Naomi Shihab Nye

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Where the Soft Air Lives

“Meanwhile Dean and I went out to dig the streets of Mexican San
Antonio. It was fragrant and soft—the softest air I’d ever known—and
dark, and mysterious, and buzzing. Sudden figures of girls in white 
bandannas appeared in the humming dark.”
                  Jack Kerouac, On the Road
1.
She placed her babies in the sink
stroking off the heat with an old damp rag.
Coo-coo little birdies, she sang,
then she tied the hair up in ponytails
pointing to the moon. It made them look
like little fruits with a pointed end.
She said, You don’t think about poverty
till someone comes over.

2.
The man of Guadalupe Street is
guarding the cars. On his porch
the lights of Virgin Mary flash
endlessly, prayer-time, vigilante,
he rocks with his wife every night
rocking, while the bakery seals its cases
of pumpkin tart and the boys
with T-shirts slashed off below the nipples
strut big as buses past his gate.
He is keeping an eye on them.
And on fenders, hubcaps,
a grocery cart let loose
and lodged against a fence.
Cars roar past, but they will have
to go home again. He is happy
in this life, blinking Mother of God,
his wife placing one curl of mint in the tea,
saying always the same line,
Is it sweet enough? and the porch
painted three shades of green.

3.
I mended my ways, he said.
I took a needle and big thread and mended them.
You would not know me to see me now.
Sometimes I see myself sweeping the yard,
watering the dog, and I think
who is that guy? He looks like an old guy.
He looks like a guy who tells you
fifteen dead stories and mixes them up.
So that explains it:
why I don’t tell you nuthin.

4.
She feeds her roses coffee
to make them huge. When her son was in Vietnam
the bougainvillea turned black once overnight.
But he didn’t die. She prescribes lemongrass,
manzanilla: in her album the grandchildren
smile like seed packets.
She raises the American flag on her pole
because she is her own Mexican flag
and the wind fluttering the hem of her dress
says there is no border in the sky.

5.
Lisa’s husband left, so she dyed her hair
a different color every day. Once pale silk,
next morning, a flame. She shaped her nails,
wore a nightgown cut down so low
the great canyon between her bosoms
woke up the mailman dragging his bag.
She pulled the bed into the dining room,
placed it dead center, never went out.
TV, eyelash glue, pools of perfume.
She was waiting for the plumber,
the man who sprays the bugs. Waiting
to pay a newspaper bill, to open her arms,
unroll all her front pages
and the sad unread sections too,
the ads for bacon and cleanser, 
the way they try to get you to come to the store
by doubling your coupons,
the way they line the ads in red.

6.
Air filled with hearts,
we pin them to our tongues,
follow the soft air back to its cave
between trees, river of air
pouring warm speech, two-colored speech
into the streets. Make a house 
and live in it.

At the Mission Espada
the priest keeps a little goat
tied to a stump.
His people come slowly out
of the stone-white room,
come lifting their feet suddenly heavy,
trying to remember far back before
anything had happened twice.
Someone lit a candle, and it caught.
A girl in a white dress,
singing in a window.
And you were getting married,
getting born, seeing the slice of blue
that meant shore,
the goat rises,
his bitten pitch of land around him.
The priest bends to touch his head,
And goes off somewhere.
But the air behind him
still holding that hand, and the little goat
still standing.