95 Immigration poems

I. The Chihuahua Desert I rose early to wash the desert grime, watch the unearthly flight of doves, the way pigeons were poisoned incorrectly or how an elephant was beaten with a stick. This is the way of beginnings, women charmed by fits of language, the cadence of bees around garbage cans, the laughter of grackles, hot sun baking Coca-Cola to sidewalks. Tumbleweeds and arroyos hush day-long trips through barrios. I am sand. My eyes grainy, tears brown, and what of the different tones of bees or flies, how a sting can kill us? I’m speaking the language of smokers, lung-full and wary, breathing a refinery chore, my eyes black pits, Historically I was fruit, voluptuous and campy, some might say exotic, cheekbones native, my hips swaying. II. The Rio Grande I grew into the silence of third person, a landscape, a mesa. I flew hard into the silence of gray smog, my chest burning, my throat dry with the songs of women with sagging faces, children strapped to their bent backs. They have become a river metaphor, a border, a soulless chant to believers. Maquiladora workers slain and buried in shallow graves. My palms refuse to fold in prayer and god giggles in my red ears. Sand pecks my skin like a drum roll in the hot wind. The march of children, their backpacks plastic, the way they see color a mystery, a dance, the shapes of clouds, an elephant, a dove, a long-lost dog. They sing song their way past the factory-circus. III. The Potomac Years later I loved a blank-faced man in tweed who drank espresso and ate bagels in a deli outside Washington D.C. His pale face mirrored in the glass at a video-store where he grumbled artless and unfilled by the hurried ache of cicadas. His first and last job in the world of mundane labor. He was all red hair; his voice bellowed. Was it the seventh or tenth year he dubbed my language, subtitled my screens? Windows on the metro metalled sand tunneled. I lost the desert dance of blood, half-forgot the closed copper mine, the way the border’s earth is lead-filled and sullen. IV. The Vlatva Awed by cathedrals in Paris, then Prague, I was the archangel of rage with my book-bag, a wordless hum. I began to speak with my hands, my eyes Slavic dark, searching. I worshipped fat swans along the thick river taking in the green wondering why I had been blessed by such beauty. I sensed him in a snowdrift of words historically divine. And what was he or I in this world? I didn’t see the gold specks in his eyes, the way poetry became his glory, full of fan-fare and the strife of strip malls. And here, envying his pristine days, the way the books never cover his mouth, our hearts pump separately to the rhythm of loss.

for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes, the damp shine of a goat’s new skin. When I was sick they followed me, I woke from the long fever to find them covering my head like cool prayers. My grandmother’s days are made of bread, a round pat-pat and the slow baking. She waits by the oven watching a strange car circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son, lost to America. More often, tourists, who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines. She knows how often mail arrives, how rarely there is a letter. When one comes, she announces it, a miracle, listening to it read again and again in the dim evening light. My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her. Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby. She knows the spaces we travel through, the messages we cannot send—our voices are short and would get lost on the journey. Farewell to the husband’s coat, the ones she has loved and nourished, who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky. They will plant themselves. We will all die. My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death. When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press, when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms, He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name. “Answer, if you hear the words under the words— otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

People, don't ask me again where my shoes are. The valley I walked through was frozen to me as I was to it. My heavy hide, my zinc talisman—I'm fine, people. Don't stare at my feet. And don't flash the sign of the cross in my face. I carry the Blue Cross Card— card among cards, card of my number and gold seal. So shall ye know I am of the system, in the beast's belly and up to here, people, with your pity. People, what is wrong with you? I don't care what the sign on your door says. I will go to another door. I will knock and rattle and if you won't, then surely someone, somewhere, will put a pancake in my hand. You people of the rhetorical huh? You lords and ladies of the blooming stump, I bend over you, taste you, keep an eye on you, dream for you the beginning of what you may one day dream an end to. The new century peeled me bone-bare like a first song inside a warbler—that bird, people, who knows not to go where the sky's stopped. Keep this in mind. Do you think the fox won't find your nest? That the egg of you will endure the famine? You, you people born of moons with no mother-planets, you who are back-lit, who have no fathers in heaven, hear now the bruise-knuckled knock of me. I am returned. From your alley. From your car up on blocks. From the battered, graffitied railcars that uncouple and move out into the studded green lightning. Dare you trust any longer the chained-up dogs of hell not to bust free? Or that because your youth's been ransacked, nothing more will be asked of you? If a bloody foot's dragged across your coiffed lawn— do not confuse me with dawn. Now people, about the shoes: the shoes have no doubt entered the sea and are by now walking the ramparts of Atlantis. I may be a false prophet, but god bless me, at least I have something to say. I lay myself down in a pencil of night—no chiseled tip yet, but the marks already forming in the lead.

