8th Annual Juried Reading
Finalist
Susan Dickman

Susan Dickman received an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction in 1997-98 and has most recently published poetry in Southern Poetry Review, Religion & Literature and Cumberland Poetry Review. She has completed a short-story manuscript called The Secret Jesus and is at work on a novel.

What Is Kept

I

They came because they fell in love
with something that couldn't love them. It was always
without a name, the layers of land
stretching for miles beneath the sky,
hot winds that opened the sun
so it poured down into every corner
and sometimes stopped their breaths.
Even the nights were heated,
the air damp with the sweetness of leaves.

Trees, trunks of olives
holding the earth together
in a place where it could crumble.
Turning the clay to find beneath it
more red dirt, new seedlings opening in fields.
Whatever they named it, it was not them.

No land owns a people.
They step across its terraced hills
with no more right than a bird
to be in the space of sky it flies through.
And there are more secrets.

II

When she came to the mud-filled land
she learned to sweep the clay floors clean
and keep November from her porch. Let me tell you

a story: she was the aunt who left for Palestine
and never returned, not once for a visit.
She kept her accent all those years
and when her husband died, young,
she didn't let another in her bed.

In the old yard she once tended
I split figs with my tongue
and wait for the afternoon shade
when girls come to the fields to pick herbs
and hold them in their long white skirts.

III

She said they never told her about
the people in the field across the road,
that when she asked about their covered women
bending over vines and putting figs
in paper bags she was told they were
strangers passing through, stealing fruit
from a rich man's orchard.
At night she watched them climb the stairs
of a white-washed villa and disappear
before the windows flooded with yellow light.
Once, standing behind the fence of cypress trees
she met the eyes of a girl
who came to the edge of the road
and tossed her a sack of almonds
saying, "Ours are much sweeter."

Later there were mortar shells
left imbedded in the hills
that wound toward the Old City,
tanks deposited at the roadsides
as a post-script toward a history
of discoveries in some imaginary final dig.
Then memory spread itself over the land
like language, reworking the old bones
resting in the earth, the battles, the many-
layered names. She said

there was so much to remember
that in her sleep
she remembered more: a house tumbling
into the red dirt, the almond girl and her family
walking to Jordan in green plastic slippers,
her brother's low voice at her ear
one night, telling of how he was ordered
to take an olive grove
out of the ground, and how he did it. In time

she would tell me that history
is cruel, that she soon came to believe there was
no such thing as an untended field
or strangers just passing through.

IV

In summer white brick balconies
open onto the night whose hips
are always moving.

One film flickers blue on every screen
while shapes in the darkened rooms
eat melon with their fingers.

Everything tonight is endless.

Above the Mediterranean
helicopters push the air to shore
and the dampness makes the children yawn.

And in the park
behind the eucalyptus
draped over blackened bars
of iron, the cats are rumbling.
They keep the birds awake,
blinking into their wings. And the lion
opens his mouth to roar.

V

It must be territorial
what the dogs bark about,
their voices full of iron.
Night opens it further: darkness blinds them
and they cannot see the bared teeth,
ears flattened back like wolves'.
One voice swallows another
in a frenzy of sound.

Dogs can bark all night.
They lumber and wind around
the thick olive trees they're tied to,
the hills above them
flowering with orange groves.

For a time there is silence.
Then one begins again, a sudden
burst of fire. Another answers from another yard,
a new one with his own opinion.
Dogs can bark all night.

No one thinks to take them in,
bring them out of the wild.
Dogs bark in their sleep
competing with the dry sleep of crickets.

VI

I remember opening the doors
of their dusty cars, climbing into the back
where the men kept food and guns
and sometimes folds of maps, the dark arteries
pulsing across paper: main road, airfield, border

of another country. They were all the same men
and different. The older ones wore ancient uniforms
stretched tightly across their bodies,
drank paper cups of coffee at the roadsides
where women offered
food for the ones going north to Lebanon
a place, one boy told me, just like the Galilee, only better.

I thought it was romantic
to hitch rides with them and share their cigarettes. I wasn't
going anywhere that I knew of; I was trying
to keep moving, thought I could live
happily in perpetual motion
if I kept my finger pointed toward the road.
Somewhere up that way

a war was brewing, death beginning
to cover the hills like a fine rain.
I was watching the sunflower fields blur past,
their yellow faces bigger than my own.
The boys in green, their faces smooth and open
were just another part of the landscape.

VII

You can see anything
in the flat grey shapes of hills,
in whatever casts its shadow against stone,
and you can travel all night
because the desert is around you
like a weight and longer than any night.

In the corners of the hard rock
is a plant whose leaves
are salt to remind you
you must drink, to keep you
thirsting for an end to desert.

I have seen the boy
who works to bury the sand,
hauling truckloads in the dark
to bring it to the other side.
He tracks the prints of animals
to see what has walked
through his canyons at night,
taking a bit of sand
between his thumb and finger,
weighing it in his small hand
to measure what has come
and gone in his absence.

VIII

Their house is strong and bright.
Bougainvillea spills down a tree near the door
and the walls are covered
with paintings of the Jericho heat
and a river cutting through rock, the quiet

of land without people. I don't know
how to sleep there, want to be awake
every moment: to reach down and press my hands
against the tile the children run across,
want to feel his fingers on my skin
in that room and watch the moon
pool itself in strips across the floor.

She told me once
she wished my parents
had been hers, that when she met them
years later she'd lie in bed pretending
their voices had filled
the silence of the house,
my aunt in her room listening to Brahms
on her big wood radio.

I couldn't tell her
that years before I'd leaned against
their cool plaster walls, before I'd ever
learned their names, I'd wanted to belong
to rooms like those, to hear
that kind of quiet, and walk through orchards in the late afternoon,
take the slow road down to the sea.

My mother's family is all women: it is small
and vast. We begin at one continent
and bleed onto another, crossing airspace in between
and chains of mountains that fold
into the bluest of seas. Into that chasm, that place
that doesn't exist on any map, I let go

my own name across the frozen seas,
over the red blot of land that was never
anyone's. In the way the sound hangs there,
echoes like the slow-motion
movement of a lover's arm across my body, I hear
something of a response, an answer,
another language to unravel.

--Susan Dickman

(C) 2002 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.