City of Desire

A woman circles round

and round the mall's glittery fountain,

her child falling asleep in his stroller, the air-conditioned

air filling with perfume, the scent of coffee and chocolate.

She comes here to escape the heat and stroll

with her child a few hours, marble stone cooling their skin,

potted ivy and gardenias lining their path.

She can hum a song and no one cares.

She can imagine a city for her child to walk in,

with sunlight and air and trees.

She doesn't have money for anything

here—candy roses, fruit wrapped in paper,

pearls laid against velvet.

But there is a dress shimmering inside a cube

of glass she would love to wear.

The woman and child gaze at its sequined sleeves

and sheer, spinning silk.

Soon it's almost dark and time to go home.

Evening faces flutter up the escalator—bright lips

and jewels arcing like coins tossed in the air.

Below, she sees the street has become a wick of lights,

the city turning, for a moment, the color

of gold as she rides down the stairs,

her baby's stroller at her hip, the baby

in the crook of her arm.

Lessons

During the war years, the murdered

were laid out in the village school.

When a teacher heard of deaths, she put away her books,

the children pushed aside their table for the bodies

that came by truck, some shrouded in black and red,

others uncovered.

When the soldiers attacked, the children knew

they were to run behind the school and lie down

in narrow trenches dug to keep them alive.

They were to curl their heads to their knees,

wait like babies inside their mothers,

eyes squeezed.

The days of mourning the children knew

their lessons stopped. At home, mothers threw beans

into a pot of hissing water.

Later, the whole village walked the road

to the tilted schoolroom, waiting for

the dead brothers and cousins,

hands and feet blown off, skin bruised from bullets.

The bodies of children were the easiest to carry,

everyone said, light as a shovelful of dirt,

an armful of clothes.

Shelves at Midnight

Night balls up, black spider-like,

a thing of its own, this solitude.

Seven years later, I saw her

come up the stairs, her spirit a smear.

At the round earth's imagined corners,

I found her, the evanescence

of water touching heat.

Vitreous trick or body of fog,

out of the corner of my eye, I watched her

pace the ordinary hazel of a room

lined with shelves. Then she lay down

inside my eye, a wonder

and so quiet when I closed my book.

What is Given

I know by my mother's long anger

how terrible is was for her

to almost lose a child in the oblivion of birth,

oxygen ripped from the life cord

like strangulation, the baby coming out

that dark, brain-menacing blue.

Even though my brother lives one,

grown-up head bent into the circles

he colors like a three-year-old,

his birth was a debacle,

a spinning rush of chrome and metal,

the doctor's rubber fingers plunging

in blood before the peeling back

of my mother's broken skin,

the slow, ritual stitching. . .

I see my mother waking in a hospital bed

cursing her breath like an ancient

woman damning all the elements

for their power to give and take away.

I see her turning to a window lit

by the red hue of Mars

and damning not the girl I was then nor

the woman I would become, but the womb

from her womb I was given,

as the earth is given, as water as wind

as fire are given us.

The Life of Wood

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

The question is an old one,

how much to adore, how much to forget.

For three hundred years, a boy carved from wood

burnished to a luster,

kneels before the Buddha.

The boy's eyes are open, in awe.

He is an arhat, a young boy

permitted to feel the Buddha's shimmering wisdom,

the mind of one

who sits in stillness.

The boy wears a gold-flecked headpiece

and belted sampot.

The dark wood from which he is made—

koki or teak, as ephemeral

as this life,

spotted with age

and disappointment.

Near the temple where the boy

has sat for three hundred years

sugar palms show the mark of bullets

in their green wood.

We know the heart will never be finished

wanting the earth,

so we suffer.

And the mind, lonely visitor to the body,

waits for a welcome

before entering the fragrant trees of the forest.

The Witness

Missouri, 1931

Starlings flew from the whirring trees.

Air rank with gasoline, smoke folding

and unfolding as it passed over

the paralyzed fields.

I got there late. After the rope had snapped,

the schoolhouse rafters fallen.

They said he screamed and his body turned white when it flared.

Now the fire was all hesitation, a smoldering mark on a hill.

The  boy they hanged and burned on the schoolhouse roof

was fifteen years old, in the third grade.

The girl they said he murdered had been his teacher,

wandering home through horsemint and hay.

They found her inside the school,

face beaten in with boards.

When I heard the roar from the courtroom,

I headed up Tarkio Road in our old Ford,

waves of brown seed and dust

breaking my streak.

A cloud of birds spiraling, the sheriff's rock-faced dogs

baying at a puddle, the schoolhouse roped off.

I don't ask to be forgiven.

In 1931, we didn't put up with Negroes. When my father

hit a possum on the road, he circled back

and flung it on their porch.

They eat that, he told us.

Before the fire caught, some men rushed in to save

the iron-scrolled school desks. They lined them up in rows,

in the yard. I found one I remembered, saw my name

carved for a long time in the wood.

Back then I believed whatever they told me.

I was fifteen, the dead boy's age. I didn't let the sheriff see

a Lucky burning in the cup of my hand.

I remember how the wind bit like a tart apple,

gave me a knife-blade chill even though I wore

my new mackinaw, red-orange as leaves.

The Name of a Tree

Right here on Ash Street, Ana says, she used to stagger

up the stairs like a drunk.

There was no light, so she patted the wall,

following hardened gum and kick marks.

Those were crazy days she tells me—

two kids, no money, no job—

when English made the sound of click, swish,

money gliding from a cash drawer,

and the only words she knew were numbers—

seventy-five cents ringing down the throat

of a soda machine, her soapy fingers counting quarters

to feed the dryer.

Some days I am Anna's teacher, some days she is mine.

This morning we look through her kitchen window,

the one she can't get clean, cobwebs massed

between sash and pane. The sky is blue-gold, almost

the color of home. Ana, I say, each winter

I get more lonely. Both of us would like the sun

to linger as that round fruit in June, but Anna says

it's better to forget what you used to know:

the taste of fish cooked in banana leaves,

the rose color of the sea waves at dusk,

the names for clouds and wild storms, and a tree

that grows, she says, as full

as a flame in the heart of all countries

south of here.

Womanhood

She slides over

the hot upholstery

of her mother's car,

this schoolgirl of fifteen

who loves humming & swaying

with the radio.

Her entry into womanhood

will be like the other girls'—

a cigarette and a joke

as she strides up with the rest

to the brick factory

where she'll sew rag rugs

from textile strips of Kelly green,

bright red, aqua.

When she enters,

and the mill gate closes

final as a slap,

there'll be silence.

She'll see fifteen white windows

cemented over to cut out light.

Inside, a constant, deafening noise

and warm air smelling of oil,

the shifts continuing on . . .

All day she'll guide cloth along a line

of whirring needles, her arms & shoulders

rocking back & forth

with the machines—

200 porch-sized rugs behind her

before she can stop

to reach up, like her mother,

and pick the lint

out of her hair.