A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing makes me enter the gospels. Not a thing ... nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nothing makes me descend from the pharaoh’s boats. Nothing carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing and not promise. What will I do? What will I do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name ... Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams to my reality: not dust and not fire. What will I do without roses from Samarkand? What will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar stones? Our weight has become light like our houses in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange creatures in the clouds ... and we are now loosened from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what will we do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name ... There’s nothing left of me but you, and nothing left of you but me, the stranger massaging his stranger’s thigh: O stranger! what will we do with what is left to us of calm ... and of a snooze between two myths? And nothing carries us: not the road and not the house. Was this road always like this, from the start, or did our dreams find a mare on the hill among the Mongol horses and exchange us for it? And what will we do? What will we do without exile?

Why and by whose power were you sent? What do you see that you may wish to steal? Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies Drink up all the light? What are you demanding That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then What is that leaping in your chest? What is The nature of your mission? Do you seek To offer a confession? Have you anything to do With others brought by us to harm? Then Why are you afraid? And why do you invade Our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute As ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess? Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?

I worry much about the suffering of Machado. I was only one when he carried his mother across the border from Spain to France in a rainstorm. She died and so did he a few days later in a rooming house along a dry canal. To carry Mother he abandoned a satchel holding his last few years of poetry. I've traveled to Collioure several times to search for Machado's lost satchel. The French fed him but couldn't save him. There's no true path to a death — we discover the path by walking. We turn a corner on no road and there's a house on a green hill with a thousand colorful birds sweeping in a circle. Are the poems in the basement of the house on the hill? We'll find out if we remember earth at all.

crossed in despair many deserts full of hope carrying their empty fists of sorrow everywhere mouthing a bitter night of shovels and nails “you’re nothing you’re shit your home’s nowhere”— mountains will speak for you rain will flesh your bones green again among ashes after a long fire started in a fantasy island some time ago turning Natives into aliens

