If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it.
If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.
No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.
from FuelFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 1998
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
Someone has been painting
NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE
across the backs of bus benches,
blotting out the advertisements beneath
with green so the strong silver letters
appear clearly at corners,
in front of taco stands
and hardware stores.
Whoever did this
must have done it in the dark,
clanging paint cans block to block
or a couple of sprays—
they must have really
wanted to do it.
Among the many distasteful graffiti on earth
this line seems somehow honorable.
It wants to help us.
It could belong to anyone,
Latinas, Arabs, Jews,
priests, glue sniffers.
Mostly I wonder about
what happened or didn’t happen
in the painter’s life
to give her this line.
I don’t wonder about the person
who painted HIV under the STOPs
on the stop signs in the same way.
NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE
Did some miracle startle
the painter into action
or is she waiting and hoping?
Does she ride the bus with her face
pressed to the window looking
for her own message?
Daily the long wind brushes YES
through the trees.
from FuelFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 1998
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: lam yours, you are mine.”
-Tommy Olofsson, Sweden
I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.
Once when my father was a boy
a stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddle: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother’s doorwaywelcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Later his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.
Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
“I am native now.”
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child’s poem says,
“I don’t like wars,
they end up with monuments.”
He’s painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.
Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
it’s ridiculous.
There’s a place in my brain
where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.
It’s late but everything comes next.
from Red SuitcaseFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 1994
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
I position my head on the pillow
where you told your last folktale,
mixing donkey, camel, mouse,
journey, kitchen, trees,
so the story grew jumbled,
uncharacteristically long.
I listened from the other small bed
thinking, not about the story, but,
it’s the last one I’ll hear from this voice,
remembering two and four and six
when this voice calmed me every night,
thinking, how will I live without this voice?
At one point, you hallucinated.
Politics came in, a rare speck
of religion, even a bad nurse
you’d had at the clinic,
frustration of long illness
tangling with the tale,
Oh Dad, you’ve been so brave,
to which you replied,
What else can I do?
and returned to the comforting
donkey, bucket of olives,
smoke curling up from twig fire
over which anyone, a lost girl,
a wanderer, a dying man,
could warm his hands.
from TransferFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2011
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
from Red SuitcaseFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 1994
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
where is the name no one answered to
gone off to live by itself
beneath the pine trees separating houses
without a friend or a bed
without a father to tell it stories
how hard was the path it walked on
all those years belonging to none
of our struggles drifting under
the calendar page elusive as
residue when someone said
how have you been it was
strangely that name that tried
to answer
from TransferFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2011
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
We thought of ourselves as people of culture.
How long will it be till others see us that way again?
Iraqi friend
In her first home each book had a light around it.
The voices of distant countries
floated in through open windows,
entering her soup and her mirror.
They slept with her in the same thick bed.
Someday she would go there.
Her voice, among all those voices.
In Iraq a book never had one owner—it had ten.
Lucky books, to be held often
and gently, by so many hands.
Later in American libraries she felt sad
for books no one ever checked out.
She lived in a country house beside a pond
and kept ducks, two male, one female.
She worried over the difficult relations
of triangles. One of the ducks
often seemed depressed.
But not the same one.
During the war between her two countries
she watched the ducks more than usual.
She stayed quiet with the ducks.
Some days they huddled among reeds
or floated together.
She could not call her family in Basra
which had grown farther away than ever
nor could they call her. For nearly a year
she would not know who was alive,
who was dead.
The ducks were building a nest.
from FuelFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 1998
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
No one should hold that against you.
It’s a means of survival.
Sometimes I thought my best talent was
taking a skinny story, adding wings and a tail.
Dressing it in a woolen Bedouin cloak
with stitching around the edges.
Putting a headdress on it.
Making a better picture.
Your mother got mad at me sometimes
for telling a story differently but it wasn’t a lie,
just a story in different clothes
with other things emphasized.
My own mother dressed up stories for 106 years
till that last winter she rode in her bed
like a boat, sitting up to sleep.
Maybe it’s our duty to be shaped
a hundred times by the same stories.
We think we’re telling them
but really they’re keeping us alive,
memory oxygen breathed out and in.
from TransferFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2011
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.
