We Kept a Jarful of Keys
We kept a
jarful of keys
on a forgotten shelf
in the house.
What doors they opened,
or what they kept forever locked,
before they came by accident
or chance into our little jar,
we never learned.
“Let them stay there,”
you said, your eyes on mine
saying, take all I have.
Since I had let you into share my little feast
and you’d
not wish to leave,
I nodded, “Yes, there let them stay.”
We hadn’t
reckoned how
the years would wear love thin.
And now your pained eyes
search my face for all I shouldn’t have taken, and I,
I ache for all I should have kept.
We hammer the doors of silence,
bruising with words we could not speak.
How did we ever think
we had no need of keys?
TALE OF THE SPIDERWOMAN
Pyres of leaves burn away summer.
Cicada shells pile under the marsh grass,
still memorial of seasons past.
I’ve no words for these—
lean boys and slender girls pass by my window
drinking the sun on their golden skin.
Apple-breasted women with melons in their bellies
snitch sprigs of basil from my herb pots,
and curious-eyed strangers scan the veiled glass
for glimpses of my blurred face, but hurry off
with any stranger’s indifference.
How endless the mazes I inhabit,
layer on layer of silence shield me.
Odd monsters breed here, I warrant.
I myself daily grow smaller and smaller until
almost invisible. Fuzz on my skin, my eyes
multiply a hundredfold in this darkness
and split the light in thousand prisms—
and now I can see what’s before and after.
I become light as air, my sweetness distils
to fatal potency. I practice a patience
vaster than ten worlds. I wait.
`If, at last, the merest rumor of your scent
warms the air drifting to my door,
I shall shake my thin thighs loose.
My hair will grow back in the usual places,
my eyes regain their focus, my ears
will hear words and speeches again.
Cicadas will chirr live under the marsh grass.
Perhaps it would be June,
the green returning to the trees.
When your shadow crosses my door,
please enter without fear.
But remember not to ask where I’d been
or what had fed me in this empty room
curtained with fine webs of silk.
Ignore the seethe of all my memories.
Come, take my hand.
I am human at your touch.
WHEN I GO
Everything I’ll leave behind of course—
clothes, books, the blue stone I bought
from the gap-toothed gypsy in La Paz,
bottles of perfume languishing unused
for years in dim closets where I’ve kept them,
the basil bush in its corner in the garden
where the sun is sure to find it everyday,
old wine vinegar scented with tarragon,
jars of jams, pickles and conserves—
how long, you think, will they last you?
Who will replenish them? Oh, but really,
should I care about any of these at all?
About the photos, can’t wash them white
or bleed the colors till they faint.
Time will oblige. They’ll breathe on their own
in the dark for a while, keep you company
some gray morning as you sip jasmine tea,
waiting for the cloud to clear. You might try
in that quiet time to gather in your mind
places, faces, words, perhaps my name
inscribed in the rusting empty mailbox.
As you sit in the watery light, a whiff of song
might float by, you might say to yourself,
“That one, I know that one, it reminds me of—”
and stop, your tongue unable to shape it,
the syllables crumbling, murdered by memory.
Then have I truly gone, my love.
Silence has closed over the space I have been,
even grief would not keep it.
STRANGER UNDER MY SKIN
A stranger lives under my skin,
an awful slob—I’ve to pick up after her,
mislays her own things all the time,
so now, hard to say what are hers,
and what are properly mine, aaiiee!
This bum knee, this cold in my back,
soreness on my feet, as though like her
I ‘m ready to trade in my shoes
for a corner in the house
where the high winds never visit—
hers, hers, I’d say, hers, all these.
She just happened. One morning,
there she was in my usual place
at breakfast, blinking at the light
with myopic eyes, acting for all the world
as if she’d always belonged at my table
and lived in my house, wondering too,
much as I would at that time of day,
what to cook for lunch, or why these days,
no one else seems to be at home but me.
Ungracious guest, ignored me completely,
shelling my egg, eating my orange,
and sipping my coffee.
Of course I didn’t press her to stay,
hoping she’d take the hint and leave.
Not her. She’d lived here ever since.
Dips her hands, she does, into all
that’s mine. Why I don’t like her, see?
So many things I’m losing these days,
Old recipes, old love letters, names
of things, of enemies and friends,
keys to treasures I’ve kept secret
that now I can’t put a finger to,
the twists and turns of familiar tales,
songs cramping their tunes in the throat,
their lyrics tingling on the tongue,
but no memory now to nudge them into sounds—
ayah, that’s when I most wish her gone.