I have arrived here after taking many steps Over the kitchen floors of friends and through their lives. The dun-colored hills have been good to me And the gold rivers. I have loved chrysantheumums, and children: I have been grandmother to some. In one pocket I have hidden chocolates from you And knives. Speaking my real thoughts to no one In bars and at lecterns I have told the truth Fairly often, but hardly ever to myself. I have not cried out against the crimes of my country But I have protected myself, I have watched from a safe corner The rape of mountains, the eagle’s reckless plunge. Ever since high school I have waved goodbye to history: I have assisted you to grow In all ways that were convenient to me. What is a block vote against steam shovels? My current events teacher was a fine man But his moral precepts were a put-up job and I followed them. Well-dressed, in my new Adidas At every gathering I investigated my psyche with friends And they investigated theirs with me. But whenever Trouble came in the front door I ran out the back And fell into the pit of my bones. Escaped from those burning buildings, the past, What balance can any of us hope for? I was comparing lipsticks The day Nagasaki vanished. The day Solzhenitsyn disappeared into the Gulag I was attending a cocktail party. Perhaps there are only ashes in my handbag. A man at the corner of Broadway and Forty-Second Street Tried to sweep me into a trash barrel and I almost agreed. Already the dried blood was sifting along my wrists. Already my own hands Were tightening around my throat But Sorrow saved me, Sorrow gave me an image Of bombs like human tears watering the world’s gardens. How could I not answer? Since then I have been planting words In every windowbox, poking them to grow up. What’s God, That he should be mindful of me? Sometimes I feel like wood Waiting for someone to peel me. Indeed I have been lukewarm At heart, which is all that matters. Of tiny bread-colored atoms, Equal fragments equally dispersed That love each other and are never hungry. What have I ever ignited That warmed anyone? I have not followed the rivers. Dangerous as a pine needle Packed in among others, in the dense multitudes And dry timbers of the West I am afraid of greed, The rich taste of it, the anger Hidden in my pockets. Columns of smoke on the horizon, Pillars of green fire. But I have arrived here somehow, Neither have I stopped talking. Numberless are the kitchens I have sat in, Chewing my fingers, trying to say something, Anything, so that the daughters of men should see As many sides of themselves as possible. Word after word my footprints Have stumbled across deserts. How should I escape them? They keep following after me. A little wind stirs itself, Whisks across my eyelids, And I know what it is before I say it: What if the world really articulates itself In the socket of a human knee? God save me From the swamps of hubris but it may be, it may be. Before the idea, the impulse. I feel it moving in me, it is there Arthritic but still powerful, a seizure Delicate as grasshoppers, a light Gathering in the skull. Between thumb and forefinger And the ballbearing joints of the tongue In soft, glottal convulsions Out of no alien skies But out of the mind’s muscle The hieroglyph figures rise. The little histories of words Cannot be eaten. I know it, you know it And the children... But the images we make are our own. In the cool caves of the intellect The twisted roots of them lead us Backwards and then forwards. If only we could understand What’s in our pockets is for everyone! I have a dictionary in one hand, a mirror. Strangers look at themselves in it, Tracing the expressions they use From one family to the next They comfort themselves, murmuring The tongues we speak are a blizzard Of words like warm wool flying: In the shy conjugal rites Of verb, consonant, vowel, In the dark mucosal flesh lining The prismed underside of the skin Each one is a spark sheared From the veined fleece of the spirit Of the looking-glass body we live in. It is the one I have been cherishing, The one all of us speak from, For the world as we know it moves Necessarily by steps. Breath, pulse beat, ten digital stops. At the foot of the mountains I look up. Does God Lift up His hand to cover them? Blinded by tears like rain My bones turn granite, the spine of the hills congeals them. Where is the eye of the storm, Or where is the center of my seeing? The wind of my breath is a hurricane: I am locked inside myself. Painfully, up the bald stepladder I climb, But sometimes the light in my head goes on More like the sun than a match. Just as they said in Arabia There’s a huge pantalooned angel swelling Inside the body’s glass jar. The white-haired thread of steam From the teakettle on the range whistles And sharpens itself into a voice Bodiless as history, invisible But still whispering in ears That keep trying to hear it. It is as if midgets were bellowing their names Down sets of cardboard cylinders. But we have not disappeared Yet. My friends, we have said many things to each other In new combinations, seed upon seed exploding And blossoming in kitchen gardens. I confess I am ashamed of myself: I have not tried hard enough to understand Or listen to you speak. But the Word is mindful of itself And always has been. Littering every street In the sly eyes of tin cans, Drops of water in the gutter The world looks back at us From every known language: Yoruba, Hebrew, Chinese, Arrogant English, the subject Subjecting all to its desires, Even the softer tongues, romantic Self-reflexive, done to As we would be done by, Whatever life we cultivate Out of the animal moans of childhood It is all wheat fields, all grass Growing and being grown. With poisoned bread in my pockets, or gumdrops, Or armies like Myrmidons rising What I say is true For a time only, thank God, If I have only arrived anywhere it is to look Carefully, at all I thought I knew. In living rivers of speech The reflections I make are my own And yet not: Though the old growth rings are hidden from us And the echoing tomorrows of the acorn, The warm currents of the senses Are a two-way street, my friends: The palms of our hands are crisscrossed With as many intersections as a leaf.

