Free Fuel by Naomi Shihab Nye Page A

depending.

    I’m driving you to school with your blue pants and box of lunch.
    I’m combing your hair with my eyes.

    They’ve built fancy houses around a giant pit. What do people see in it?
    The smokestacks were smoking when I was in college, when my father

    drove me down the old road on the other side.
    Was it neat? We both know smoke isn’t neat but I guess

    what you mean. Was it black or white? I can’t recall.
    So much has poured out the top of my head.

    I knew the lady who owned the smokestacks, her peacock
    bit my hand. We take turns imagining what happens next,

    if they stand or fall, whether the wrecked warehouse
    with arches will be spared, or the fog lift, or the sun.

    Today a small red light glitters at the throat of the lucky one.
    You call it a good sign. At school your friends wear puffy coats

    bright as parrots. You fly into your teacher’s arms.
    I could even hug a dull-looking father in his necktie

    as we roll out of the lot into our daily lives. When I pass
    the smokestacks again, their firm ladders

    and proud ALAMO lettering up the sides, I’m fiddling
    with the radio dial, swinging into a lane of cars.

    Now the gloom of distant news washes over worse than grit
    and we can’t clean it, fix it, or make good sense.

    Still we hold our mouths wide open, and the birds,
    the sky, the trees, and the river

    fly into us as if anything could heal. Somewhere deep,
    these years must be churning the way cement does

    inside a truck. The cement those smokestacks helped to make—
    it became sidewalks all over this city. It became

    buildings and tunnels and walls. We don’t think of it gleaming.
    Even the highway I drive on.

ALONE

    He grows used to the sound of the floor
    Not yet     Not yet
     each evening
    right before the news comes on.

    Then the killing and the stabbing
    and the beating and the crashing.
    Turn it off. There’s a smudge on the wall,
    a Jesus with a blazing heart.

    His coffee cup waits
    upside down on its plate.
    The shape of dinner tastes upside down.
    He eats whatever the nurse-lady left him,
    the hamburger in its three-day shirt.
    Sometimes he doesn’t know the name
    of what he eats.

    He hauls his body to the porch,
    sinks his eyes into the weeds.
    A hose curls in the lilies.
    If he could reach it,
    make it down
    those three crooked steps . . .

    When his wife died he was very quiet
    for one day. Then he smiled
    and smiled with his two teeth
    for the bad time they had
    that was over.

    His tongue could sound
Soledad
or
Solamente
    for his bones and his blood and his few good hairs.
    When the drop of water on the white sink
    meets the next drop and they are joining,
    he thinks of other ways to spend this life
    that he didn’t do. He would like to meet them.

ALPHABET

    One by one
    the old people
    of our neighborhood
    are going up
    into the air

    their yards
    still wear
    small white narcissus
    sweetening winter

    their stones
    glisten
    under the sun
    but one by one
    we are losing
    their housecoats
    their formal phrasings
    their cupcakes

    When I string their names
    on the long cord

    when I think how
    there is almost no one left
    who remembers
    what stood in that
    brushy spot
    ninety years ago

    when I pass their yards
    and the bare peach tree
    bends a little

    when I see their rusted chairs
    sitting in the same spots

    what will be forgotten
    falls over me
    like the sky
    over our whole neighborhood

    or the time my plane
    circled high above our street
    the roof of our house
    dotting the tiniest
    â€œi”

FEATHER

    She’s walking up the street from Sanitary Tortilla
    with her pink mesh shopping bag.
    Mrs. Esquivel of the waving plants,
    front porch lined with leaves.
    In softer light she dances with sheets.

    She came here from the old days.
    Slipped out of the old days like a feather.
    Floated here with her aluminum pot lids
    and blue enamel spoons tied to her wings.
    Fanning the heat away