Fuel Read Free Page A

way.

    NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE

    Did some miracle startle
    the painter into action
    or is she waiting and hoping?
    Does she ride the bus with her face
    pressed to the window looking
    for her own message?

    Daily the long wind brushes YES
    through the trees.

LIVING AT THE AIRPORT

    Because they lived near a major airport,
    their children were always flying over their heads.

    Assimilating into cloud till specks of ground life
    became smaller even than lives together remembered:

    the floor furnace they leapt over for whole winters,
    its gaping hot breath. How far they had come from

    the clumsy navy stroller in the hall with its bum wheel and brakes.
    The mother used to cry, pushing that thing.

    Sometimes now the father went to the airport just to see
    people saying good-bye and hello. Especially the good-bye gave him relief.

    Before boarding, families looked so awkward together.
    Repeating,
Now you be good, hear? Give a call if you can
.

    They seemed almost desperate
    to get away.

    Since so many suitcases had their own wheels now,
    he wondered, had the old rooted suitcases gone to live in attics

    stuffed with unseasonable clothes, or junkyards with disappeared cars,
    and what staple of their lives might have wheels next, not to mention

    wings?

STRING

    At certain hours we may rest assured that nearly everyone inside
    our own time zone or every adjacent time zone lies asleep and then
    we may begin to speak to them through the waves and folds of their dreaming
    then we may urge them on    beg them not to forget
    though so many days have driven in between us and original hopes
    as a boy stands back from his earlier self mocking it
    and the light of fireflies blinking against an old fence has become
    as sad as it is lovely because so many hands are gone by now
    it is not that we wanted the light to be caught      but reached for
    that was it

    Tonight it is possible to pull the long string and feel someone moving far away
    to touch the fingers of one hand to the fingers of the other hand
    to tug the bride and widow by the same thread    to be linked to every mother
    every father’s father       even the man in the necktie in Washington
    who kept repeating
You went the wrong way, you went the wrong way
    with such animation he might have been talking about his own life

    My friend took my son for his first ride on a bicycle’s back fender
    He said
Are you sure it is okay to do this?
—
We have been doing it forever
    I loped behind thinking how much has been denied him for living in a city
    in the 1990s but this was a town    the dreamy grass    slow spoke
    clipped hedges

    Just then a light clicked on inside tall windows    draped tablecloth
    pitcher of flowers    lace of evening spinning its intricate spell
    inside our blood and what we smelled was earth and rain sunken into it
    run-on sentence of the pavement      punctuation of night and day
    giving us something to go by    a knot in the thread
    although we did not live in that house

FUEL

    Even at this late date, sometimes I have to look up
    the word “receive.” I received his deep
    and interested gaze.

    A bean plant flourishes under the rain of sweet words.
    Tell what you think
—
I’m listening
.

    The story ruffled its twenty leaves.

    *

    Once my teacher set me on a high stool
    for laughing. She thought the eyes
    of my classmates would whittle me to size.
    But they said otherwise.

    We’d laugh too if we knew how
.

    I pinned my gaze out the window
    on a ripe line of sky.

    That’s where I was going.

COMING SOON

    Today reminded me of Christmas—bright and utterly lonely
.
    Coleman Barks

    I placed one toe
    in the river of gloom.
    On the streets of the cold city
    a man with two raw gashes at his temple
    fingered them gently.
    Middle-aged sisters selling old plates and postcards
    Three