Mount Nebo

The last morning I saw you
on Skype, tornados
in Joplin tore
a grandmother in blue
from the earth.
You asked if I was safe
here. I sat on my fingers
and fought my eyes
darting between the screens
of you and me
trying not to miss a thing.

Mr. Rocket could watch
a child's mind
movie reeling
like a fickle light bulb
and call it spunk.
In his third grade, I met
imagination as pet caterpillars
in brief recesses.
I once asked Mr. Bathroom
to use the rocket
and he nodded
my reddening cheeks
backward into a grin.

Moses may be buried here,
gnarled and orange
like the metal crucifix
by new Orthodox construction.
I hoped for secrets
covered in ghost prints
before I came here
to a hill with thorny weeds.
Now the earth's axis
is a wood staff
my fingers
squeeze of snakes
and Skype time differences.

Before I ever imagined
Moses's desire as deep,
visible and lonely
I tied your hands
to a kitchen chair
and everywhere
except your black hair
seemed pixelated
and bright
in a performance
not easily remembered
or left secret.

I often wonder if a God
kept Moses to die
on this mountain
crippled or starved
or weakened in spirit
and if Moses gazed
to honey and green trees
or if he crouched
in a Bedouin cave
with baying donkeys
and reflecting pictures.

When Mr. Rocket is arrested,
his mug shot
makes permanent
the smart round glasses
and brown beard
of third grade
memory. I want to snip
away the hard mouth
and Photoshop in his kind smile
the first time he read
my fledgling block-letter story
of young octopi glory
in sixteen-legged races
and said, ah-ha
here's a dreamer.

I imagined this mountain
as a source of truth
before I came here
and met its sheep bells
echoing across a yellow view.
On Mount Nebo,
the mysteriousness
of a God, a teacher or a man
is just a feeling
I sift happily
through my fingers
like sand.
 

Swim Coach in the Desert

My swimmers clutch bellies with bulge-eyed worry
the day after our first team wall sit.
They confuse sore abs with mutant stomach bugs
or spells that come from leaving windows cracked at night.

Amer is a giant-breed bush baby throttling
like a boulder into a wadi. Banan is an ambling camel
nibbling weeds everywhere.
Leen is a salamander with the rhythm of a salsa dancer,
Sama is springy as a frog.
But the girls miss 25% of swim practices
in order to bleed outside of their bodies.

Our school imports grass
to cover the lands of Moab.
We are the only green spot seen from an airplane
or from Google Earth Jordan.
Who am I to turn dust into greenery?
To change the geometric patterns seen by a satellite's eyes?
I quietly doubt everything,
watching the skies.

This country has cracks
filled with streams and 50-meter waterfalls.
It takes climbing deep
deep deep deep down
to find that purple and green and red world called the wadi.

Hasham grins with the glee of excuse:
"Miss, miss, miss, my maid ran away.
So no one put my swim suit into the dryer."
"But, Hasham, why didn't you?"
Hasham stares,
he's seen neither a wave nor a tsunami.

This country's sea is so salty
I'm flung horizontal
and no water mammals survive for my students to copy.
It takes digging deep
deep deep deep down in the black mud
to find earth slick with fresh spring water.

At the first swim meet, Ibrahim mimes a pterodactyl
baby birthing war dance for victory,
shouting, "Yalla, ya shabab! Yalla!"
They're laughing, cheering, diving, losing, winning.
My swimmers pull each other from these races clutching stomachs
they call earned instead of given.

Ala is late to practice but completes penance lunges
with the cartoonish vertical walk
of a character from Cosby's Junkyard Gang.
Mohammad is an eager goat scrambling
from lane rope to lane rope.
Nour has the wingspan and the patience of a desert hawk.
Haneen can't join the team at all.
Wet clothing clings too close to the female body.

Akram swims like Tarzan with his face out of the water,
Omar refuses to pump pushups off his knees,
Ziad is a calm and careful plodder
like a beetle searching both sides of a leaf.
Jafar is silent and as buoyant as an oryx,
and Shahem is the harmless Wile E. Coyote
frozen running midair off a cliff.

Who am I to turn hoofs into fins?
I weigh everything,
afraid to linger
and turn into a pillar of salt.
I question everything,
afraid I am breeding mutant fish goats of dysfunction.
To what world will I send them?

I am a porpoise flipping sunbaked
out of water, a teacher with big lessons
left to learn. I am like Bugs Bunny
who keeps asking for a carrot without hearing
there's another cure for hunger here.

This country has water in unexpected places,
its cracks, its mud, the bellies of its people.
It takes searching deep
deep deep deep down within
my desert swimmers, deep
inside anyone I meet, deep inside me,
for what my father calls the imaginario.
The part of the soul who can make into reality
what one has only heard about
or seen inside a dream.

 

Iftar, Breaking the Fast

We consume iftar on top of a low-rise building:
everything east is white, even the hills


covered with houses like mushrooms over moss.
To the west, we eat an orange sunset over desert.


Pink clouds frame a monstrous stone turtle
and we smoke melon-flavored shisha toward Mecca, exhale white


against white against white against white.
But where is God here?--Here, on Ruth and Naomi's land,


Moses's deathbed, Salome's dance floor where Yahya's ghostly head rolls.
The water of Jesus's baptism flows through our faucet.


In all truth, we ran away. Across the Atlantic,
and still, nostalgia sticks


in this night, along the rim of expat liquor glasses of lemon,
a song, the occasional panging notes searching for solace


like the flies that cling to our skin for moisture,
for the comfort something else is alive in this desert.


A whisper rises from the sand like the breath
of our someday dead mother buried on foreign land.


Somehow the desert holds a hope
lost in adolescence, forgotten and strange with time--


hope in the smile of a young man smoking
agila across from us, the way he breathes


Inshallah, hope in the lonely bus ride home
with only the lights of Amman as company,


hope in the twanging, bending, lilting,
hypnotizing bus-nomad music of this country


my body hasn't learned how to follow yet,
hope in night sky geometries, the shifting isosceles


of Jupiter, Venus and the crescent moon,
in the haunting isha'a melody of the muezzin,


the call for everyone to fold and be still.
Perhaps even for the heathens like us.