A House Without

Homely brownstone. Black hair, seventy years

ungrayed. Arches of eyebrows and aisles,

stained glass gaze and minaret mind. You take

everyone in, and raise them. Your hand always

cold, grow thick in the knuckles, numb

to dishes from the oven. How did they feel

tender on my nape? Your faux pearls

and rosaries, sayings and saints and dark

household God. Who could ever believe

they know you? You swallow your mother tongue.

One by one we abandon the rooms, and leave

a button you like: "Just visiting this planet."

You always dished out more than we could chew.

Now you feed the soil. What house is let without you?

2. Housework

All day she'd work but things didn't

stay clean. When we came to stay,

my father shuddered at the sight

of her knees, tattooed by the floor

of the dim rooms she scrubbed. After the war,

why did his father come home

to another woman first and not his mother?

In the book she loved and left me,

The Potato Eaters sit and eat, just one lantern

to light innumerable browns: dun, earth,

smoke, and peasant eyes. I want to see

in the dark her mystic disdain

for light, a still life of Depression shelves

brimming with chipped tea cups, lampshades and twine.

3. Making Meshi

I was five, rolling grape leaves

into thick fingers: meshi. Ne touche pas,

ne touche pas, my father trying to hug

his mother's back, proudly bowed

before the oven. God-damned French

hudda. Everyone laughed

when Grandpa swore in Arabic, as if

the language itself were a punch line.

Plucking grape leaves from

the patio vine. Everyone reaching

for words to describe them, all garlic

lemon on the tongue. Why did he talk

to her like that? Washing,

spreading the leaves open,

veins pointed up. Grandma's tongue

a Beirut convent, Grandpa's tongue

planted between his teeth, biting off

his Arabic. It was pride,

the way they held

or lashed their tongues. Spooning spiced rice

into the palm. Folding the base

inward to center. Grandpa scolded a cusser:

what kind of language is that? Aroma

of arms. Tucking the wings in

—but unwinding, undone in young fingers.

I can't keep them all together. Laying torn leaves

to blanket the pot. Years later, lying in

my father's room, in summer's

over, I heard them, whispering, in their bed. Beyond

the wall, all embers and breathing.

4. Ascent

She leans against the stairwell railing,

trying to catch her breath

as if it were a moth, hovering

around a bulb, just out of reach. Her heart

failing for months now, her lungs exhausted

as night swimmers, arms flailing

the black glass of water for something solid.

The knifepoint of each inhaling.

In the convent, as a teen, she could steal

the ball from any priest and swish a shot

from thirty feet. Now, in her last ascent,

she turns, looks down the unmirroring well

and grabs the rail as if it were an arm

of someone trying to rob her.

5. The Landing

Grapevines snake through broken

         panes. Stairs now quiet, reek

                  of acrid mold, fallen

plaster. Water pipes burst

         twice since her lungs flooded,

                  the sump of her heart stalled.

When something was lost, she'd pray

         to St. Anthony, who'd lived

                  his last days in the arms

of a tree, descending only

         to eat. Then, a sudden thirst

                  for the dust of the city

of his birth. He walked till he could see

         the gates. Then he was carried.

6. The Attic Bird

Where the staircase ends, where I sleep

when all the beds are full. Where Salma wakes

each day to the Statue of Liberty. In 1950,

age eighteen, she arrives, a seamstress

who resides in the gorgeous weave

of Arabic alone—each letter a painting

of what could not be painted. Salma,

the last of her family, will never marry.

Her parents disown her when she hangs the cat

who ate the family chickens. Attic bird

that my grandmother-cowbird dupes

to roost above her brood, Salma grieves

like a widow when the one she raises,

marries and moves away. her red hair

shocks to white. Her eyes widen. Her face

retreats to the necklace of bones. when no one's left,

her "son" returns to take her back

to Lebanon, where a convent will nurse her to God.

The radiator clings, as if Lily were in the kitchen

still banging out her own Morse Code,

calling Salma down for the phone.

7. House Cleaning

We spend all day dismantling the years

floor by floor, now toss and turn

in unfamiliar walls, trying to remember

a faded oriental rug, the edges worn

ragged, soggy from the floods, a table

lacquered black and black and gouged by mistake,

a powder blue statuette of Mary

grinding her holy heel on a snake,

Baltimore Catechism and Vanity Fair,

Paris Match and The Cloud of Unknowing,

Lust for Life and Lady Chatterley's Lover—

the musty walls of books Lily dreamed in—

the whole housewide Brooklyn dumpster

picked clean, that night, while we sleep.

8. Inheritance

Out on our porch, out facing the shapeless

dark of moonless night, my father told us

how, his mother still unconscious, he rose

from his childhood bed, the room cluttered

with what he'd always seen as junk, trinkets

his mother hoarded and stirred

to life with prayer to saints she figured

bodily, and good on their promises:

Saint Jude, patron of desperate cases.

Saint Anthony, patron of the lost. Eyes

closed, he could walk each room of the house

in his mind. At the hospital, he found her

sitting up, in a white hospital gown,

still-black hair combed to small shoulders,

looking calmly out the far window, at dawn,

and at that moment knew she would die

and he would live on. And that he would live

only in light of her living. She shifted his eyes

to us, as if someday we would save him.

9. Memory Jar

Qui se ressemble, s'assemble.

Invitation is the sincerest form

of fluttering. Lily, it's dark

and I can't see you. La patience

est un virtue. Cliché, a cocktail dress

you wore to hide your shy desire:

five months pregnant with my father,

you had no idea why you tired

climbing stairs. When you work,

you face a thousand. The dark house

even dark in day. The house in pieces.

A thousand nights torment the lazy

golden silence. My hands grope the walls

in a dark foyer. A house without

children runs away from you. Qui s'excuse,

s'accuse. In case of emergency, contact

someone you've never known. I ask

and ask. Qui ne dit mot, consent.

like a house without windows. When you

leave, she pursues you.