The intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.

As the Jews’ army was making its way along the road winding up to Deir El-Kasi, Abu Shacker was looting its houses. The inhabitants of Deir El-Kasi had not waited for the convoy to arrive. They were already across the border. And Abu Shacker, who had felt their outstretched arm upon his back in the days of the Arab Rebellion, now entered the home of Mahmood El-Ibraheem, who had been the regional commander in the days of the rebellion. The gate to the courtyard was open, as if the inhabitants of the house had just stepped out for a moment to visit a neighbor. Abu Shacker entered through the gate and shut it behind him as if he were trying to preserve, if only for a moment, the vanishing past, and he stood in the courtyard, in the very spot where he had stood ten years before.

Imagine, then, a British soldier plummeting from the roof high above the third floor down into our courtyard, landing in a puddle of water from the early-December rain. The water splashes on the gas mask over the face of a boy playing by the puddle and blurs his vision. But first imagine a shot, just a single round from among the hundreds that had begun with the gray dawn, whose trajectory crisscrossed the skies of Haifa, in the warp and woof of the war between Jews and Arabs. Then imagine this one bullet hitting the soldier standing watch on the roof. He falls, and behind him the sharp spire of St. John’s Church rises toward the brightening sky. The boy, who is about seven, freezes to the spot where the thud has caught him trying to frighten a neighbor’s daughter with the gas mask he has bought from a peddler of military equipment. Now imagine the long second that passes between the thud and the scream: the silence that falls on the courtyard and is cast over the body, and then is lifted by the scream, which hangs in the air until the silence wraps itself again around the still body.

Long ago a fish forgot what fins were good for

And flew out of the stream

It was not dreaming

It had no ambition but confusion

In Nova Scotia it lies on ice in the sun

and its eye turns white and pops out like a pearl

when it’s broiled

The Titanic is the one that got away.

Here’s a reason to mourn: letting the best man get

away, marrying a lesser, non-superlative groom. It

happens at every wedding. Mistakes

are any nation’s chief product. Apology

travels incognito, in the form of toothbrush, in

the form of maid, doing my dirty work for me, keeping

my hands clean, business as usual, elbows off the

table, grace before the meal in which teeth

could be innocent bystanders were they not gladiators.

All that I don’t doubt is the nature of a thing.

Should be a headline but it’s not

newsworthy, more ordinary than anchovies

gossipping olfactions of fishy scandal.

The Lady of the Harbor, Fatima rip-off

except she came first with a crown like

the one of thorns on another whose cause is

masses. Avant-garde refugee from 50’s horror

flick Attack of the 50-foot Woman, here turned

to stone fleeing Gomorrah, Gotham, some G (god-

damned) place. There she is, Miss America, your

ideal; there must be a mistake, Miss Liberty

should have won. Why was there a contest? And

what about that talent? Professional model, posed,

picture perfect. Mannequin displayed where the world

window shops. In case of emergency, break glass.

She lost her fire. Holds an ice-cream cone.

Maybe she’ll court Prometheus, this green old

paradoxical maid in Spinster Army uniform.

For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question “Are women human?” with a yes. It is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. And it’s certainly not about trading personal liberty – abortion, divorce, sexual self-expression—for social protection as wives and mothers, as pro-life feminists propose. It’s about justice, fairness and access to the broad range of human experience. It’s about women consulting their own well-being and being judged as individuals rather than as members of a class with one personality, one social function, one road to happiness. It’s about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others: fetuses, children, “the family,” men.

