If you’re swimming
then you have lost something important.
If you’re flying
then your heart’s been broken.
If you sit at a table before a deck of cards
then you are afraid of getting older.
If you undress beneath a single spotlight
then you are about to commit a crime.
If you are singing while holding a Spanish guitar
then someone you know has passed away.
If you are preparing to leap from a balcony
then you are mourning the loss of your childhood.
If you place your lips to the breast of a cloud
then you have forgotten to say your prayers.
If you run three red lights in a row
then there is a lesson you still haven’t learned.
If you pull water from an old well
then your father is preparing to call you long distance.
If you hear music playing from another house on your street
then your sister is about to come back from the dead.
If you cup your hands as a hard rain begins
then you are days away from falling in love.
If you find that you cannot run when you want to
then there is a book that you need to reread.
If you awaken in a field of strawberries
then a long journey awaits you.
If you eat the strawberries
then you won’t be going alone.
from Poetry, January 2022
At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to drink from my water bottle.
This water bottle?
That's right. Open it and drink from it.
At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to take off my shoes.
Take off my shoes?
Yes. Both Please.
At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked if I have a fever.
A fever? Really?
Yes. Really.
My grandmother is in a nursing home. It's not bad. It doesn't smell like pee. It doesn't smell like anything. When I go to see her, as I walk through the hall past the common room and the nurses' station, old person after old person puts out his or her hand to me. Steven, one says. Ann, another calls. It's like being in a third-world country, but instead of food or money you are what is wanted, your company. In third-world countries I have felt overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white. Here, I feel young, lucky, and sad. Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.
