Hidden Drive

(yet another revision)

The air thick and sweet with unseen
flowers, I escape an echo

of words in my head. Just turned ten, I believe
I can outrun anything. Behind

their house, the woods are signaling
summer—the green has deepened already,

hiding its black. My feet beat the ground,
suddenly unsettling leaves—

dark birds lick the air
as they lift from every branch

and are gone. Slowed to a stop, there
at my feet—a single wing like lit night,

the street slick after rain or the sheen of coal,
obsidian, silken fan, shining

pupil, moonlight sharp against the sea.
My wing-filled hand holds a message

I need and know to hide. Some things are secret.
Dark totem pressed between ribs and arm,

I walk toward the call of my name.

Persistence

White paint splattered across a canvas
of high grass, clusters of daisies
glow at dusk, their infinite bright faces
like galaxies of fat stars
punctuated by buttercups—
pools of semicolons and ellipses.

The field’s flowers become light spilled
and scattered amongst impenetrable layers
and shades of green—bushes and trees climbing
the hill behind a yellow house, gathering
strength in late May beneath a Technicolor
Magritte evening sky. Under the front porch light,

on the stoop’s stage, a moth drags heavy,
cream-colored wings of tissue
striped with the palest pink
along a notebook’s edge, oblivious
to the poem being written around it.
In spite of it. Suddenly about it. Claws

along the horizontal ladder of metal
spiral and all three edges of thin paper
then follows the faint blue tracks
of black script. Climbs onto the pen
that is writing it. Traces
the pen’s length then paces. Declines

to the poem again, circles a stanza
before abandoning the poem
altogether and settling on the copper
beer mug, orange body folding
beneath draping wings like a miniature aircraft
parked without fanfare.

The world does not ask us to write it
or paint it. We persist, century
after century, asking pigment
and syllable to bring us closer
to the world’s body, like a lover
longing to describe the beloved.

We work the oil to remember
how the field sways, seducing
us to enter. We unwind the line
to catch the moth that is already gone.

Her Words

Silent, the girl holds a pale blue cigar box.
She stands in thick dusk, both hands holding
the closed coffin at heart level, ready,
offering it to the ground. It has been lightly raining
on and off for days. Early May, layers of yellow-green
lighten the quick, darkening air.
That small body was still soft when she found him,
pliable when she gently folded him into a torn, white t-shirt—
the innocent out of pain.
This ground does not resist the shovel.
Yet, digging still takes longer
than I want it to take, for the longer we wait
the more we’ll remember.
She hands me the box
covered with her words
written with marker. I should
bend down, offer
the dead to damp earth
but I hesitate, trying to read my daughter’s words.
While her body has bloomed overnight,
her voice has grown rare, painfully
rare. Too dark, I struggle to decipher
the shapes her fingers worked
to form, feeling like I’m reading
someone else’s love
letter. My gaze lingers too long on her writing,
as if I could read my daughter’s heart—this lovely stranger
I raised, this child, this woman who has become,
is becoming, was—the minute she was born, is—the moment,
in the moment, a force that cannot be contained yet must
be, even as she longs for what she hates.
The box’s blue cardboard
lifts her letters away from its surface, makes
them hover, luminescent. After one line
I stop reading. Suddenly, what matters
is that she wrote
across the entire face of the box. Her hand
kept moving. She said it.
Her words glowing in my hands,
I stoop and give them
to the grave. The sound
of dirt hitting
a coffin of any kind
sounds the same.
As my right arm embraces her,
she leans into me.

Never Tell

This is what I don’t want to tell you. Am afraid to say. Shouldn’t. Don’t. Won’t. Want to. Have to. Need you to know. Cannot tell. I want to tell you. What it is. To work. To really work. Work sitting. Sitting so long in an office chair that nothing eases the ache down the right side of your spine, not even straightening your back, creatively slumping or taking too many Ibuprofen. And you cannot stop sitting in that chair. Your knees ache with inconsolable premature arthritis and you cannot straighten them for long because to do so makes you look like you’re not working hard, makes you look like you’re even lazy or don’t take your job seriously. And working overtime all the time is just the nature of the job. As is eating lunch at your desk. And you need this job. Everything and I mean everything depends on it. Your head pounds, sure, the eyestrain feeds it, but your aching neck is worse than all the other varieties of discomfort and pain because hour by hour it is becoming more uncomfortable to hold up your head. Last week your neck ached until you became nauseous and needed to excuse yourself and couldn’t. You were on deadline. As usual. And you were still on the three months of probation because your supervisor reported you to her boss because she was not able to get all of her work done and therefore needed you to take on far more than your job description implied when she hired you. I want to tell you how good it feels to almost make your deadline and be freed from the skyscraper that holds you prisoner in its dungeon and to then walk as fast as you can down Madison Avenue in old heels that need reheeling through the streets of a city where you are anonymous and the finer the clothes the courser the manner. You ask a suited woman for the time and she asks you why you don’t have a watch, sneering as she passes. At that moment, you realize that you’re bleeding through your pants crotch seam. Your heavy bag presses your bones a little harder against cement. Yes, it’s almost cliché, isn’t it? Or just boring. What’s my point? My point is that the job you are working so hard to keep is an improvement over the one before it and the one before it. Now you are asked to think! Though your body is suffering, slowly aging, even dying, your mind is active! Remember the old days of scrubbing slate tables with Brillo pads at 3 a.m. so that patrons could write with chalk on their tabletops while drinking red wine, eating lamb, listening to Moroccan music and laughing at Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times flickering against a wall? Remember that your mother never made as much as you make now at this job you’re not complaining about because to do so is to lose it, so even if you can’t pay your rent, which is due tomorrow, I mean today, you graduated from college and have health insurance. Remember that your grandmother worked in a factory all of her life and as a child picked one hundred pounds of cotton per summer day so that she could buy her own clothes, shoes and a coat for the school year. My, how things have changed, she says when you tell her about your kids’ extracurricular horseback riding, music and dance lessons, how they won’t do their chores and want their own cell phones. She remembers bits of blood on every finger, beads of sweat sliding down her legs under heavy dungarees and hiding the money she made under her mattress at the age of nine.

