Eating Poetry

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew — however poorly used -
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her — southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies — little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts — out of her bag —
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo — we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers —
Non-alcoholic — and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American — ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands —
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate — once the crying of confusion stopped
— has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

By Naomi Shihab Nye.

After all the Shakespeare, the book
of poems they type is the saddest
in history.

But before they can finish it,
they have to wait for that Someone
who is always

looking to look away. Only then
can they strike the million
keys that spell

humiliation and grief, which are
the great subjects of Monkey
Literature

and not, as some people still
believe, the banana
and the tire.

By Ronald Koertge.

They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them,
so much frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self
and the self-admiring entity and unity they make —
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back
so far in her laughter at his laughter
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual
in the headiness of being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again,
touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away
soaring back in flame into the sexual —
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin,
that filling of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart,
snorting again, stamping in its stall.

By C K Williams.

The trees were soon hushed in the resonance
of darkest emerald as we rushed by
on 322, that route that took us from
the dead center of Pennsylvania.

(a stone marks it) to a suburb ten miles
from Philadelphia. “A hummingbird”,
I said, after a sharp turn, then pointed
to the wheel, still revolving in your hand.

I gave Emily Dickinson to you then,
line after line, complete from heart. The signs
on Schuylkill Expressway fell neat behind us.
I went further: “Let’s pretend your city

is Evanescence - There has to be one -
in Pennsylvania - And that some day -
the Bird will carry - my letters - to you -
from Tunis - or Casablanca - the mail

an easy night’s ride - from North Africa.”
I’m making this up, I know, but since you
were there, none of it’s a lie. How did I
go on? “Wings will rush by when the exit

to Evanescence is barely a mile?”
the sky was dark teal, the moon was rising.
“It always rains on this route”, I went on,
“which takes you back, back to Evanescence,

your boyhood town”. You said this was summer,
this final end of school, this coming home
to Philadelphia, WMMR
as soon as you could catch it. What song first

came on? It must have been a disco hit,
one whose singer no one recalls. It’s six,
perhaps seven years since then, since you last
wrote. And yesterday, when you phoned, I said,

“I knew you’d call,” even before you could
say who you were. “I am in Irvine now
with my lover, just an hour from Tuscon
and the flights are cheap.” “Then we’ll meet often.”

For a moment you were silent, and then,
“Shahid, I’m dying”. I kept speaking to you
after I hung up, my voice the quickest
mail, a cracked disc with many endings,

each false: One: “I live in Evanescence
(I had to build it, for America
was without one). All is safe here with me.
come to my street, disguised in the climate

of Southern California. Surprise
me when I open the door. Unload skies
of rain from distance drenched arms.” Or this:
“Here in Evanescence (which I found - though

not in Pennsylvania - after I last
wrote), the eavesdropping willows write brief notes
on grass, then hide them in shadows of trunks.
I’d love to see you. Come as you are.” And

this, the least false: “You said each month you need
new blood. Please forgive me, Phil, but I thought
of your pain as a formal feeling, one
useful for the letting go, your transfusions

mere wings to me, the push of numerous
hummingbirds, souveniers of Evanescence
seen disappearing down a route of veins
in an electric rush of Cochineal.”

By Agha Shahid Ali.

Mirrors are not more wrapt in silences
nor the arriving dawn more secretive ;
you, in the moonlight, are that panther figure
which we can only spy at from a distance.
By the mysterious functioning of some
divine decree, we seek you out in vain ;
remoter than the Ganges or the sunset,
yours is the solitude, yours is the secret.
Your back allows the tentative caress
my hand extends. And you have condescended,
since that forever, now oblivion,
to take love from a flattering human hand.
you live in other time, lord of your realm -
a world as closed and separate as dream.

By Jorge Luis Borges

No one tells much about it,
but there were vultures in the Garden of Eden,
Turkey vultures, to be exact.
Dark eagles, they would soar like gods
voiceless, their wings held out in blessing,
their unfeathered heads the red jewels
of the sky of the garden.

They were vegetarian then.
There were no roadside kills,
no bones to pick, no dead flesh to bloom, ripen.

And they were happy.
They could not imagine
what they would become.

By Sheryl St. Germain

It seemed like suffering, or a lesser form of anguish,
though I’m not sure where it comes from,
watching the possum choose an eggshell
from the garbage can, there in the night orchard
of this minor city, the streetlight’s hum so peculiar,
clumsy nest bright above the alley. I knew right then
the earth loved it more than me. A city possum,
no “o,” no rat, two babies asleep on its back
and a hunger shot through with fear, with purpose.
In the awkwardness of its living, I feared the city
would abandon me. The possum, too.
I had grown accustomed to its visits.
It lived under the abandoned house down the street,
where the prostitute’s body was found last winter,
where the walls grow gentle with rot, a gentleness
gone wrong, harm and permanence, whole and flaw.
Everything is sacrificed to something. The fill the spaces,
I guess. Ash in the trees, then the two stars come out,
the only ones the city allows, little-blue-star-pale-in-its-cups,
little-junkie-trackmarks-thanks-for-nothing.
The city has two mouths, the river and the sky,
both brown in the darkness, and open.
More than likely, there is a place inside the body
that is not afraid, but I haven’t found it yet,
there is not returning. The hills bear down.
The possum is not jealous, mores slow
through the walls. We can lie down in our emptiness.

By Joshua Poteat

You are driving to the airport
Along the glittering highway
Through the warm night,
Humming to yourself.
The yellow rose buds that stood
On the commode faded and fell
Two days ago. Last night the
Petals dropped from the tulips
On the dresser. The signs of
Your presence are leaving the
House one by one. Being without
You was almost more than I
Could bear. Now the work is squared
Away. All the arrangements
Have been made. All the delays
Are past and I am thirty
Thousand feet in the air over
A dark lustrous sea, under
A low half moon that makes the wings
Gleam like a fish under water—
Rushing south four hundred miles
Down the California coast
To your curving lips and your
Ivory thighs.

By Kenneth Rexroth.

How to bike on cobblestones and where to signal right.
How to walk through doors held open by Old Etonians
and not scowl. How to make myself invisible in seminars
by staring at the table. How to tell Victorian Gothic from Medieval.
How to eat a Mars bar in the Bodleian. When to agree
With everything in theory. How to cultivate a taste for sherry.

Where to bike on the pavement after dark. How t sabotage a hunt.
When to sunbathe topless in the Deer Park. When to punt.
How to hitch a lift and when to walk and where to run.
When not to address my tutors formally. How to laugh at Latin pun
and when to keep quiet and preserve my integrity.
How to celebrate an essay crisis. When to sleep through fire alarms.

How to bike no-handed, how to slip a condom on with one.
When to smoke a joint and when to swig champagne.
When to pool a tip and how to pull a pint. A bit of history.
When to listen to friends and whether t take them seriously.
At the same time how to scorn tradition and enjoy it.
How to live like a king, quite happily, in debt.

by Kate Bingham

‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed …’
(from Shakespeare’s will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

by Carol Ann Duffy.