Marilyn Bates

1.

Vendors dog me in the streets
of Tangier, hawking brass trinkets,
arabesque mirrors, good hashish
from Baba and Omar. Here, the smell
of urine rises up above the mint
and almond as young boys beg
pesetas from my purse. In a small
square, merchants trade kilim
rugs that children make, losing
their eyes in hundreds of knots tied
into a carpet he rolls out on the street.

At the cafe, men in yellow babou-
ches squander time playing ludo
while women carry loaded baskets
above their faces trapped in veils.
A young girl lugs water on mule
calves up hills to a house where
she will hide behind the narrow
windows and birth a dozen
children in as many years, then lose
them in a street where dirhams
buy boys for the pederast trade.

2.

In the tanneries and street bazaars,
Moroccan girls deny the cry
of the mullah.They dream instead,
of Paris fashions, Pretty Women
in a night with Richard Gere.
They don't know that in America,
we take our husband's name in cere-
mony hiding slavery, wonder in
the shelters why we're only chattel,
a stool that he can kick in anger.

We too lose children to the street
in drive-by shootings or old men
sending boys to the Gulf war. Our
headlines cover crimes with words
like crowd and mass, never mention
men in the faceless mob of fists thrown
on a playing field. On our back pages,
a woman's bloody face swells across
a column touting Chico's run off
Manny's hit to batter the Braves.

Trapped in Line

The man in front of me at the Safeway
wears a straw cap, a weave recalling days
when Cuba was just a step from a cruise ship
and campesinas sold thin brimmed hats
like the one he wears. So oddly dressed
for ninety degrees, his linen jacket drapes
over a rake of a body, smothers like wool.

Ahead, the line stumbles. Someone's
in a rag about the register tape, a torn piece
caught in the cog, clerks with hands like nettles.
The man shrugs shoulders, thick-browed
in questions until I coax him into conversation,
with my prattle about the heat, the wait.

From his pocket he fingers a voicebox,
holds it to his throat and makes it talk,
unleashes a torrent of words I can't comprehend
and I don't know what to say or do, but nod
as if I understand. I turn aside, think instead
of the greenery of the campo, far-off plains
where grass grows to make the hat he wears.

The line budges like a rusty hinge.
He loads the moving belt with milk,
lots of milk, bananas, mangoes, ears of corn.
I think of kernels stuck inside his throat
in that place where part of him is missing,
imagine his slender fingers caressing Havanas
that swallowed his voice.

Outside, I haggle with the vendor
over a long leafed fig tree.
My voice reminds me of how
it is to be whole, how it is to squabble
over pennies, how it is to have a song
trapped inside a bell without a tongue.

Aparting

The Christmas cactus claws at the amber lamp
you left burning in the night.
A pear, half-eaten on the marble table,

deepens in the blush of ripeness.
All there is of you is this stage vacated.
Last night you sold your red jeep,

packed the last of it, suede boots,
green sweater you'll wear at Chamonix.
In every corner, your books from the d'Orsay,

VanGogh staring from an opened page.
It is madness to call you back from Paris
to the time you brought the swollen lilac wands,

offered succor when your father swapped
our blue Buick, for gems he peddled
in a manic binge, that summer in Nantucket.

Later, we stood in the kitchen, stunned
at the snapshot of the woman in fake pearls.
Her face cast a sunspot on our white

clapboard house, where I find myself today,
cold December, thinking about lilacs
spread across your fist.

Poetry