Fuel (8 page)

A man letters the sign for his grocery in Arabic and English.

Paint dries more quickly in English.

The thick swoops and curls of Arabic letters stay moist

and glistening till tomorrow when the children show up

jingling their dimes.

They have learned the currency of the New World,

carrying wishes for gum and candies shaped like fish.

They float through the streets, diving deep to the bottom,

nosing rich layers of crusted shell.

One of these children will tell a story that keeps her people

alive. We don't know yet which one she is.

Girl in the red sweater dangling a book bag,

sister with eyes pinned to the barrel of pumpkin seeds.

They are lettering the sidewalk with their steps.

They are separate and together and a little bit late.

Carrying a creased note, “Don't forget.”

Who wrote it? They've already forgotten.

A purple fish sticks to the back of the throat.

Their long laughs are boats they will ride and ride,

making the shadows that cross each other's smiles.

The person who wrote
YES
!

in margins

disappeared.

Someone else

tempers her enthusiasms,

makes a small “v”

on its side

for lines

worth returning to.

A farmer

stares deeply

at a winter field,

envisioning

rich rows of corn.

In the mild tone

of farmers, says

Well, good luck.

What happens to us?

He doesn't dance

beside the road.

A boy told me

if he roller-skated fast enough

his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard

for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight

pedaling hard down King William Street

is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness

panting behind you on some street corner

while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,

pink petals that have never felt loneliness,

no matter how slowly they fell.

On the horizon, their problems

loom as long as burial mounds . . .

if we rise early enough

we can visit their problems.

Low-hanging fog.

Planes held on the runway an extra hour.

We didn't get our ginger ales till Cleveland.

Expecting some light chop
, the pilot said.

Chop, now there's a word.

Their problems sound arrangeable,

building blocks in a mesh bag

strung from the doorknob.

When I hear their problems I know

what the next sentence will be.

This is how they could solve them.

This is what they could do.

Hum from the lowest place in the body.

Take the problems off like a shirt.

Will they listen?

Of course not.

Without their problems they would be too lonely.

A crisis pitch is, at least, a pitch.

If they did not have extra sofas where would they sit?

A walk without any scenery?

Easy to stand back from anybody else's problems.

My own, now there's a different feather

sticking straight up out of the wing.

I need it to fly.

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.

Because they lived near a major airport,

their children were always flying over their heads.

Assimilating into cloud till specks of ground life

became smaller even than lives together remembered:

the floor furnace they leapt over for whole winters,

its gaping hot breath. How far they had come from

the clumsy navy stroller in the hall with its bum wheel and brakes.

The mother used to cry, pushing that thing.

Sometimes now the father went to the airport just to see

people saying good-bye and hello. Especially the good-bye gave him relief.

Before boarding, families looked so awkward together.

Repeating,
Now you be good, hear? Give a call if you can
.

They seemed almost desperate

to get away.

Since so many suitcases had their own wheels now,

he wondered, had the old rooted suitcases gone to live in attics

stuffed with unseasonable clothes, or junkyards with disappeared cars,

and what staple of their lives might have wheels next, not to mention

wings?

At certain hours we may rest assured that nearly everyone inside

our own time zone or every adjacent time zone lies asleep and then

we may begin to speak to them through the waves and folds of their dreaming

then we may urge them on    beg them not to forget

though so many days have driven in between us and original hopes

as a boy stands back from his earlier self mocking it

and the light of fireflies blinking against an old fence has become

as sad as it is lovely because so many hands are gone by now

it is not that we wanted the light to be caught      but reached for

that was it

Tonight it is possible to pull the long string and feel someone moving far away

to touch the fingers of one hand to the fingers of the other hand

to tug the bride and widow by the same thread    to be linked to every mother

every father's father       even the man in the necktie in Washington

who kept repeating
You went the wrong way, you went the wrong way

with such animation he might have been talking about his own life

My friend took my son for his first ride on a bicycle's back fender

He said
Are you sure it is okay to do this?
—
We have been doing it forever

I loped behind thinking how much has been denied him for living in a city

in the 1990s but this was a town    the dreamy grass    slow spoke

clipped hedges

Just then a light clicked on inside tall windows    draped tablecloth

pitcher of flowers    lace of evening spinning its intricate spell

inside our blood and what we smelled was earth and rain sunken into it

run-on sentence of the pavement      punctuation of night and day

giving us something to go by    a knot in the thread

although we did not live in that house