Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Garden Dreams

Friday, March 21, 2014

Garden Dreams

Each year, we plan a bigger garden. He and I
sit with grid paper between us, plotting the future
of zucchini, squash, beans and kale. We dream
of home-canned pickles gleaming on our pantry shelves,
the juice bursting from the first ripe tomato,
picked in summer heat, popped directly to mouth.

I tell him we need to dig to put up the kind of food
we'd like to feed a growing family well into winter.
Our lot has plenty of potential.
The front yard may be torn up and tiered,
the back alley bullied and rebuilt into beds.

My husband agrees: Grow more, grow much more.
We used to think that way about everything.
More vines crawling in the dirt behind our house
more tiny hands and feet padding in our home.
It's easy to dream on paper, before
you have to pick up your shovel, and dig.

Last year, I told him: No more children.
When I was younger, I thought there was enough
room in my house, in my life,
and in my heart, though I tremble to mention
how very full it is now, how I'm not sure
of its capacity for more. I wish it was larger.
I feel the soil beneath my hands crumble;
needs water, and I rise in the early morning light,
looking for something to give it to drink.

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I STILL HATE PICKLES

The Brick House

Friday, March 7, 2014

The Brick House

Cab drivers will greet you in English, no matter
how much you’ve practiced your guttural letters.
Your hair is blond and, like your accent, shows.

In English, the cabbie will state the cost
of your ride and drop you at your tutor’s house.
She is Palestinian but was born here;
her house here is not her home.

You only know one Arabic word for both house and home.
You do not linguistically differentiate.

For months you greet her “Peace upon the plural you.”
Later you learn that saying “hello” evokes the plural presence
of all her house and home, who are with her,
as you say in English, in spirit. That concept is untranslatable,
despite knowing the words “with you in spirit.”
You keep making this mistake:
one-for-one replacement.

When you speak Arabic, you write your translations in pencil,
so you can revise as you go.
Everything has its excess meanings.

In Arabic you use variations of the verb “prefer”
to answer the door, to pay, to say “go ahead.”
Your English doesn’t have a concept for a pen
being “private.” Ownership has different rules than you’re used to.

And English, despite its insistence on the constant presence of verbs,
finds it impossible to “mercy” someone.

But you still haven’t figured this out.
You still believe this language is a house,
that each word has its equal in size and weight and meaning,
that you can replace your ideas brick by brick.

As though you could simply substitute
the word for “house,” the word for “peace,”
the word for “God.”

  
I STILL HATE PICKLES