Fuel (11 page)

On the first day of his life

the baby opens his eyes

and gets tired doing even that.

He cries when they place a cap on his head.

Too much, too much!

Later the whole world will touch him

and he won't even flinch.

beat his wife.

We did not know it then.

We knew his slanted-stripe

ties.

We said, “Good morning”

in our cleanest voices.

He stood beside the door

of the office

where all our unborn

report cards lived.

He had twins

and reddish hair.

Later the news

would seep

along the gutters,

chilly stream

of autumn rain.

My mother,

newspaper dropped down

on the couch, staring

out the window—

All those years I told you

pay good attention to

what he says
.

The stones in my heart

do not recognize your name.

Lizard poking his nose from a crack

considers us both strangers.

This wide terrain,

like a gray-green bottom of an ocean,

gives no sign.

If we have been here since whatever blow it was

toppled these boulders,

if we are brief as lightning in the arrow-shaped

wisp of cloud—

on top of this peak, there are no years.

A single mound rises off the plain.

There I would make my house, you say, pointing.

And I want to take the hand that points

and build with it. Place it against my eyes,

lips, heart, make a roof.

If each day, history were a new sentence—

but then what would happen to

the rocks, the trees?

From this distance every storm

looks like a simple stripe.

The boy needed

to stop by the road.

What pleasure to let

the engine quit droning

inside the long heat,

to feel where they were.

Sometimes

she was struck by this

as if a plank had slapped

the back of her head.

They were thirsty

as grasses

leaning sideways

in the ditch,

Big Bluestem

and Little Barley,

Texas Cupgrass,

Hairy Crabgrass,

Green Sprangletop.

She could stop at a store

selling only grass names

and be happy.

They would pause

and the pause

seep into them,

fence post,

twisted wire,

brick chimney

without its house,

pollen taking flight

toward the cities.

Something would gather

back into place.

Take the word “home”

for example,

often considered

to have an address.

How it could sweep across you

miles beyond the last

neat packages of ice

and nothing be wider

than its pulse.

Out here,

everywhere,

the boy looking away from her

across the fields.

she carries her eyes from country to country

in Rome adding the crisp slant of sky

as earlier she gathered crowds of coffee cups

frothing hot miles     a scared man with a name tag

planted firmly on one shoulder

rows of empty chairs     buckled cases

and the bags from India tied and tied with rope

as she gets older the luggage grows

lighter and heavier     together

strange how the soil absorbs water

and is quickly dry again

how the filled room points to the window

haggard smiles of waiting strangers

brief flash and falling back to separateness

how much everyone is carrying

moving belt   the artifacts expand

now a basket of apricots

a mini-stove from England

an Italian grandfather weeps on the shoulder

of his glorious departing girl

the woman takes it in   thinking

how this world has everything and offers it

how it is good we only have two hands

Humps of shell emerge from dark water.

Believers toss hunks of bread,

hoping the fat reptilian heads

will loom forth from the murk

and eat. Meaning:
you have been

heard
.

I stood, breathing the stench of mud

and rotten dough, and could not feel

encouraged. Climbed the pilgrim hill

where prayers in tissue radiant tubes

were looped to a tree. Caught in

their light, a hope washed over me

small as the hope of stumbling feet

but did not hold long enough

to get me down.

Rickshas crowded the field,

announced by tinny bells.

The friend beside me, whose bread

floated and bobbed,

grew grim. They're full, I told him.

But they always eat mine
.

That night I told the man I love most

he came from hell. It was also

his birthday. We gulped lobster

over a white tablecloth in a country

where waves erase whole villages, annually,

and don't even make our front page.

Waiters forded the lulling currents

of heat. Later, my mosquito net

had holes.

All night, I was pitching something,

crumbs or crusts, into that bottomless pool

where the spaces between our worlds take root.

He would forgive me tomorrow.

But I wanted a mouth to rise up

from the dark, a hand,

any declarable body part, to swallow

or say,
This is water, that is land
.

Atsuko

steering her smooth burgundy car

past orange cranes

and complicated shipyards

has always lived in Yokohama,

but possibly this neighborhood

sprang up over the weekend

when we were off beside the sea.

Massive concrete, tones of gray.

Every day something changes in a city.

A woman pulls groceries home

in a metallic cart past five thousand

beige apartments,

but she will find her own

and twist the key.

We respect her.

Iron girders for a new

construction.

Rafters. Pipes.

Legions of coordinated

stoplights.

Atsuko cannot see any street

she recognizes,

one roadside tree

staked to bamboo

looks vaguely familiar.

She has seen other trees like that.

Will I keep my eyes open please?

Let her know if I spot any clues?

Remember who

you are talking to
, I say,

and we both laugh very loudly,

which is not something

I thought I would get to do

in Japan this soon.

We veer under highways,

elevated tracks, clouds.

The red train zips by smoothly overhead,

but all our streets go one way the wrong way

and I'm still confused by her steering wheel

on the right side, my foot punching

an invisible clutch.

What has she done?

Atsuko keeps apologizing

as we circle shoe shops dress shops party shops—

obviously her city is bigger

than she thought it was.

We must get gas.

Another day Mount Fuji-san looming

on the horizon

might help us gain our bearings,

but it's invisible today.

Right now

everything is gray.

Only the red train for punctuation.

She has never been more lost.

Keep driving
, I whisper,

Kyoto, Hokkaido,

villages, rice fields,

how can I be lost or found

if I have never been here before?

Your hotel is hiding, she groans.

Instead we find the Toyota dock

for the third time

in three hours.

Tricky city clicking its rhythms

into each U-turn, crosswalk,

the intricate red blood

networks of people,

into the secret hidden dirt.

Soon I will feel as grounded

as the citizens of the foreign cemetery

on the one high hill

who came here planning to

leave.