Fuel (2 page)

From my father I have inherited the ability

to stand in a field and stare.

Look, look at that gray dot by the fence.

It's his donkey. My father doesn't have

a deep interest in donkeys, more a figurative one.

To know it's out there nuzzling the ground.

That's how I feel about my life.

I like to skirt the edges. There it is in the field.

Feeding itself.

*

From my mother, an obsession about the stove

and correct spelling. The red stove, old as I am, must be

polished at all times. You don't know this about me.

I do it when you're not home.

The Magic Chef gleams in his tipped hat.

Oven shoots to 500 when you set it low.

Then fluctuates. Like a personality.

Thanks to my mother I now have an oven thermometer

but must open the oven door to check it.

Even when a cake's in there. Isn't this supposed to be

disaster for a cake?

My mother does crosswords, which I will never do.

But a word spelled wrongly anywhere

prickles my skin. Return to beginning

with pencil, black ink.

Cross you at the “a.” Rearrange.

We had family discussions

about a preference for the British
grey
.

In the spelling bee I tripped on
reveille
,

a bugle call, a signal at dawn.

I have risen early

ever since.

She is holding the book close to her body,

carrying it home on the cracked sidewalk,

down the tangled hill.

If a dog runs at her again, she will use the book as a shield.

She looked hard among the long lines

of books to find this one.

When they start talking about money,

when the day contains such long and hot places,

she will go inside.

An orange bed is waiting.

Story without corners.

She will have two families.

They will eat at different hours.

She is carrying a book past the fire station

and the five-and-dime.

What this town has not given her

the book will provide; a sheep,

a wilderness of new solutions.

The book has already lived through its troubles.

The book has a calm cover, a straight spine.

When the step returns to itself

as the best place for sitting,

and the old men up and down the street

are latching their clippers,

she will not be alone.

She will have a book to open

and open and open.

Her life starts here.

We jumped in, trusting

the slow swish of heavy doors,

punching 7, 9, 12.

O swoon of rising stomach! Then a sudden drop.

We took turns popping envelopes into the mail chute

& watching them whiz by from a lower floor.

Where are you? Calling down the tunnel,

sweet high ding, nobody's dinnerbell.

In stepped the lady with a fur muff,

her elegant gentleman smelling of New York.

We sobered our faces, bit the glinting arrows

while our father sorted receipts off the lobby.

Good-bye! we called to him again & again.

His desk wore a little spike.

Where are you going?

We are going!

Breathing rich perfume & dust

ground into burgundy carpet,

we glistened in the polished edge

of everything that didn't belong to us,

suitcases, humming radios,

brass locks, canisters for ash.

With nowhere to go we became

specialists in Ups & Downs.

Brother! I cried, as he rose to the penthouse without me.

Sister! He wailed, as I sank deep into the ground.

The graves of Desire Nye and Patty Nye (1794)

and the two Mehitabels who lived one year each.

William and Ebenezer and Samuel Nye

and the wives and cousins and the one with no hands.

Deep, deep in the ground that is cracking.

We jog and skip the ditch.

Your red shirt, your tipped cap.

Is it strange to see your name

on so many stones?
I am not alone
.

A riddle hangs by a single corner

like a towel pinned on a line.

We forget to bring it in for days.

It barely waves, taking on

the shape of the sea.

Whose towel was it?

In the sun a pebble glitters.

A hundred thousand pebbles line the sand

where Henry David Thoreau

ate a giant clam and threw it up.

Ebenezer fell into the mouth of the whale.

Henry was sad here.

He wrote his gloomiest essay

after a shipwreck, all the ladies

floating dead into shore.

That's what you get for traveling
.

But this other lady with no hands

stayed close to home sewing quilts.

How? The riddle blinks.

Tiny green triangles poked nose-to-nose.

We saw them in the house

down the road.

Can we find a silver needle

in her hem?

Under the nickel-gray bridges

the rumbling trains snaked over,

and the bitter gray rain

draining toward holes in the streets,

beneath buildings with teeth for windows,

the Veiled Prophet floated past

in his strange parade. No one knew who he was.

I cracked my head on cement when the giant lion

opened his jaws to roar
NO
always
NO

but we were going to do it anyway.

Over the scum of the fallen gray leaves

and winter's fist that held and held

till every secret tip of the tree was frozen,

beside the gray river that marked us off—

what did east or west mean if you were in the center?—

and its splintered, floating debris,

we left our smallest clothes behind.

Under the bent gray sky and its month-long frown,

the gloomy wisdom of red brick and the silver Arch

that would surely fall, we said,

standing nervously off to one side

as the last gleaming segment swung into place

on the hook of a giant crane—

Come tumbling down.

Since those days we became people

who blink harder in sunlight,

flying into our old city

staring from the plane

who have become the gray rain

in a quiet place under our skins,

returning to the house still standing,

to the trees who do not see us,

to the schoolyard to pick up

one pencil-sized stick from the rich gravel.

Who carry it home as we would have done

in another life when the earth was still writing

its name on our knees.

The D is desperate.

The B wants to take a vacation,

live on a billboard, be broad and brave.

The E is mad at the R for upstaging him.

The little c wants to be a big C if possible,

and the P pauses long between thoughts.

How much better to be a story, story.

Can you read me?

We have to live on this white board

together like a neighborhood.

We would rather be the tail of a cloud,

one letter becoming another,

or lost in a boy's pocket

shapeless as lint,

the same boy who squints to read us

believing we convey a secret message.

We are so tired of meaning nothing.

Tip their mouths open to the sky.

Turquoise, amber,

the deep green with fluted handle,

pitcher the size of two thumbs,

tiny lip and graceful waist.

Here we place the smallest flower

which could have lived invisibly

in loose soil beside the road,

sprig of succulent rosemary,

bowing mint.

They grow deeper in the center of the table.

Here we entrust the small life,

thread, fragment, breath.

And it bends. It waits all day.

As the bread cools and the children

open their gray copybooks

to shape the letter that looks like

a chimney rising out of a house.

And what do the headlines say?

Nothing of the smaller petal

perfectly arranged inside the larger petal

or the way tinted glass filters light.

Men and boys, praying when they died,

fall out of their skins.

The whole alphabet of living,

heads and tails of words,

sentences, the way they said,

“Ya'Allah!” when astonished,

or “ya'ani” for “I mean”—

a crushed glass under the feet

still shines.

But the child of Hebron sleeps

with the thud of her brothers falling

and the long sorrow of the color red.