Category: Margaree Little

by Margaree Little

for Marianne Boruch

By a Chicago lake, in a Chicago summer,

1962 or 63, and she twelve or thirteen,

I think, she’d only said that she was young,

she spent the summer with a group of girls,

sleeping in tents, studying

different kinds of pines—

White Pine, for example, five needles

in each bundle, one needle

for each letter in its name—

and from June to September, she said, they kept

the same fire going, each girl learning

when it needed dry wood or green wood—

no one could leave that spot by the lake for long.

She would understand

how my friends and I carried the man we found

together, the forty pounds of him

inside the white bag the sheriff brought,

the white of the bag showing the way

through the dark. And the mountains,

the thin grass in the desert

like hair that had fallen out

and then like grass, Border Patrol trucks

on the far side of the mountains,

their light coming to meet his light.

from RestFind more by Margaree Little at the library

Copyright © 2018 Margaree Little
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Margaree Little

If not the cane fields, if that’s not where he worked,

it could have been a city with white walls and gray birds

in the plaza, children begging on the steps

of the church. Or maybe he came from the mountains

in the south, sound of crickets at night,

smell each day of each day’s fire. And he loved the sound

of one woman’s voice, or the underside

of her wrists. And their son cried, and their son

was hungry. And he undid the laces on his shoes

before he lay down here. Or he walked in circles first,

underneath the stars and moon, certain that this way, yes,

this way was north. Or his hands swelled

in the heat. Certainly, his hands swelled.

Or he folded his hands under his head, told himself he’d stop

for just a few minutes, just to rest. And it was August,

I know that it was August, because the sheriff said

it had been six months at least, time to be buried by the shale

and then unburied, soft wind giving him new names,

or he went back home, or he never left home,

he didn’t try to cross, never put his mouth

to the gravel here, never thought that it was water.

from RestFind more by Margaree Little at the library

Copyright © 2018 Margaree Little
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Margaree Little

Hands getting cold at night. Light flashing

through the chain-link fence on the bridge

over the dammed river from El Paso, sun getting low

in the West so the light comes fast between the shadows.

And Betty’s minestrone soup and Peter’s bread

in their house in Juárez, and outside in Juárez

the sound of dogs barking. And the evening, and the fish

the woman next door fries when Betty and I visit,

and the woman’s daughter, Selia, who is seventeen—

Age, is that lost? Lost, the idea of seventeen?—

Selia, who has two braids tied with different-colored

rubber bands, one red, one blue, her hair

dyed the soft red of carnations.

Lost, the feeling of shame, of shyness?

What about the feeling of being far from home?

And Betty’s hands on my hands in their yard at night,

and the sky in the morning above Selia’s street

like a field of lemon trees, just as pale, just as simple.

from RestFind more by Margaree Little at the library

Copyright © 2018 Margaree Little
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Margaree Little

You should get out of here, my friend said, so we drove north

out of Arizona, and coming up through California the shape we saw by the road

was not a person, the green we saw not the green

of the Border Patrol’s dogcatcher trucks, that’s what they call them,

cage in the back so from the back you can see

the desert running north as they drive south, Red-tailed Hawks

taking off in the heat, the heat like another person—this green

was the green of fields north of Los Angeles, Pacific green

opening to our left as we drove, green eyes

of my friend’s oldest sister, who showed us the way

into the forests of Santa Cruz, where men from Portugal used to cut

Redwood trees to burn, and built kilns from stones they broke with other stones,

and dropped the limestone from the hills into the kilns, and kept it there,

and stayed by it, and added wood all night to it, so in the kilns

it became another thing, the men coming back to town,

two days off after two weeks in the forest,

moths around the lamps, trains calling out in the night,

dragging the stone north. It’s heavy,

that stone. But they carried it. And men built San Francisco out of it,

and they didn’t complain, I think, as my friend didn’t complain or swear like I did

when the two of us carried the body, Elias—

and the stone didn’t burn when San Francisco burned in 1906,

my friend’s oldest sister tells me this in her family’s house in Santa Cruz,

she’s sitting at the piano to play us sonatas,

she’s making us coffee, she’s making us bread, she’s cutting pieces of apples

into our hands, as though she didn’t know where our hands had been.

from RestFind more by Margaree Little at the library

Copyright © 2018 Margaree Little
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Margaree Little

The undersides

of the hands. The hair.

The eyes. The chin,

the spot where the chin

becomes the neck.

Both of the arms.

The armpits.

The left tennis sneaker,

Wilson brand.

Water that we could

have left for him.

The sound of trains.

The canals that carry sound

into the ears. The ears.

Bruises and lips.

Wallet, if there ever was

a wallet. Light after a while.

Dark after a while.

Thighs. A name.

The face, the neck.

from RestFind more by Margaree Little at the library

Copyright © 2018 Margaree Little
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Margaree Little

There is an abandoned orchard on the road that runs east
from the city to El Paso, and you can see by the old quarry
the furrows that are green with clover now in March,
pecans falling from the trees to the ground, their dark husks
open and not open. The black and red birds fill the quiet
with their singing.

We were quiet when we stood in the wash south of the
orchard, and my friend said she was afraid the animals might
come to the man we had found, if we left to climb the ridge
and call the police. We didn’t say, he has already been here for
months and months. You could tell he was a god by the way his
feet were broken.

from Poetry Northwest 10.2 Winter & Spring 2016More by Margaree Little from the library

Copyright © Margaree Little
Used with the permission of the author
on behalf of Poetry Northwest.