My husband sighs into the dark to complain
he can’t sleep and his blame
has the small, inconspicuous shape
and scant weight of a bookmark.
Downstairs the alarm whines in starts
as his father keeps trying and failing to set it.
It’s like in a crazy house, my husband says.
Take this blame, it’s a little pebble.
Take this blame, it’s a tunnel that goes
to the other side of the rock.
Imagine, I said to my student, if I were to tell you
I was born in a city that’s reached by a tunnel
whose portal was painted
to look like a rainbow, and it leads
through a cliff and on top of the cliff
is a massive state prison that no one beyond it can see.
My student was trying to describe what he saw
when he pictured the city
his family could no longer live in.
I had heard his same language before
so did not hear it now.
In the city of his family: a gold dome,
and around the dome: a wall.
So tell me about the wall, I said to my student.
So then tell me about the concrete.
Poems are handfuls of dirt that you scoop
from the ground near your home,
wrote a poet whose body
has never been found, but it’s handfuls of dirt
that are handfuls of dirt. The blame
is a dome, or a knot. My husband says
we’ll be OK, said a white woman in the gift shop
when I read from my phone that the president
just banned three news outlets from the White House.
How much is this stationary with the swirling.
How much for this one with the cats.
Tell me about your city, the dirt there.
No, tell me about the gold dome
beneath which the American dream
beats wings like fists through the sealed air
of superlatives. It was never my dream,
said a black woman in the gift shop
buying glitter and spools of silk ribbon.
Right, I said. Like that video yesterday
of the thirteen-year-old boy who kept saying,
Just let me go
and the cop dragging him through front yards
saying, I’m not gonna let you go,
and then dropping the kid in some bushes
and pulling his gun out and pointing.
Right, I said, but by saying
he’s a thirteen-year-old Mexican boy
and the cop is this white guy with a shaved head.
Language hasn’t migrated yet,
hasn’t reached where we are.
So we haven’t reached where we are.
The boy, the Mexican-American kid, the thirteen-year-old’s
stepfather is a cop.
After the white cop with the shaved head
pulled the gun on him, the boy
was arrested. Wait, what?
said the white woman in the gift shop when I told her
CNN, The New York Times. What?
I had heard her same language before
so did not hear it now. The wall was just plain,
I guess grayish, explained my student.
But that gold of the dome. Dome
of the rock, rock of the tunnel
that leads from the city that built
the gray wall around memory’s
migrating dirt. After the cop pulled the gun
but before no charges were filed against him,
people broke windows of a home
they mistook for the cop’s home;
an old woman lived there. Christian, that’s
the boy’s name. And the cop, his name
is Ferguson. San Francisco, Jerusalem, Anaheim.
Those who migrate are inventors.
I know, said a different white woman
in the gift shop. I already freaked out this morning.
So I did not hear it now. My husband
was in the military, so he knows, and he said.
So we haven’t reached where we are. I am here
because I am scared, said the poet after naming
the handfuls of dirt but before he was buried
without any trace in the ground near his home.
Maybe you are, too. Maybe you are
Mexican-American, African-American, Native-
American, my president, the president, my
husband said. Language the bones in the wings of the fists.
Let me go, it’s easy. Just take your hands off me.