NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Yellow Glove

WHAT CAN A YELLOW GLOVE MEAN in a world of motorcars and governments?

I was small, like everyone. Life was a string of precautions: Don’t kiss the squirrel before you bury him, don’t suck candy, pop balloons, drop watermelons, watch TV. When the new gloves appeared one Christmas, tucked in soft tissue, I heard it trailing me: Don’t lose the yellow gloves.

I was small, there was too much to remember. One day, waving at a stream—the ice had cracked, winter chipping down, soon we would sail boats and roll into ditches—I let a glove go. Into the stream, sucked under the street. Since when did streets have mouths? I walked home on a desperate road. Gloves cost money. We didn’t have much. I would tell no one. I would wear the yellow glove that was left and keep the other hand in a pocket. I knew my mother’s eyes had tears they had not cried yet—I didn’t want to be the one to make them flow. It was the prayer I spoke secretly, folding socks, lining up donkeys in windowsills. I would be good, a promise made to the roaches who scouted my closet at night. If you don’t get in my bed, I will be good. And they listened. I had a lot to fulfill.

The months rolled down like towels out of a machine. I sang and drew and fattened the cat. Don’t scream, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fight—you could hear it anywhere. A pebble could show you how to be smooth, tell the truth. A field could show you how to sleep without walls. A stream could remember how to drift and change—the next June I was stirring the stream like a soup, telling my brother dinner would be ready if he’d only hurry up with the bread, when I saw it. The yellow glove draped on a twig. A muddy survivor. A quiet flag.

Where had it been in the three gone months? I could wash it, fold it in my winter drawer with its sister, no one in that world would ever know. There were miracles on Harvey Street. Children walked home in yellow light. Trees were reborn and gloves traveled far, but returned. A thousand miles later, what can a yellow glove mean in a world of bankbooks and stereos?

Part of the difference between floating and going down.

Arabic

        The man with laughing eyes stopped smiling

        to say, “Until you speak Arabic—

        —you will not understand pain.”

        Something to do with the back of the head,

        an Arab carries sorrow in the back of the head

        that only language cracks, the thrum of stones

        weeping, grating hinge on an old metal gate.

        “Once you know,” he whispered, “you can enter the room

        whenever you need to. Music you heard from a distance,

        the slapped drum of a stranger’s wedding,

        wells up inside your skin, inside rain, a thousand

        pulsing tongues. You are changed.”

        Outside, the snow had finally stopped.

        In a land where snow rarely falls,

        we had felt our days grow white and still.

        I thought pain had no tongue. Or every tongue

        at once, supreme translator, sieve. I admit my

        shame. To live on the brink of Arabic, tugging

        its rich threads without understanding

        how to weave the rug . . . I have no gift.

        The sound, but not the sense.

        I kept looking over his shoulder for someone else

        to talk to, recalling my dying friend who only scrawled

        I can’t write. What good would any grammar have been

        to her then? I touched his arm, held it hard,

        which sometimes you don’t do in the Middle East, and said,

        I’ll work on it, feeling sad

        for his good strict heart, but later in the slick street

        hailed a taxi by shouting Pain! and it stopped

        in every language and opened its doors.

Jerusalem

                           “Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed

                           Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy

                           Is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”

                               —Tommy Olofsson, Sweden

        I’m not interested in

        who suffered the most.

        I’m interested in

        people getting over it.

        Once when my father was a boy,

        a stone hit him on the head.

        Hair would never grow there.

        Our fingers found the tender spot

        and its riddle: the boy who has fallen

        stands up. A bucket of pears

        in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home.

        The pears are not crying.

        Later his friend who threw the stone

        says he was aiming at a bird.

        And my father starts growing wings.

        Each carries a tender spot:

        something our lives forget to give us.

        A man builds a house and says,

        “I am native now.”

        A woman speaks to a tree in place

        of her son. And olives come.

        A child’s poem says,

        “I don’t like wars,

        they end up with monuments.”

        He’s painting a bird with wings

        wide enough to cover two roofs at once.

