The Traveller
Often I see myself as simply a traveler.
With some purpose I walk
through the oppressed carpets
of the airport, my black leather bag resting
on my capable shoulder. I carry nothing
loose and my bag is hardly cumbersome
though I am constantly moving.
At train stations, I arrive on time.
I don't even have ten minutes to waste,
waiting, staring at posters and the litter.
I never have to hurry in either, my throat burned
by sudden rushes of air. I see myself
in hot climates too, wearing sleeveless shirts
and sunglasses, but I am no tourist.
Vacationers are a little in awe
of me, they can tell I'm on some important
mission, so intent is my gaze, my face closed,
can't easily be read. And yes, I am
traveling for a reason, my work
(though I can hardly think of what it could be)
carries me all around the world, directing my days,
hardly allowing me a night's sleep.
Your Life Versus a TV Show
It never matches up somehow.
The shows you love, leave you
tired and strained eyed. And you don't
waste your time on sitcoms, people idly
complaining out their lives in coffee shops,
high school gyms, offices, hardly ever
leaving the safety of the building.
You'd rather watch a mystery play itself out,
an adventure. Every moment crucial,
every sentence, the thoughts.
Each character wholly dependent
on the other-and moving: driving to outskirts
of the city and abandoned buildings.
Perhaps that's why your favorite state
is driving, why you'd rather be in between
places than stuck somewhere.
You rebel against laundry. Food shopping
nearly kills you. You boil spaghetti noodles
every night so you don't have to waste time cooking.
You try to push yourself forward during the day
in your job, but it hardly seems worth it.
You think advancing at the bank
will only take you deeper into offices.
You get tired of asserting yourself,
walking assuredly into the office in grey suits.
The only risks you take at lunch,
driving to distant parts of the city,
never getting out of your car.
In Disneyland
At least one person cries inwardly
that the people in the park don't
know each other. Why must
only the relatives of the old man
in the sky blue polo shirt help
him when he struggles in the sun.
And the woman who stands in the yards
and yards of her maroon muu-muu
at the entrance to Adventureland and sobs.
Her two daughters in their Metallica
t-shirts and heavy eyeliner hug her
and look to the plastic walls of the Tiki Room
for guidance. The couple smiling
at their toddler in her Pooh Bear outfit
could comfort this woman when they
pass; their child might hug her leg.
The talking Abraham Lincoln, if
her could say what he wanted,
would ask why didn't the people talk
to each other, use up their eyes
on the live bodies walking through the park.
Can only war make you
speak excitedly in the street, sharing
the threat of severed arms? he might add
in his grave voice.
Song on a Dark Road
Finally let free of a long day, I welcome
the color of 11:30 and the road I drive
on. I am so glad that there's only dark
all around me. I don't want to know
about the houses and stores and billboards.
The road needs to be anonymous,
without a name, that could run through any
time period, regardless of my car or me.
But what I want from my car is a song
on the radio. A deep voiced song
from the early sixties that I haven't heard
before, so on this night when no one else
might be listening, this hollow path can
give me the song and the D.J. and
the newborn tingling from the air
of its debut.
The Woman on the Ground
My friend didn't notice her at first,
on his way to hand in his petition
to graduate. Then he would be free
for the rest of the afternoon.
But there she stretched, in the grassy courtyard,
her matted white hair, dead
on the grass, her faded dress twisted
around her legs. My friend couldn't tell
if she was asleep, or in trouble. He thought
about it all the way to the dean's office.
And on his way back, he stopped
to check on her, not to take her pulse
or nudge her, but to sit twenty feet away
on a bench and wait for her to get up.
He had seen this woman probing for aluminum
in garbage cans. To him, her age was past
knowing, immediately old from long exposure
to sun. It was a good sign
that her cart of cans stood upright
beside her, as if intended.
He watched students in shorts
the color of fruit; strawberry, nectarine, plum,
glance at her as they chatted by, probably what he
would have done, had he come with a group.
But my friend stayed on that bench
a half-hour watching over the woman
until the height of the building
mastered the sun and a grimace started
on the woman's face. Then her eyes opened.
Before she began brushing grass off
her dress, my friend slipped out
of the courtyard thinking, "I knew
almost for certain in the beginning,
why did I wait?"
