Fuel (6 page)

You can't be, says a Palestinian Christian

on the first feast day after Ramadan.

So, half-and-half and half-and-half.

He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,

chips. If you love Jesus you can't love

anyone else. Says he.

At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa,

he's sweeping. The rubbed stones

feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar

across faces of date-stuffed
mamool
.

This morning we lit the slim white candles

which bend over at the waist by noon.

For once the priests weren't fighting

in the church for the best spots to stand.

As a boy, my father listened to them fight.

This is partly why he prays in no language

but his own. Why I press my lips

to every exception.

A woman opens a window—here and here and here—

placing a vase of blue flowers

on an orange cloth. I follow her.

She is making a soup from what she had left

in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.

She is leaving nothing out.

There is a picture to help us.

Also an announcement:
Carton has been opened
.

In case we are stumbling through an afternoon,

have lost our way, or plate and knife confound us.

Once a plastic bag intoned:
There should be a suggestion

of firmness in the cooked macaroni
. Not entirely firm,

not utterly anything, just a
suggestion
.

But I don't want to close the butter box

with the butter in it. Place a single brick

in the pink dish, extra three

stacked in waiting, box discarded.

See how much help we didn't need?

The new slash of road curves up beside five sleeping smokestacks.

Four stand together, one apart—the lucky or the lonely one, depending.

I'm driving you to school with your blue pants and box of lunch.

I'm combing your hair with my eyes.

They've built fancy houses around a giant pit. What do people see in it?

The smokestacks were smoking when I was in college, when my father

drove me down the old road on the other side.

Was it neat? We both know smoke isn't neat but I guess

what you mean. Was it black or white? I can't recall.

So much has poured out the top of my head.

I knew the lady who owned the smokestacks, her peacock

bit my hand. We take turns imagining what happens next,

if they stand or fall, whether the wrecked warehouse

with arches will be spared, or the fog lift, or the sun.

Today a small red light glitters at the throat of the lucky one.

You call it a good sign. At school your friends wear puffy coats

bright as parrots. You fly into your teacher's arms.

I could even hug a dull-looking father in his necktie

as we roll out of the lot into our daily lives. When I pass

the smokestacks again, their firm ladders

and proud ALAMO lettering up the sides, I'm fiddling

with the radio dial, swinging into a lane of cars.

Now the gloom of distant news washes over worse than grit

and we can't clean it, fix it, or make good sense.

Still we hold our mouths wide open, and the birds,

the sky, the trees, and the river

fly into us as if anything could heal. Somewhere deep,

these years must be churning the way cement does

inside a truck. The cement those smokestacks helped to make—

it became sidewalks all over this city. It became

buildings and tunnels and walls. We don't think of it gleaming.

Even the highway I drive on.

He grows used to the sound of the floor

Not yet     Not yet
     each evening

right before the news comes on.

Then the killing and the stabbing

and the beating and the crashing.

Turn it off. There's a smudge on the wall,

a Jesus with a blazing heart.

His coffee cup waits

upside down on its plate.

The shape of dinner tastes upside down.

He eats whatever the nurse-lady left him,

the hamburger in its three-day shirt.

Sometimes he doesn't know the name

of what he eats.

He hauls his body to the porch,

sinks his eyes into the weeds.

A hose curls in the lilies.

If he could reach it,

make it down

those three crooked steps . . .

When his wife died he was very quiet

for one day. Then he smiled

and smiled with his two teeth

for the bad time they had

that was over.

His tongue could sound
Soledad
or
Solamente

for his bones and his blood and his few good hairs.

When the drop of water on the white sink

meets the next drop and they are joining,

he thinks of other ways to spend this life

that he didn't do. He would like to meet them.

One by one

the old people

of our neighborhood

are going up

into the air

their yards

still wear

small white narcissus

sweetening winter

their stones

glisten

under the sun

but one by one

we are losing

their housecoats

their formal phrasings

their cupcakes

When I string their names

on the long cord

when I think how

there is almost no one left

who remembers

what stood in that

brushy spot

ninety years ago

when I pass their yards

and the bare peach tree

bends a little

when I see their rusted chairs

sitting in the same spots

what will be forgotten

falls over me

like the sky

over our whole neighborhood

or the time my plane

circled high above our street

the roof of our house

dotting the tiniest

“i”

She's walking up the street from Sanitary Tortilla

with her pink mesh shopping bag.

Mrs. Esquivel of the waving plants,

front porch lined with leaves.

In softer light she dances with sheets.

She came here from the old days.

Slipped out of the old days like a feather.

Floated here with her aluminum pot lids

and blue enamel spoons tied to her wings.

Fanning the heat away with an apron,

ruffled rickrack edge.

She believed in the screen door,

its tiny holes letting in breeze.

She preceded thieves and reasons for locking.

She held on to all her paper fans.

Her
¿Como estas?
has a heart in it.

If I said
No good
, she would listen.

*

Honey how's the little one? I see him come out

on the porch in his red shirt
,

pick up the hose, shoot it straight

in the air at the bananas
.

You got any ripe yet?

I walk over to see the President of the United States

at the Alamo and he don't look like much
.

He stand up high on a little stage and look down

into our faces. He got that tight look

like the curly-tail dog sit in the middle

of the street every night when the lamps

go on. Why you think it do that?

I say, Hey! Hey you! Trucks!

And it turn its head, look at me

so up and down like I'm the one

who crazy
.

*

Sometimes the grass grows so tall

in the vacant lot beside her house.

Fancy pink vines tie knots

around the heads of weeds.

She swims through the field at sundown,

calling out to hens, cats, whoever

might be lost in there,

Hey! Hey you! It's time to come home!

And the people drifting slowly past

in the slim envelope of light

answer softly,
Here I am
.