        Why are we so monumentally slow?

        Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:

        big guns, little pills.

        If you tilt your head just slightly

        it’s ridiculous.

        There’s a place in my brain

        where hate won’t grow.

        I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.

        Something pokes us as we sleep.

        It’s late but everything comes next.

Holy Land

    Over beds wearing thin homespun cotton

        Sitti the Ageless floated

        poking straight pins into sheets

    to line our fevered forms,

        “the magic,” we called it,

    her crumpling of syllables,

        pitching them up and out,

    petals parched by sun,

        the names of grace, hope,

    in her graveled grandmother tongue.

        She stretched a single sound

    till it became two—

        perhaps she could have said

    anything,

        the word for peanuts,

    or waterfalls,

        and made a prayer.

        After telling the doctors “Go home,”

    she rubbed our legs,

        pressing into my hand

    someone’s lost basketball medal,

        “Look at this man reaching for God.”

    She who could not leave town

        while her lemon tree held fruit,

    nor while it dreamed of fruit.

        In a land of priests,

    patriarchs, muezzins,

        a woman who couldn’t read

    drew lines between our pain

        and earth,

    stroked our skins

        to make them cool,

    our limbs which had already

        traveled far beyond her world,

    carrying the click of distances

        in the smooth, untroubled soles

    of their shoes.

The Only Word a Tree Knows

Tonight the hens line up on a bamboo roost,

sides touching.

You can hold their evening in the palm of a hand,

wondering at restlessness,

the stranger people should never let in.

Pecans falling before we have cracked the ones from last year!

Squirrels building a nest under the roof!

There is nothing to do that isn’t singular.

One meal, one letter, one memory roaring inside the head.

The trees promise to remember us.

Yes. It is the only word a tree knows.

Leaves dropping, it is the one thing left.

Tonight we will be branches loose in the wind of our bed,

a motion preceding and following everything we do.

The trees shrink on the wall of the sky.

Listen long enough, it sounds like

they’re talking inside your head.

This bending, this rake—

a leaf lands, little boat, on a stair.

To be everywhere and know:

I was born to answer a tree.

Renovation

1.

It cheered me that the man and woman ripping our house apart were a married couple. Maybe this meant they would be more careful with things. Delia neatly packed all the belongings from the three rooms where mold was detected in large cardboard boxes marked KITCHEN ITEAMS and BATH—the mugs, spatulas, pots and pans, towels, bottles of shampoo. Chico draped large sheets of plastic from the 11-foot-high ceilings for “containment.” Then they both donned plastic space suits and face masks and began smashing the hundred-year-old green-and-white tile of the kitchen counter and the blue Mexican bird tile in the bathroom to take it out. The mold was under wood and sheetrock. It likes to eat adhesive. A very subversive guest. Goodbye familiar cracks and rounded edges. Goodbye heavy wooden drawers and stained porcelain bathtub. Our neighbors felt scared when they saw the spacemen in the yard.

2.

We slept at a hotel three blocks from our own house for 32 days. We ate waffles and hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. The hotel served an unidentifiable form of mixed canned fruit in a big bowl. I heard people wondering about it at other tables, Is this papaya? A slimy peach? What the hell is this? We saw the traveling groups come and go, the deputy sheriffs of small-town Texas (very noisy group), the evangelical African American track stars of Houston, the glittery pre-teen Britney Spears fans of northern Mexico. The best thing about our hotel was the free happy hour from 5 to 7 every day, which I almost never missed. Carlos made a terrific Cuba Libre. He made two in a row, perfectly. I needed them, in order to be able to face our house during the rest of the day.

3.

