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Nani
Sitting at her table, she serves the sopa de arroz to me instinctively, and I watch her, the absolute mama, and eat words I might have had to say more out of embarrassment. To speak, now-foreign words I used to speak, too, dribble down her mouth as she serves me albondigas. No more than a third are easy to me. By the stove she does something with words and looks at me only with her back. I am full. I tell her I taste the mint, and watch her speak smiles at the stove. All my words make her smile. Nani never serves herself, she only watches me with her skin, her hair. I ask for more.
I watch the mama warming more tortillas for me. I watch her fingers in the flame for me. Near her mouth, I see a wrinkle speak of a man whose body serves the ants like she serves me, then more words from more wrinkles about children, words about this and that, flowing more easily from these other mouths. Each serves as a tremendous string around her, holding her together. They speak nani was this and that to me and I wonder just how much of me will die with her, what were the words I could have been, was. Her insides speak through a hundred wrinkles, now, more than she can bear, steel around her, shouting, then, What is this thing she serves?
She asks me if I want more. I own no words to stop her. Even before I speak, she serves.
From Five Indiscretions (Sheep Meadow: New York, 1985). Originally in Ironwood.
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Mi Abuelo
Where my grandfather is, is in the ground Where you can hear the future Like the movie Indian with his ear at the tracks. A pipe leads down to him so that sometimes He whispers what will happen to a man In town, or how he will meet the best
Dressed woman tomorrow and how the best Man at her wedding will chew the ground Next to her. Mi abuelo is the man Who speaks through all the mouths in my house. An echo of me hitting the pipe sometimes To stop him from saying my hair is a
Sieve is the only other sound. It is a phrase That among all others is the best, He says, and my hair is a sieve is sometimes Repeated for hours out of the ground When I let him, which is not often. An abuelo should be much more than a man
Like you! He stops then, and speaks: I am a man Who has served the ants with the attitude Of a waiter, who has made each smile as only An ant who is fat can, and they liked me best, But there is nothing left. Yet I know he ground Green coffee beans as a child, and sometimes
He will talk about his wife, and sometimes About when he was deaf and a man Cured him by mail and he heard groundhogs Talking, or about how he walked with a cane He chewed on when he got hungry. At best, Mi abuelo is a liar.
I see an old picture of him at nani's with an Off-white, yellow center mustache, and sometimes That's all I know for sure. He talks best About these hills, slowest waves, and where this man Is going, and I'm convinced his hair is a sieve, That his fever is cooled now underground.
Mi abuelo is an ordinary man. I look down the pipe, sometimes, and see a Ripple-topped stream, in its best suit, in the ground.
From Whispering to Fool the Wind (New York: Sheep Meadow, 1982). Originally in The Louisville Review. Included in [among many others] The Norton Introduction to Literature, Ed. J. Paul Hunter and Jerome Beaty, and Poems, Poets, Poetry, Ed. Helen Vendler.
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The Language of Great-Aunts
The great-aunts have a corner, and wrinkled skin indistinguishable from their thick stockings, and they invariably speak in the other language of which we, as children, are able to recognize only the commands, which are obvious, and the narrow eyes, which make them law, drawn overly tight.
And their smiles are also long and tight, black and without real teeth, scars on the skin but only slight ones; red lips pressed, narrow, their smiles are like the lines on their stockings, which as two boys, at our height, we recognize and wonder if these lines also speak some language.
And they do: theirs is the visible language that when these women chew, only their mouths are tight and immediately, because we are down there, we recognize that, if they chewed harder, their wrinkled skin would chew too, jiggling under their faces like the stockings which are too big because their legs have grown too narrow.
But if we laugh, we get again the quick pin-narrow eyes, who themselves speak a third language more powerful than the line mouths of the stockings. The eyes of the great-aunts disappear when drawn tight and conspire somewhere under their spiderwebbed skin made more webbed by attempts, not to warn, but to recognize.
We are never sure what exactly they are trying to recognize: who we are, perhaps, or what we've done, and the narrow amount of us they admit through the eyelids into that skin is the part in us, inside, that makes us recognize at these moments that our stomachs grow muscle-tight and we change our big attentions fast from their stockings.
Because we are still too much children, their stockings allow us to understand what others will not, to recognize like commands what their eyes are really saying: how tight their lives have grown, making their insides more narrow than outside; words, black lines, eyes, all are one language, saying too tight now, too weak inside to hold up this skin.
We watch their stockings grow larger, their legs more narrow. We recognize by touch the verbs of this single language. Later we stay tight, and pull--in mirrors--at our strong skin.
From Whispering to Fool the Wind (New York: Sheep Meadow, 1982). Originally in The Louisville Review. Included in [among many others] The Norton Introduction to Literature, Ed. J. Paul Hunter and Jerome Beaty, and Poems, Poets, Poetry, Ed. Helen Vendler.
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Belita
The faces and hands of her grandchildren Had grown too big to fit through her eyes. She learned to keep bowed her head Because fingers and ankles she could recognize And faces she could not, not even her own Which fit her now like a wrinkled handkerchief,
Like the brown, unlaundered, unironed handkerchief She kept always in her hands because her grandchildren Had given it to her, had allowed her to own Some part of them, a larger part than her eyes Would have allowed; she could recognize In her hands the face from her head
Better than in a mirror, and her head Felt lighter without eyes, or ears, and the handkerchief She massaged constantly showed her how to recognize Clearly why not one of her grandchildren Would touch her; she could feel their eyes Also with her fingers, and they were like her own,
Afraid of looking, and their lips were like her own, Afraid of speaking, and she was kissed only on the forehead Because of this, and with her fingers that were eyes She felt afraid, again, again, crushing the handkerchief Because these were the children of her children And in them she could not fail to recognize
Herself, trying nervously, trembling, not to recognize Death, how it had taken her name, Belita, for its own. She remembered her friends suddenly as children, How they had played Death like this, because ahead Only dinner waited for them, how each took a handkerchief And pulled it slowly over the mouth, the nose, the eyes.
How it was her turn, and quickly her own eyes Closed; in her short life she had learned to recognize How a sheet was like a handkerchief And how both could be her own, and yet not her own, How each covered easily the length of her head, How the pennies put on her eyes balanced like children.
But those eyes are not her own. She cannot recognize any longer the little head, Covered now by that handkerchief, kissed by the children.
From Whispering to Fool the Wind (New York: Sheep Meadow, 1982). Originally in A Shout in the Street.
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The Women at Early Mass
Small towns have the smell, Wood burning, cool air, Houses high on the sides Of painted, small mountains, Silent smell, which stands Arms folded and thick
As a man's are thick. Small towns know the smell No one understands. One man dreams it as the air Half-strong in the mountains-- Young girls on their sides
Propped and nude, white sides Exposed, breasts as thick And sloped as new mountains Whose smooth, hard pine smell Braids now the rented air Where a thin girl stands
Ashamed for him, and he stands, But still dreams, so his sides Stay as pained as the red air That moment is thick Suddenly; and the smell Of pain is also mountains
In wives, whose mountains Never were, Wife, who stands The thin, sexual smell Of his dreams, who sides With this man grown thick, Strong, high in the air
But then sad--that air, The weight of mountains, Is always more thick Than himself. She stands Pain, too, in her sides: The fat, votive smell
Of white air; she too stands Beneath mountains, with sides Thick, but scrubbed of smell.
From Five Indiscretions (Sheep Meadow: New York, 1985).
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