If your name suggests a country where bells
might have been used for entertainment

or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons
or the birthdays of gods and demons,

it’s probably best to dress in plain clothes
when you arrive in the United States,
and try not to talk too loud.

If you happen to have watched armed men
beat and drag your father
out the front door of your house
and into the back of an idling truck

before your mother jerked you from the threshold
and buried your face in her skirt folds,
try not to judge your mother too harshly.

Don’t ask her what she thought she was doing
turning a child’s eyes
away from history
and toward that place all human aching starts.

And if you meet someone
in your adopted country,
and think you see in the other’s face
an open sky, some promise of a new beginning,
it probably means you’re standing too far.

* *

Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book
whose first and last pages are missing,
the story of your own birthplace,
a country twice erased,
once by fire, once by forgetfulness,
it probably means you’re standing too close.

In any case, try not to let another carry
the burden of your own nostalgia or hope.

And if you’re one of those
whose left side of the face doesn’t match
the right, it might be a clue

looking the other way was a habit
your predecessors found useful for survival.
Don’t lament not being beautiful.

Get used to seeing while not seeing.
Get busy remembering while forgetting.
Dying to live while not wanting to go on.

Very likely, your ancestors decorated
their bells of every shape and size
with elaborate calendars
and diagrams of distance star systems,
but with no maps for scattered descendants.

* *

And I bet you can’t say what language
your father spoke when he shouted to your mother
from the back of the truck, "Let the boy see!"

Maybe it wasn’t the language you used at home.
Maybe it was a forbidden language.
Or maybe there was too much screaming
and weeping and the noise of guns in the streets.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is this:
The kingdom of heaven is good.
But heaven on earth is better.

Thinking is good.
But living is better.

Alone in your favorite chair
with a book you enjoy
is fine. But spooning
is even better.

And what did I learn, a child, on the Sabbath?
A father is bound to kill his favorite son,
and to his father’s cherishing,
the beloved answers Yes.

The rest of the week, I hid from my father,
grateful I was not prized. But how deserted
he looked, with no son who pleased him.

And what else did I learn?
That light is born of dark to usurp its ancient rank.
And when a pharaoh dreams of ears of wheat
or grazing cows, it means
he’s seen the shapes of the oncoming years.

The rest of my life I wondered: Are there dreams
that help us to understand the past? Or

is any looking back a waste of time,
the whole of it a too finely woven
net of innumerable conditions,
causes, effects, countereffects, impossible
to read? Like rain on the surface of a pond.

Where’s Joseph when you need him?
Did Jacob, his father, understand
the dream of the ladder? Or did his enduring
its mystery make him richer?

* *

Why are you crying? my father asked
in my dream, in which we faced each other,
knees touching, seated in a moving train.

He had recently died,
and I was wondering if my life would ever begin.

Looking out the window,
one of us witnessed what kept vanishing,
while the other watched what continually emerged.

I sang in a church choir during one war
American TV made famous.

I fled a burning archipelago in the rain,
on my mother’s back, in another war
nobody televised.

In the midst of wars worldwide, many
in places whose names I can’t pronounce,
my father taught me, "When asked
about your knowledge of politics, answer, 'None.' "

I doodled in the church bulletin on Sundays
while my father offered the twenty-minute Pastor’s Prayer.

Every morning, I tucked Adam’s promise and Jesus’ disgrace
together with my pajamas under my pillow,
unable to distinguish which of them
was God’s first thought, and which God’s second.

When asked about my religious training, I answer,
"I seek my destiny in my origin."

Most of my life, I’ve answered politely
to questions put to me, speaking only when spoken to,

a sign of weakness
unbefitting of any free human being.

* *

Therefore, for the sake of free human beings everywhere,
and because no one asked, I now say:

My voice’s taper graduates to smoke,
dividing every word between us,
what was meant and what was heard.

And speech's bird
threads hunger’s needle
or perishes in a thicket of words.

And so, speaking as one of the flowers,
I’ll seek rest in the falling.

I’ll seek asylum in the final word,
an exile from the first word,
and refugee of an illegible past.

1.

She aches.
And would have me think
it had to do with rivers.

She talks.
Her voice a wheel
and every station on it.

And what she doesn’t say
makes the sound of wind in the trees.

She walks
her path the years sown behind her.

She sleeps.
And her sleep becomes
the river I build
my house beside.

So, on which bank of the river
am I now, waking or dreaming?

She says, Come away from the window. Lie down.
There’s no dark out there that isn’t first in you.

* *

Close the door. Come lie down.
There’s no ocean out there not already in you.

What a narrow residence,
the lifetime of her eyes.

2.

She opens her eyes
and I see.

She counts the birds and I hear
the names of the months and days.

A girl, one of her names
is Change. And my childhood
lasted all of an evening.

Called Light, she breathes, my living share
of every moment emerging.

Called Life, she is a pomegranate
pecked clean by birds to entirely
become a part of their flying.

Do you love me? she asks.
I love you,

she answers, and the world keeps beginning.