Fuel (9 page)

Even at this late date, sometimes I have to look up

the word “receive.” I received his deep

and interested gaze.

A bean plant flourishes under the rain of sweet words.

Tell what you think
—
I'm listening
.

The story ruffled its twenty leaves.

*

Once my teacher set me on a high stool

for laughing. She thought the eyes

of my classmates would whittle me to size.

But they said otherwise.

We'd laugh too if we knew how
.

I pinned my gaze out the window

on a ripe line of sky.

That's where I was going.

I placed one toe

in the river of gloom.

On the streets of the cold city

a man with two raw gashes at his temple

fingered them gently.

Middle-aged sisters selling old plates and postcards

Three Floors of Bargains *** Step Right In !

stared glumly at a large clock.

December was just beginning.

One touched up her lipstick.

She could see herself between the 6 and 7.

Sunday-school children ate cookies

shaped like trees.

A waiter draped garlands of crumpled greenery

above the door of his restaurant,

adjusting the velvet bow.

A toothless woman wearing plastic bags

asked for the hour, which I gave her

too enthusiastically.

Here they came again.

Rolls of wrapping paper.

Red letters of ads.

I wasn't hungry

for the countdown.

Cluttered days

so sharp they cut.

What about our people

on the giant list of loves?

What would we give them

this time around?

The days say we will

look and look and look.

I plunged my foot

into the river of gloom,

it said it did not need me.

Santa has a bad memory.

Santa forgets your name

the minute he talks

to the next person.

Santa calls you by a baby's name

and doesn't even know.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Should you tell Santa?

Already he thought you were a girl

though you just had a haircut

last week.

How can he remember

all those wishes?

How will Santa ever find

our house?

The world has turned to

red sweaters, jingles,

freezing rain.

Santa says he's on a diet,

that's why he's not eating pancakes

with the rest of us.

Mrs. Claus told him to

lose some weight.

Santa keeps drifting back

for more chatting.

He sits down at our table.

What else can we say to Santa?

Santa says
ain't
.

The phone rang in the middle of the Fairbanks night and was always a wrong number for the Klondike Lounge.
Not here
, I'd say sleepily.
Different place. We're a bunch of people rolled up in quilts
. Then I'd lie awake wondering, But how is it over there at the Klondike? The stocky building nestled between parking lots a few blocks from our apartment like some Yukon explorer's good dream of smoky windows and chow. Surely the comforting click of pool balls, the scent of old grease, flannel, and steam. Back home in Texas we got wrong numbers for the local cable TV company. People were convinced I was a secretary who didn't want to talk to them. They'd call four times in a row.
Sir
, I eventually told a determined gentleman,
We've been monitoring your viewing and are sorry to report you watch entirely too much television. You are currently ineligible for cable services. Try reading a book or something
. He didn't call back. For the Klondike Lounge I finally mumbled,
Come on over, the beer is on us
.

Because I would not let one four-year-old son

eat frosted mini-wheat cereal

fifteen minutes before dinner

he wrote a giant note

and held it up

while I talked on the phone

LOVE HAS FAILED

then he wrote the word
LOVE

on a paper

stapled it twenty times

and said

I STAPLE YOU OUT

*

memory stitching

its gauze shroud

to fit any face

he will say to his friends

she was mean

he will have little interest

in diagramming sentences

the boy / has good taste

enormous capacities

for high-tech language

but will struggle

to bring his lunchbox home

I remember / you

you're / the one

I stared at in the / cloud

when I wasn't paying / attention

to people / on the ground

*

the three-year-old wore twenty dresses

to her preschool interview

her mother could not make her

change

take some off her mother pleaded

and the girl put on a second pair of tights

please I'm begging you

what will they think of us

the girl put all eight of her pastel barrettes

into her hair at once

she put on

her fuzzy green gloves

she would have worn four shoes but could not

get the second pair on top of the first pair

her mother cried you look like a mountain

who has come to live with me

she had trouble walking

from the car up to the school

trouble sitting

in the small chair that was offered

the headmistress said

my my    we are a stubborn personality

If we throw our eyes way out to sea,

they thank us. All those corners

we've made them sit down in lately,

those objects with dust along

their seams.

Out here eyes find the edge

that isn't one.

Gray water, streak of pink,

little tap of sun,

and that storm off to the right

that seems to like us now.

How far can the wind carry

whatever lets go? Light

shining from dead stars

cradles our sleep. Secret light

no one reads by—

who owns that beam?

Who follows it far enough?

The month our son turned five

we drove between cotton fields

down to the bay. Thick layers

of cloud pouring into one another

as tractors furrowed the earth,

streams of gulls dipping down

behind. We talked about

the worms in their beaks.

How each thing on earth

searches out what it needs,

if it's lucky. And always

another question—
what if?

what if?

Some day you'll go so far away

I'll die for missing you,

like millions of mothers

before me—how many friends

I suddenly have! Across the bay

a ship will be passing, tiny dot

between two ports meaning nothing

to me, carrying cargo useless to my life,

but I'll place my eyes on it

as if it held me up. Or you rode

that boat.

Serum of steam rising from the cup,

what comfort to be known personally by
Barbara
,

her perfect pouring hand and starched ascot,

known as the two easy eggs and the single pancake,

without saying.

What pleasure for an immigrant—

anything without saying.

My uncle slid into his booth.

I cannot tell you—how I love this place
.

He drained the water glass, noisily clinking his ice.

My uncle hailed from an iceless region.

He had definite ideas about water drinking.

I cannot tell you
—all the time. But then he'd try.

My uncle wore a white shirt every day of his life.

He raised his hand against the roaring ocean

and the television full of lies.

He shook his head back and forth

from one country to the other

and his ticket grew longer.

Immigrants had double and nothing all at once.

Immigrants drove the taxis, sold the beer and Cokes.

When he found one note that rang true,

he sang it over and over inside.

Coffee, honey
.

His eyes roamed the couples at other booths,

their loose banter and casual clothes.

But he never became them.

Uncle who finally left in a bravado moment

after 23 years,
to live in the old country forever
,

to stay and never come back
,

maybe it would be peaceful now,

maybe for one minute,

I cannot tell you—how my heart has settled at last
.

But he followed us to the sidewalk

saying,
Take care, Take care
,

as if he could not stand to leave us.

I cannot tell—

how we felt

to learn that the week he arrived,

he died. Or how it is now,

driving his parched streets,

feeling the booth beneath us as we order,

oh, anything
, because if we don't,

nothing will come.