We should not be surprised that motherhood does not produce uniform beliefs and behaviors: It is, after all, not a job; it has no standard of admission, and almost nobody gets fired. Motherhood is open to any woman who can have a baby or adopt one. Not to be a mother is a decision; becoming one requires merely that a woman accede, perhaps only for as long as it takes to get pregnant, to thousands of years of cumulative social pressure. After that, she’s on her own; she can soothe her child’s nightmares or let him cry in the dark. Nothing intrinsic to child-raising will tell her what is the better choice for her child…

I had two longish talks with Ramon, punctuated by his calling out “Abortion is murder!” every few minutes as another woman brushed past him on her way into the building. They were not very satisfying conversations. For one thing, Ramon is evasive about facts: his last name, for instance, and his nationality. When I asked him if he had voted in the last election, he told me he was not a U.S. citizen but would not tell me which country he was from, except that it was in Latin America, and he pulled out a plastic rosary. “The Blessed Mother sent me here.” What did his parents think of what he was doing? “The Blessed Mother and Jesus Christ are my parents.”

There is a strange world

in the changing of a light bulb,

the waxing of a bookshelf

I think I could grow by,

as into a dusty dream

in which each day layers

against one just past

and molds the one to come,

content as cabbage

drudging towards harvest.

The worms are

working their way to his heart.

Every day there are more of them

inside him. They enter

his white arms and leave

their red tracks.

Their red tracks

scorch me when I go to hug him

and a black mouth ruptures

on my forehead. It

will not stop laughing.

I cannot find my hat.

Worms. Mouth. Scorch.

Now you stand accused

of wanting to die, of saying so

endlessly, with needles – and the speechless

track marks recording it all.

The evidence is

a red river, mounting.

It wants to carry you

away like an old chair

some fisherman forgot

to take home. And I want

to shout: Listen

            - this man

          is my father.

             I love him.

From a side lane soft with lunar mulch

and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone

on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties

as wide as an elephant’s forehead.

I sighed across the boy-mown lawn

and they shook as though they shed blessings

to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.

Who would dare pour such panties

along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.

The Milky Way was pavement

compared to their luxury. I knew

I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.

Next morning my feet felt like mallets.

I was back in the world where people

wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,

and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.

There a shirtless dwarf tilts ten cauldrons

of liquid gold, and brass. Pours it

into trophy shapes and molds for metals.

Grungy wet he shines gray, like a catfish

surfacing. Later on he shines less:

cutting out squares of lambskin

from little carcasses, for diplomas.

He labors all night. One day a week

a deaf young man lugs off the junk

we will covet, our names emblazoned.

Why must achievements be made official?

In a bad sleep the dwarf grinds green molars.

By cloud people I mean elderly women

whose white hair poofs out: cumulocirrus.

Between the filaments blue ether flows.

It would be peaceful to lean my face in…

Why don’t I? After all, it’s okay to touch

a pregnant woman, an acquaintance, where she feels

the baby move; I feel it too. We love

the unborn because we love the ideal

of a safe place where even as adults

we can, as over a campfire, warm our hands.

But a cloud hairdo looks cool, cold

as a person’s last pillow. Oblivion we solo.

I love American newspapers, the way each section

is folded independently and believes it owns

the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-

national pages: the Chinese government has posted

signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.

I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say

the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces

unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although

no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter

busting inside them. I go back to the sports section

and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face

keeping all the wrong emotions in check.

My mother the seamstress had a seamstress

of her own, like the cook who will not

eat her own recipes: nearly everything we wore

was a product of my mother’s sewing,

but she made nothing for herself.

Her seamstress, whose nickname begins

with a consonant for which there are only

approximate sounds in English,

made the dress my mother wore out of Cuba,

then again and again in exile as we unfolded

our maps of dead-end streets

and studied dictionaries filled with

the new country’s euphemisms for no and why.

He closed the deal on the night. A real

bargain, he said. And the city was reduced

to a room, the man’s constant body in bed,

the sheets glowing like phosphorus.

One flaw in the design made it possible

for an occasional body to slip in.

The sheets would glow a bit more brightly

in its presence. Each time it left, the body

would leave more of itself behind,

until there was no absence to speak of.

The man began to count on the occasional body

and its lingering presence, which he now calls

memory.  He understands that the laws

of necessity draw their own conclusions.