At the Sight of Mary Janes
When the room is nearly
full, a grey woman appears
at the door and finds
her way to the only empty
seat, next to me. Before she
settles, her smell reaches
me like the odor of oyster juice seeping
into brown paper. I turn my head
away, wonder if she has only
climbed in from the street in her
loose housedress and deeply wrinkled
skin. My need for human comfort wants
to refuse to share my book
when she leans over. But at sight
of her shoes, black Mary Janes, badly worn,
I realize that she's Alice,
out of Wonderland and grown old,
stumbling about to find more pieces
for her yearning mind. Maybe
come to this room to listen
for nonsense. And when she strains
to catch the floating words
in my book, or blurred people around her,
she may think she ate from an odd
shaped mushroom, even hope this is true.
The Day Before her Brain Hemorrhage
She woke with a thickness that she couldn't
shake, even as she moved about the coffee
pot and toaster, she felt it too fuzzy
and clumsy and thought she should be somewhere
else. By the time she got to work, she cleared
up. She opened two new accounts by noon and
for lunch, she and Sally rushed to make it
to the Chinese food place across town
and back in an hour. When her two o'clock
appointment canceled, she thought it was a gift
and leaned back in her chair and remembered
the first time she drove into New York City.
She finished two credit ratings and thought
she could leave early for the day, but decided
to straighten up her desk for tomorrow.
At home, she tied
her hair back into a pony tail and called
her friend in Connecticut, talking a good
forty-five minutes about the past, the strange assortment
of neighbors during college, darling people she could never
have remembered on her own. Swept up in it all,
she wanted to phone someone else in Pennsylvania,
but it was already nine o'clock in California.
She found a movie on television, a story
about children who made friends with leprechauns.
She had watched it again and again
with her brother and sister years ago.
She tried to stay awake for the ending
when the leprechauns sailed away,
but the sound and images of the TV
came across as a hypnotic rhythm
already pulling down her eyelids.
Mutiny
I'm afraid of doing the wrong thing;
carrying books I didn't pay for right
out of the store without ever meaning to.
Only smiling helplessly at the clerk who rushes
out after me and grabs my arm. "What do you think
you're doing?" he'll demand. I won't have
an answer. Perhaps I won't be able to stop laughing
during jury duty, or worse, at a funeral.
And it won't be because I think anything
is funny. And one scene I'm convinced
will happen on the lonely highway.
Instead of passing the weather beaten hitchhikers,
I'll pull right over to them, my breaking foot
and stretching hand doing what they want
in spite of my mind. I can see the men grinning
at their good luck as the eagerly open
the doors I've unlocked while my own face
is expressionless in its shock and surrender.
The Veterinary Students' Workroom
Only those who truly love animals can go
behind the bolted, four-inch door.
Huge carcasses of cows and horses hang
from thick chains to the ceiling.
Intact skins, dried out eyes, hoofs
dangle, just above the place for the student.
Some work's been down, a three-foot chunk
is missing from a cow, a horse has lost
its back two legs, though its course tail
sways slightly, wanting to be brushed.
The veins on the horses' necks are tight
and the stiffened dog on the tray lies tense
with an angry open mouth. Open and frozen.
The mass of animals in the air
wants to fight this defiance of gravity.
The pull of the bodies creaks the chains-
the bodies want to crash down
on the counter and floor, freeing the flesh,
knocking over the can of soda waiting,
unopened for some student's break.
The Poet as a Poem
Daytime she walks the beach, watches
the hooded sweatshirt woman squish
sea pods between the thumbs of each
hand and wander the sand looking
for more. She notices the game
of paddle ball between skinny son and power
body father. The man locked in a bold stance
as he watches the boy chase the rubber ball
down to the water again and again.
She wonders about the stiffness
in the man's knees, the boy's hurry.
And the teen-age girl sitting next
to her boyfriend on a rock, looking
straight into his averted eyes and rubbing hard
on his thighs to take his attention.
How crucial the movement of eyes.
She sees the hooded sweatshirt woman again,
this time standing alone watching
a man on a crate make his body
swivel like a robot, lips buzzing
with electronic noises. The hooded sweatshirt woman stays
when other onlookers stroll away, stays
after she hands the robot
a dollar and he gives her
a mechanical handshake in return.
From a distance, she who wants things
to be poems so badly, understands
this scene is already a finished work.
What words could describe the robotic man's
precision of movement though he's been
on the crate all day.
And the hooded sweatshirt woman's attention,
honest and depending on every head tilt
and knee roll, understanding
the severe meld of metal and flesh.
Hong Kong, 1976
I notice it only when
I'm leaving the library,
patches of blue and orange
on the people walking down
the street of a book jacket.