Mold is not a very sexy topic but it could be growing inside anybody’s walls at any moment, finding its own safe harbor of moist secrecy, spreading and thickening in green or black creepy glory. We had mostly green but a little black. It gave me asthma even before it started sneaking out of a hole in the ceiling over the bathtub. Thanks to a leak in the roof and two other unrelated leaks in two wall pipes, we had it. Our hundred-year-old cottage was sabotaged by a sneaky culprit. Truly, considering all the possibilities for leakage in this world, it amazes me that more things don’t leak. It amazes me that poop goes into the poop pipe and relatively clean water comes out of the faucet. It all amazes me. I know some people who have had to bulldoze their houses and throw away all their belongings. Delia called me into the front yard to see the boards from our bathroom wrapped in plastic. She pointed. There, there it is. See those little black and green spots? It is going away now. We are hauling it to the DUMP. You won’t have it any more.

4.

So we moved back into our house without any running water or toilets, it was like camping out at home. We ate peaches and icy cherry tomatoes from a big bowl. We drank coffee and made rum drinks in the afternoons, trying to replicate the happy hour at the hotel down the street, but it did not feel as delicious. We drove around in the summer heat through traffic to gaze at tile and bathroom fixtures in too many stores and talked to carpenters and lighting experts and tried to make decisions. There are some people in the world who are good at doing this. We are not among them. During all these minor movements of human beings, rain began falling in beautiful gray sheets and fell for 20 days and nights. Biblical fashion. I actually invited it to fall before it started, though harbor no delusion of my power. On June 28, when the annual south Texas summer water conservation measures were announced (you will only water between certain hours, on certain days, and only with a hose, not a sprinkler, blah blah blah), I said (this was Happy Hour talking), “Well I wish it would just start raining and rain for all of July.” And then it almost did. Numerous Texans saw their houses float away downstream, in shocking TV newsreel footage played over and over. Such sights eclipsed our efforts at domestic improvement. Messages came in by e-mail, phone, “Are you okay?” Our inner-city neighborhood is protected by a multi-million dollar drainage system installed years ago. We made fun of it when downtown was all torn up, but have changed our tune. I had a panic attack at a granite yard among sheets and slabs of cut stone, then decided against granite, which seemed cold, hard and too chic for my humble leanings. How could you go from washing dishes in a red plastic pan in the yard to granite? Finally, after waking up with tile/grout nightmares, I decided on SILESTONE, a mysterious impenetrable reconstituted quartz substance supposedly popular in Europe for many years. Welcome to the United States. We selected elegant turquoise and green MISSION TILE from Mexico for the back-splash, a term that reminds me of elephants. Do you do much splashing in your kitchen?

And then we waited. For someone to come measure. For substances to arrive from different directions. For things not to be broken. For them to be re-ordered. For someone to be able to put them in. Renovation involves mostly waiting. For the electrician who knows you cannot deal with those wires yourself. For the evangelical electrician who says we will soon all be washing dishes in our yards. He does not like to go under the house if no one is home. For the carpenter who looks uncannily like my gynecologist. For the diverter switch to arrive at a plumbing warehouse. For windows. For the counter installers who wanted advice about their rosebushes at their house where they live together when they are not installing counters. How do you make a rose bush bloom more? What does it want and need? We start receiving mysterious catalogues like “Rest Room World.”

5.

During all this, the Palestinians overseas were being confined to their homes, if they had homes, or to their shacks, rooms, tents, and hovels. They could not go out to buy fresh oranges. They could not go to school. More houses were being seized and demolished daily. The word “demolished” sounds softer than it is. But in the documentary movie Gaza Strip you can hear the terrifying crashing sounds of giant bulldozers as they knock down houses a hundred years old. One gets tired of saying or hearing the words but it keeps happening. The whole time we were putting our house back together, more Palestinians were losing their homes. Suicide bombers, those tragic people driven insane by oppression, do not come out of vacuums. They come out of demolished homes. They saw their fathers blindfolded, hauled off to prison in buses. They saw their friends gassed by poison, blown up, stomachs strewn in the dust. Their mothers wailing and bloody. Why is this almost never considered in the news? Where everything comes from? We pay our taxes to Israel for 53 years so they can brutalize and oppress an entire population then feel stunned when so many people start acting crazy blowing each other up. Sometimes where everything comes from is much more critical than where everything is going.

