It must say something wonderful about my life
that my first meal in America was a bucket
of chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I was ten. Hours before, the arrival at the airport
to the cacophony of relatives, then the drive
to my uncle’s house in the new winter cold,
where the bucket waited, like America itself.
For once, that one memory is not like the tattered
band T-shirt you only wear to bed, but like
the crisp task the teacher gives to her students.
She hands each of us a mason jar full of black,
white, red, and brown rice. She tells us
to pour the rice on the table and sort it
by color, however long it will take. In this way
the counting and accounting, like the work
of memory, is its own abundance, along with that
of the gorgeous rice. All my life I have been
drawn to exercises in patience because so many
of the things I love don’t love me back,
a claim that, to borrow a line from Miłosz,
I make not out of sorrow but in wonder.
The patience of bending over a table, counting.
The patience of hunger. The patience of love
clinging to an image of sunlight on a hazel eye.
That day, we lay on the summertime grass
of the park and looked up at the maples
the sun ruffled through. He told me about
the stern way his grandmother had taught him
how to play the violin when he was a child.
I told him about my childhood newspaper route,
walking the neighborhood’s sleeping streets
at dawn, my hands black from newsprint,
stung by the rubber bands that always snapped.
When we weren’t talking about those things
we were talking about poetry, beside ourselves
when reading out loud the Larkin poem
about how parents fuck you up, whisperingly
amazed reading Dickinson’s poem about
how things fall apart in an exact, organized
decay. Reading the poems with someone else,
I had the thought that it was best to always
read poems this way, like the trains in Europe
where you have to sit facing each other.
I had the thought that the space between
the lines in a poem was like the space between
two people facing each other on a bed,
the space of breath. In the park, the maples
we lay under were Norway maples, a species
considered invasive because it out-shades
everything around it. I didn’t know this
when I fell in love with the geometry of each
astral leaf, or fell in love with the chorus
the leaves made when the breezes conducted
them. Often I am moved by all the information
I’ve gathered but don’t know what to do with.
That the needles used for upholstery are curved
like parentheses. That there’s a star somewhere
two hundred times bigger than our sun.
That far back in its etymology the closet
actually meant a space of intimate privacy
where you might welcome others, not a place
of shame you’re supposed to leave behind.
The abundance of that closet, crowded now
with my fierce friends. The abundance
of having a new truth in the mind, the bloom
in your senses like biting into a fennel seed.
The abundance of America, its orchards
and its libraries, its cemeteries and its airports,
the circle of people praying in the basement
of a church and the muddy field after a festival,
the boy counting the sixty-seven rings
of the fresh-cut log washed up on the beach
and the girl wearing red sunglasses on the train
in the morning, startled awake at her stop,
then, like all of us, walking into the day,
into the one thing there’s plenty of: the future.