Hong Kong, 1976, the title reads.
I can't help wanting to recapture
1976, when as a young child
I leisurely watched the adults
around me in bright seamless
slacks and loose printed blouses
caring about the things
of that year. I want all
the feelings back of that time,
my unconcerned childish self
exactly the same, only immersed
in that crowded street, caught in the motion
of those lively walkers in Hong Kong.
Outside the Dressing Room
People find me useful. I can
say which rooms are empty
and agree to "Please watch this
room so nobody takes it."
One woman asks me to tie
the sash of a pink backless dress,
doesn't know if she will buy it
or not. I laugh at the role
these people have my play.
Helper. Reassurer. My own sister
inside with her bright, scrap bathing suits,
doesn't call for my opinion. But these
women, without a friend waiting
outside for them, call on me, yet
they must know I don't really
work here, slouching back on the attendant's
chair, holding my black backpack
and crumpled shopping bag.
I am their neediness and my own
free time. When the rooms quiet down
momentarily, I catch sight of the gold
design on a black button lying
a few feet away. I pick it up and see
it so exactly matches a button I lost
two weeks ago in another mall.
Back from the Airport
I'm on the symbolic highway again, only
it's the real highway, upholstery
under me. The cars pouring around me
and towards me on wide stretches of lanes
are glows of light against the dustcloth sky,
shedding its purple lint.
And I am a glow, moving with these others
alongside me like we might be riders
coming back across the range, humming
in tune with the hoof beats
and the dirt trembling underneath.
Now our motion quivers, and we
are the steady buzzes and pulses.
For the Record
I am on the trail
of an artist clutched by the kitchen.
I find remnants of her sketches
on shopping lists and paper towels;
bright, stylish women looking coy,
or thoughtful with a head on a hand.
These ink women all have short puffed hair,
like film clips of the 1960s, but they
look smart and eternally modern
in their straight-cut outfits.
I have often wanted to feel what it would be
like to be one of these drawings.
Her paint brushes are dried out
in the shed, her canvases were taken
to the dump years ago. Her hands mostly
work lasagna noodles and red onion.
The stylish women go their ways, some
are sent on envelopes to the phone company,
some are used to wipe up spilled spaghetti.
On today's holiday, the women haven't appeared.
She's been busy all afternoon with
the tomatoes and peppers while we sit
on the patio and sip beer and iced tea.
It is the farthest point in history
we have yet seen, yet the sketched women
are beyond history. They have been created
and discarded so many times that they know
their return is inevitable, simply
a matter of time for the canvas and charcoal.
Foster Teen Conference, 1996
I didn't see how I could write a story
about it. I couldn't see the kids talking
to me when I hardly looked older than a teen
myself. Yet the assignment was mine.
I even pulled my hair back austerely
for the occasion. Determined, I went to the ones
who seemed the most trouble. "What do you
think of today?" I asked noisy t-shirts
and spiked leather jackets. And finally,
the boy who had kept his sunglasses on
the whole time inside the gym. Those lenses
seemed more steady than eyes when he told me,
"I come from a group home for abused and neglected
teens." He said it in the same manner
as his name. It's only the truth.
"They told me I should come here today,"
he said, standing in his shades in a room
of a hundred. Writing this down, I remembered
how nice it is to wear sunglasses on a crowded
street or on some beach where there's no accounting
for how the glances of others will hit.
Ninety Inside
Heat like this can't be measured.
All you know is how you stick
to every piece of furniture you touch.
And the air conditioning unit is thirty
years old and it's really just a box.
Even the night won't provide relief.
So you know in advance what you must
do. Even before you step in, you understand
how the cold water must hit each
body part like a target, how you'll know
exactly where your neck sprouts from
your shoulders and how long your legs are.
But in that bristling time before
your skin goes numb, you can imagine
yourself lying down somewhere and closing
your eyes. You've become your own chilled artichoke
for lunch at the equator.
Sisters
All this Sunday and Monday we take
the house as if it's only ours.
We venture out on the stripped wood
of the kitchen floor, braving
metal slivers, sharp tools.
We watch television in close
proximity to the stacks of precariously
balanced cabinets waiting
to be installed. We find ways to avoid
Frank the carpenter and turn down
the volume of his news talk radio
when he visits his truck. After
he leaves, we sit with the disembodied
dishwasher and trashmasher and eat
lime marshmallow salad left behind
from a wedding we were not invited to.