We washed dishes in a pan in the yard for two months and became related to all the people in the world washing dishes in the yard. If they had a yard. If they had dishes that weren’t broken by someone with a tank and large guns who likes to break dishes, smash glass in picture frames, defecate on beds. Say this, American TV. Say what the Israeli soldiers do with the money we give them. Stop acting so pure.

6.

I hate this, said the teenager we live with, one rare night when I asked him to help me rinse. We had had company for dinner. It was fun to have company with no running water or bathroom. They were a little taken aback. I poured water over their hands from a pitcher. They tried not to look at all the boxes piled up in the dining room. The teenager scraping plates said, How long is this going to go on? Don’t some people get their whole houses rebuilt in, like, a week? Why is it taking so long for this to be completed?

Just think, I said to him. This is never a good idea to say to someone, especially a teen person, but I said it anyway. Just consider someone coming and taking our house away, on top of it. While we’re in the middle of fixing things. While everything is a mess. How would you feel? They would say your room is their room. Your computer is now their computer. Or they would blow up your room and say, Ah, too bad, we call it security, no one cares if you suffer.

What are you talking about? he said. I’d call the police!

What if you had no phone lines? What if the police had no power?

Stop talking like this. The mosquitoes are killing me. I hate washing dishes.

Amir & Anna

               “It’s unbelievable, this cycle of violence, and how neither party

               realizes they’re both losing.”

                               —Dr. Cairo Arafat, West Bank

        Amir can’t sleep.

        He dives under his bed.

        Anna is afraid of everything.

        Parked cars, moving buses.

        Anna is afraid of toast.

        Their names begin with “A”,

        contain the same number of letters.

        No one has given them

        what they deserve.

        Around both their houses,

        all the Arab and Jewish houses,

        red poppies sleep beneath

        dirt and stones.

        What do they know?

        In March green spokes

        with fluttering heads

        rise and rise on every side.

Your Weight, at Birth

        Watching the Palestinian men

        emerge from the Church of the Nativity,

        I considered birth: being born into light again

        after so many cramped weeks inside,

        born into air & space,

        how we wish the best for one another when someone

        is being born, born into deportation & exile,

        born, & banished.

        Across the street, their women were wailing.

        They could not greet or hug them.

        The men were shuffled onto buses

        to be sent away.

        On the white & dusty street of Bethlehem,

        where so many travelers have stood

        holding candles, wrapped in song,

        the prisoner men, in their own town.

        An American TV announcer’s voice sounded excited

        to be present at the births—

        over & over again

        he hailed the table of sandwiches & bottled water

        provided by Israeli soldiers

        who actually looked perplexed

        whenever the camera came in close.

        One is born to wear a helmet, carry large artillery.

        One is born to be thin, to wear raggedy clothes

        & be shot in the leg. And some are born

        to wonder, wonder, wonder.

Supple Cord

        My brother, in his small white bed,

        held one end.

        I tugged the other

        to signal I was still awake.

        We could have spoken,

        could have sung

        to one another,

        we were in the same room

        for five years,

        but the soft cord

        with its little frayed ends

        connected us

        in the dark,

        gave comfort

        even if we had been bickering

        all day.

        When he fell asleep first

        and the cord dropped

        to the floor,

        I missed him terribly,

        though I could hear his even breath

        and we had such long and separate lives

        ahead.

The Only Democracy in the Middle East

        Please leave your house immediately.

        Do not call it a home.

        This is our home not yours.

        And this is for security.

        Always, always, for security. Our security.

        Take nothing, ask nothing.

        Stand over there, against the rubble, where

        you belong. All young men, come with us.

        A chance you will not see your families again.

        You can’t say goodbye or hug your son.

        We have suffered too much thanks to you

        and thanks to everyone

        but you are the only ones we can touch.

        Please don’t give us any trouble.

Because of Poems

        We were never alone.

        Words had secret parties.

        Verbs popped surprises

        from their pockets.

        Quietly stared out the window,

        but someone—was it Befriend?—

        wrapped a comforting arm around her.

        Lost and Remember huddled

        in the corner.

        I was serving punch.