The women were divided between regrets for the homes they had left and fear of the deserts and savages before them. —Francis Parkman nothing but this continent intent on its dismay— hands, etc. bandaged, a torn petticoat fringed with lace, roseate frozen fingers, or elsewhere feet wrapped in burlap scuffing new snow after the indigo of their tunics seeps back into the soil this spring, the several springs’ dulling thaw and incidental greenery what marks they made were harrowed out by those who settled, so set themselves against the land whether to keep the land open to passage or parcel it to the plow Benton and Everett argued “English tartars,” some said, white savages to plunder the trade, “only farmer and tradesman stabilize” his head raised slightly the dying woodsman views the open plains, “flat water” squalls spilling stiff grasses into the small shade a stand of scrub trees gives his end “huge skulls and whitening bones of buffalo were scattered everywhere” the Conestoga’s canvas straining to the wind, the plow’s first bite, the first indenture of the rutted road, crossties set down, oil, asphalt glittering quartz aggregate to the sun the harrow’s bright discs crumble the damp shine of the new furrow, the wind dulls and sifts grassland into dust two days in the storm cellar, wet rags to their faces, the slatted door impacted with wet rags, dowery linens strange light at the cyclone’s onset, a cupped brightness edging banks of dark clouds, fields darkening in lines of gathering dust, section on section spilling eastward, a straw drilled through a tree, a team of mules transported forty miles intact a dream of transport, Dorothy soaring on the wind, becalmed in still another summer, lost, follows billboards and Burma Shave into the city’s ragged sprawl Uptown or Lakeview, five children in three rooms, A.D.C., weathers like unpainted wood, stacked porches where her laundry tatters with city grit, bars haunted by banjo music everybody talks of home as though it were the sparkle of an earlier dream, a glint of rainwater in someone’s hair, names you can’t remember, old photographs gone brown with age, a man and woman, faces obscured by broad hats, a bare tree beside them, the bare distances empty and faded into the sky Oxus, Phasis, Palmyra— Oz encased in glass, “variegated with fields and meadows” store window dioramas display the life and manners of high-rise glass apartments— The El Dorado, Malibu East— warm winters, cool summers high above the city’s noise clouds move in facets across their polished faces, tipped red at sunset, presiding over a close-set clutter of flat, graveled roofs graceful as mannequins they are laughing into the summer evening, women bright as spring flowers, in autumn’s colors, warmed and smiling, they talk of love before a dying fire gray as she is, aging, she fingers the pictures of ladies’ magazines, fingers, as well, pictures she brought from home the red flowers on the floor wear into black treads, black dust comes in at her windows his weapons arranged at his side, the sun darkening his sight, Cooper contrived his death in alien spaces; Boone finished his days on a crumbling porch that fronted on the open West

A collaboration with Emma Lazarus Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Give me your gentrificatees of the Lower East Side including all the well-heeled young Europeans who’ll take apartments without leases Give me your landlords, give me your cooperators Give me the guys who sell the food and the computers to the public schools in District One Give me the IRS-FBI-CIA men who don’t take election day off Give me the certain members of the school board & give me the district superintendent Give me all the greedy members of both american & foreign capitalist religious sects Give me the parents of the punk people Give me the guy who puts those stickers in the Rice Krispies Give me the doctor who thinks his time is more valuable than mine and my daughter’s & the time of all the other non-doctors in this world Give me the mayor, his mansion, and the president & his white house Give me the cops who laugh and sneer at meetings where they demonstrate the new uses of mace and robots instead of the old murder against people who are being evicted Give me the landlord’s sleazy lawyers and the deal-making judges in housing court & give me the landlord’s arsonist Give me the known & unknown big important rich guys who now bank on our quaint neighborhood Give me, forgive me, the writers who have already or want to write bestsellers in this country Together we will go to restore Ellis Island, ravaged for years by wind, weather and vandals I was surprised and saddened when I heard that the Statue of Liberty was in such a serious state of disrepair & I want to help This is the most generous contribution I can afford.