and
snow
.

On another street called Salah Eddin, a shopkeeper

called out,
Your father was the most handsome man

in Jerusalem when he left!

Tears for the men and women

who leave the places that know them.

For the streets we cannot fix

and the gray school copybooks,

weeks plotted neatly in Arabic

as if days were really square.

We marched from Tuesday to Wednesday cleanly.

Streets were the blood of our bodies;

and just as you could say veins or arteries

carried red or blue depending on whether

they were coming or going, so we each traveled

our streets coming and going at exactly the same moment—

cells, scraps, puffs of living smoke.

Once with my scarf knotted over my mouth

I lumbered into a storm of snow up the long hill

and did not know where I was going except to the top of it.

In those days we went out like that.

Even children went out like that.

Someone was crying hard at home again,

raging blizzard of sobs.

I dragged the sled by its rope,

which we normally did not do

when snow was coming down so hard,

pulling my brother whom I called by our secret name

as if we could be other people under the skin.

The snow bit into my face, prickling the rim

of the head where the hair starts coming out.

And it was a big one. It would come down and down

for days. People would dig their cars out like potatoes.

How are you doing back there?
I shouted,

and he said
Fine, I'm doing fine
,

in the sunniest voice he could muster

and I think I should love him more today

for having used it.

At the top we turned and he slid down,

steering himself with the rope gripped in

his mittened hands. I stumbled behind

sinking deeply, shouting
Ho! Look at him go!

as if we were having a good time.

Alone on the hill. That was the deepest

I ever went into snow. Now I think of it

when I stare at paper or into silences

between human beings. The drifting

accumulation. A father goes months

without speaking to his son.

How there can be a place

so cold any movement saves you.

Ho!
You bang your hands together,

stomp your feet.
The father could die!

The son!
Before the weather changes.