After graduation, I needed money to visit my sister in Morocco. A temp agency placed me in human resources at a local hospital, where my job was to make photo identification cards for new employees. I sat in a dull gray room at a desk reading novels while waiting for the next person to arrive. I’d situate the person against a wall and tell them to smile. Most of the time, they wouldn’t, but every now and then, a person’s face would break into a huge smile that made us both giggle like little kids.
I am the poet laureate of my past. Verses vie for my attention in water color blotches of recollection. Like that time, and that other time.
I’m at a Halloween party with my sister in Fez, a living room full of peace corps volunteers wearing wigs and glitter. I wander into the crowded kitchen for a drink. I recognize a man I met in another city and we gravitate toward each other like magnets until we’re the nucleus of the orb of this moment. He takes my hand and leads me outside to get some air and we dance like we know something about ballrooms. A camera placed on a window ledge gets stolen.
I didn’t know what to do with my life so I stayed in Morocco for months, living with my sister in the High Atlas, visiting friends in different cities and villages. I kept a little notebook of songs and observations. The only road to her village was a brutal ride that switched and wound up in a cluster of clay homes crammed into the mountains. I remember throwing up more than once off the side of the truck full of men and their goats, who brayed with what I felt could only be compassion for the sick foreigner.
Can we break up with a language? And if I can’t recall it, did I ever really know it? I barely knew Arabic, never spoke French, learned to read and write Hebrew as a kid expected to perform incantations. But I did throw myself into Swahili with some seriousness. I started learning the noun classes in college at the age of 20 and once more at the age of 33. Who was she, speaking through that alphabet of coast and clove?
Poets and writers talk a lot about voice—how to find it and use it, speak with some sense of authority through it. But we’re also many people and parts inside a single life. So when I write a letter, my voice is one verse. And when I leave a message, my voice is another. As if the voice is an ocean with different kinds of weather and waves. I’m funny but I’ve also been told I’m as a “serious as a graveyard,” so yes, I guess how you know me depends on where we met and what I knew about myself just then.
Transit Slips, #10
I am the poet laureate of my past. Verses vie for my attention in water color blotches of recollection. Like that time, and that other time.
I’m at a Halloween party with my sister in Fez, a living room full of peace corps volunteers wearing wigs and glitter. I wander into the crowded kitchen for a drink. I recognize a man I met in another city and we gravitate toward each other like magnets until we’re the nucleus of the orb of this moment. He takes my hand and leads me outside to get some air and we dance like we know something about ballrooms. A camera placed on a window ledge gets stolen.
I didn’t know what to do with my life so I stayed in Morocco for months, living with my sister in the High Atlas, visiting friends in different cities and villages. I kept a little notebook of songs and observations. The only road to her village was a brutal ride that switched and wound up in a cluster of clay homes crammed into the mountains. I remember throwing up more than once off the side of the truck full of men and their goats, who brayed with what I felt could only be compassion for the sick foreigner.
Can we break up with a language? And if I can’t recall it, did I ever really know it? I barely knew Arabic, never spoke French, learned to read and write Hebrew as a kid expected to perform incantations. But I did throw myself into Swahili with some seriousness. I started learning the noun classes in college at the age of 20 and once more at the age of 33. Who was she, speaking through that alphabet of coast and clove?
Poets and writers talk a lot about voice—how to find it and use it, speak with some sense of authority through it. But we’re also many people and parts inside a single life. So when I write a letter, my voice is one verse. And when I leave a message, my voice is another. As if the voice is an ocean with different kinds of weather and waves. I’m funny but I’ve also been told I’m as a “serious as a graveyard,” so yes, I guess how you know me depends on where we met and what I knew about myself just then.
Transit Slips, #10
