ONE
Rocklin
I saw it being built in the bowl
of our foothills, trees disappearing
month after month replaced by smooth roads,
empty schools, chopped-up lots and cul-de-sacs,
unfinished houses, sound berms curving
roads into long cement smiles. We’d
drive there in our parents’ cars — past
starter castles — to daisy-wheel junctions,
stoplights sheathed in muslin,
swinging slowly in summer breeze,
air so tight and piney you could hear
construction hammering miles away.
A ghost town but for that sound. We’d
sit in the unfinished high school stadium, at the
lip of what became the bleachers, a half-built
multiplex in the distance, and listen to nothing
turning into something, waiting for the sky
to go purple, traffic to hush.
Then, curfew looming, we’d race back across
the newly edgeless city, radios cranked
to drown our pounding hearts, tires whining on
the silky arterials. We felt it would never end —
the empty sky, the city that didn’t matter,
holding our breath when we clicked off
the headlamps and ran through stoplights.
Beirut
For N
That rusting water tower collapsing
on its ruin was the movie theater
where lovers sat in smoky consternation
while James Bond lit his cigarettes.
The mirrored shopping mall selling
push-up jeans and gleaming watches
used to be the souk, where an old man
sold za’atar for small change.
Here, on the corner, where your
father explained to a gun in his mouth:
he was driving back to the
apartment to pick up the dog you left
behind, here, the apartment given
to the head of the Deuxième Bureau,
because when such a man asked for a
favor, he didn’t ask, and you didn’t say no.
This corner, where the sea shines in the
near distance, where Marianne was shot
through the mouth and wondered, as she
lay, if another bullet would come. Over here,
at that shop where we found the mother-of-
pearl table, the hotel where snipers played
God and the flies on the corpses in the street
rippled when the fallen were merely
wounded, and still fair game. Here,
where everywhere was somewhere else,
and the street signs point to Paris and the
invisible city calls through its sarcophagus
a thousand years, we move like ghosts.
The light is not to be trusted. It has been so
easily redirected. We orient through
the night, following the wind, listening for a
sudden noise, waiting for the taste of ashes.
Legend
My father’s father rode the rails
west into Grass Valley and buried three children
in the shadow of a tree that spread its arms around his bakery.
Cold nights he saw stars he didn’t
believe existed, and heard wild animals
howling with a loneliness he knew.
Wife dead, every morning
he woke to the bread and chill, horses
snuffling in the dark. He’d starved
before, in Canada, winter so ragged it
killed the dog, and this grief was that
feeling, shifted north into his chest.
The heart is not a diamond pressed down
into something hard like rock, but, rather, the word
my father’s father said to himself
those too-cold California nights when
all he could see was the work ahead of him,
the dead behind —
her name.
He’d say her name.
The Unknowing
My grandfather was born after the earthquake and
fire, began work at four, buried his mother at six.
Summers he