This must stop, this sniffing around
my little dreams as when she learned
of my gentleman with a snake-headed cane
and a mask of gold and vermilion who
each night comes to the edge of my sleep
—“Shameless, shameless,” says the hussy,
making an awful face. If I could, I’d take her
by her heels and give her a smart smack
on the butt to make her cry, that primal yell,
as it were, to brighten a world grown slack,
to restore it to innocence and freshness
as in the beginning. “Go away, you old witch,”
I told her once. Ayah, she took me by the wrist
and pulled, laughing, running, running, crying,
And you, come with me, come, come, come!”
Aaiiee, could’ve dragged me off easily too,
she ‘s that strong. The pain of her grip
has lingered since in my bones.
Some nights, when my vermilion knight leaves,
and the crushed papaya blossoms reek
with the odor of longing and the smell of death,
I turn my back and close my eyes so
I don’t see her. But she’s there, I know,
this awful stranger sharing my skin
laughing silently, her mad laughter.
She’d never go, never go, never go, I know.
Never, never, never, until I do—
WHEN A POET DIES
The hunting hawk loses the airstream,
falters and dives, a moment pinched from time
that allowed fish to hide among the bending reeds.
The nestling dreams of its nest crashing down
on the ant heap below, cowers, and sleeps
until wakened by warm beaks for food.
The trees in their green dance may pale a little,
and flowers shiver though no breeze blows.
As before, mimosa opens
and shuts its leaves as pigs and leopards
snaffle by, cicadas sing the hours of their love,
never stopping for any reason under heaven.
The treacherous and the true fall as ever,
and tyrants rule for faith as for gold.
Childless young men yield their blood to slake
the thirsty sand of Lebanon in a war without end.
Should the sky fall over Iraq, it would fall
on old and young alike, the guilty and the pure,
the evil and the good, sin and virtue both
confounded as some ancient law foretells,
no one, nothing spared, and thus,
a poet’s death happens as quietly
as any man’s, unannounced as a sparrow’s fall, is no more
ponderous than a beggar’s, curled in some ratty corner,
alone and unmourned. Felons and saints be among us still,
Mere vanity to say truth ends with him, or honor,
or joy, or even love. His breath has not the savior’s pitch
to save us from our fates. Words will go on assaulting us,
wanting to be said. And how unsay what we should have
vaulted in our throats? No matter, we will find means
to please tomorrow, we’ll get on somehow, despite today’s
raw deals. Learn forgiveness, no choice.
Now that he has breathed his last,
women who know these things, true to their duties,
will gather the little children at dusk and make them
kneel on wooden floors to pray for his peace.
Despite the massing of the dark outside,
their frail voices will seethe among the leaves,
and cross the silence where he lies next to stones
and the roots of weed and grass under the mold.
Should he hear them, he might, as they say,
turn a little in his grave. The candle flames might
flicker for a while, a bit of air stirred by his movement.
Think nothing of this. In our innocence,
we would pronounce to one another,
It’s only the wind, the wind, nothing more.
Amina Among the Angels
Three years after the Flood.
Not by your old name I address you,
no, not by the one you went by
when living in the midst,
Mamang, name that kept you bound
to cradle, washtub, sink stove and still
your back bent and all your singing
caked into silence, your dreaming crushed
like fishbones in the traffic of daily need.
Your own name, then. Amina.
Cold letters etched on stone in Ormoc's
graveyard hill, the syllables gliding still
all music and glod upon the tongue of memory.
Amina. Back here, no news you'd like to hear,
or that you wouldn't know: One day at noon,
in a year of war and famine, of volcanoes bursting
and earthquakes shaking the ground we stood on,
floodwaters broke the mountains.
Our city drowned in an hour's rampage.
But you've gone ahead to this hill earlier,
three years, you weren't there to witness
what we had to do among the leavings of the water,
mud, rubble, debris, countless bodies
littering the streets-- your husband among them, a son, his wife, their
children--how in a panic,
we pried and scraped and shoveled from the ooze
what had once been beloved, crammed them
coffinless without ritual without tears
into the maw of earth beside you up on that hill.
Amina, what have the angels to say
of that gross outrage?
You must know I keep my own name,
times, I feel myself free
to chosse the words of my singing, though
in my own woman's voice, cracked
with too much laughter, or anger, or tears,
who's to listen, I don't know,
admitting as I do no traffics with angels.
I htink of your beauty fading and this,
what's left for a daughter to touch-- your namestone
mute among the grass greensinging,
your name i raise to the wind like a prayer.
If you hear it among
the lift and fall of angel wings,
oh please send word somehow.
Please let me know, have they given you back
your voice?Safe among the angels,
what can a woman sing?
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