Ada Limón

I’m not yet comfortable with the word, its short clean woosh that sounds like life. At dinner last night my single girls said in admonition, “It’s not wife-approved” about a friend’s upcoming trip. Their eyes rolled up and over and out their pretty young heads. Wife, why does it sound like a job? “I need a wife” the famous feminist wrote, “a wife that will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced if need be.” A word that could be made easily into maid. A wife that does, fixes soothes, honors, obeys, Housewife, fishwife, bad wife, good wife, what’s the word for someone who stares long into the morning, unable to even fix tea some days, the kettle steaming over loud like a train whistle, she who cries in the mornings, she who tears a hole in the earth and cannot stop grieving, the one who wants to love you, but often isn’t good at even that, the one who doesn’t want to be diminished by how much she wants to be yours.

All these great barns out here in the outskirts, black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass. They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use. You say they look like arks after the sea’s dried up, I say they look like pirate ships, and I think of that walk in the valley where J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said, No. I believe in this connection we all have to nature, to each other, to the universe. And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there, low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss, and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets, woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so. So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky, its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name though we knew they were really just clouds— disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always, there is war and bombs.) Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw even the tenacious high school band off key. But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps, the truth is, every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can love it again, until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains, the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright, that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on, that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says my bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones, and isn’t that enough?

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear the frantic automatic weapons unleashed, the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands, that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to say:Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish comes back belly up, and the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing? The truth is: I don’t know. But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move my living limbs into the world without too much pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight toward the pickup trucks break-necking down the road, because she thinks she loves them, because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud roaring things will love her back, her soft small self alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm, until I yank the leash back to save her because I want her to survive forever.Don’t die, I say, and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth. Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe, like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

I can’t undress from the pressure of leaves, the lobed edges leaning toward the window like an unwanted male gaze on the backside, (they wish to bless and bless and hush). What if I want to go devil instead? Bow down to the madness that makes me. Drone of the neighbor’s mowing, a red mailbox flag erected, a dog bark from three houses over, and this is what a day is. Beetle on the wainscoting, dead branch breaking, but not breaking, stones from the sea next to stones from the river, unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat, a siren whining high toward town repeating that the emergency is not here, repeating that this loud silence is only where you live.

When you come, bring your brown- ness so we can be sure to please the funders. Will you check this box; we’re applying for a grant. Do you have any poems that speak to troubled teens? Bilingual is best. Would you like to come to dinner with the patrons and sip Patrón? Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit? Don’t read the one where you are just like us. Born to a green house, garden, don’t tell us how you picked tomatoes and ate them in the dirt watching vultures pick apart another bird’s bones in the road. Tell us the one about your father stealing hubcaps after a colleague said that’s what his kind did. Tell us how he came to the meeting wearing a poncho and tried to sell the man his hubcaps back. Don’t mention your father was a teacher, spoke English, loved making beer, loved baseball, tell us again about the poncho, the hubcaps, how he stole them, how he did the thing he was trying to prove he didn’t do.