There. I said it. That’s it.
No. There’s more. One more thing.
This is what I don’t want to tell you:

The check did not arrive.
The job’s filled. Position aborted.
No vacancies. Your card has been rejected. The deadline
was yesterday. You did not
qualify. It’s time
to pack your room.
We are getting a divorce.
I have cancer.
He is dead. She
gone. I left him
for another man. For a woman.
She left me. It is over. Done.
Your puppy is gone.
The good guy turned bad. The buildings
collapsed. We are at war.
Your daddy is going away.
We are broke. You’ll live
with your grandparents. This may
be goodbye. Your daddy
is dead. We have to move
again. She has perished.
The plane—

I am sorry. Your only hope

is for all you still love
to be enough
to keep you going when bone tired
you hold the baby
in darkness, her tiny, innocent mouth
working at your breast. As you struggle

to carry the cold, metal end
you are not strong enough to carry.

As you straighten your back
and adjust the height of your chair.

As you stare at the typed page in your veined hand
because you do

have a choice. And you want.
You are hungry

to prove me wrong and that makes you strong.

On Sweetheart Mountain

for V.

Raw garnet in the rock beneath our feet,
we stand separate yet together—wordless,
witness to the vast valley, aching snow and silence.
Rare, stunning silence.
The kind that reminds us we’re bone clothed
in flesh, small creatures given breath.
Specks on top of a mountain, balancing on a ledge.
A bird calls out. We do not know what bird it is.
Then a Black-capped Chickadee stirs the air—
its small, plucking call leaves
an absence of sound so penetrating
and complete we can only whisper.

Light Years Later

First she lifted a small corner of the sky,
gradually peeling away daylight.
A bag of stars slung over one shoulder,
she entered the uncovered darkness
and traced the same path every night—
carefully placing each bright sun—
her work so precise it guided the lost.
Eight centuries of her shining
embroidery filled these heavens.

And then she was gone.
Light years later, darkness
is deeper than we’ve ever known—
our torches that much brighter.
The moon has never come closer.
The children can almost touch it.
Stars may seem to hover
and pulse with the news
yet we know they’re moving fast
across the sky, finding their way.

 

music that has never ended

Here is the Last Stop variety store
where you worked your first job unpacking boxes.
Here is the beach where you juggled rocks
and chipped your front tooth. Overlooking bright water,
the yellow house your family loved and had to sell.
The sandy lovers’ lane where you first tasted salt
from a woman’s skin with the windows wide,
open. Eight years of stories that you told as we drove
tangled roads in your black Jetta, kayaks on the roof.
As we walked every beach on Cape Ann,
paddled the pulsing harbor and bays,
married on a rock overlooking the raw sea.
But this turbulent force, this blue that is not blue
nor green but sliding, rolling, slipping over itself endlessly
in its rush toward rock and sand, these cascading
layers of sound—the roar, the whisper, the crashing—music
that has never ended, that has existed since the beginning
of time—this is no longer your story.
Or ours. Or mine. I stand
at the edge of the surf,
cold wind sobering my vision,
staring into this rare sea, loving this face of God—knowing
this may be the last
I see of her—as if for the first time.

Witness

You are the shard of light
flashing from a spoon’s hollow—
and like everything infinite
I cannot touch the softness
below your ear ever again.
Why, my own face
reminds me of yours,
for in these eyes
even strangers see
all that I became
in loving you. All
that I believed, witnessed, lost
and learned over eight centuries.
Even my child can see longing and defeat
playing against the iris’ defiant fire.

Naming Jack

There is nowhere I can go
that you are not present.
The hairpin turn that took us
away then returned us home.
The overlook where you placed silver
in my daughter’s palm so she could see
April’s gray bowl of valley.
The very museum window
through which we looked out upon rushing
brown water, red brick from another century
and hills that leave only a thin strip of sky.
This is the cost of living in a small place.
I came here to escape my life
without you, forgetting
that everywhere we’ve ever been
will always be ours. When we last
climbed that winding mountain road—side
by side—we were busy choosing
a name for the puppy we’d soon have.
Like expectant parents, we were too full
imagining a future to realize
the moment we were living
could be all we’d have left
once we drove into that cloud.

To a Teacher

This is the first time in my life as an educator & a parent that I have felt tremendous & absolute pride in the country that I represent & have brought my child into. What I am about to say may seem overstated, but I feel in my bones, in my cells, new hope for the survival of our planet & its childrens’ children. We have a chance to create a different fate than the tragic one we have been hurling ourselves toward. I believe that having a profoundly intelligent, well-educated, international president can cultivate a deep, lasting respect, desire & commitment to learning in this country.

While teaching yesterday, I was reminded of just how urgent our work is as educators: a freshman student asked, “What is Watergate?” I asked the class to raise their hands if they had the same question & numerous hands went up. While there are wide gaps in my own education, I struggle to imagine a college student in 2008 that has never even heard the word Watergate—a part of recent history that dramatically eroded our nation’s confidence in its own leaders & resulted in a president’s resignation. How ironic to have a student ask this question on the very day our nation is choosing its next president, a leader to replace one who betrayed our nation & the world & should have been impeached, not pardoned.

Our ignorance is deadly.  Our work as educators has never been more essential than now. Finally, we have a leader who believes in what we do.

(for Shoba)