my sister's 70th birthday

I didn't do much from another state, but we plotted and schemed, and now she arrives innocently at her very own home in a strange reversal of her life. Here waiting surreptitiously inside are the friends she has served pot roast and pie week in and week out, with eager eyes and hushed giggles at her door. Then Surprise! Here is the woman she befriended at the shoe repair shop opening arms, I'm glad you're here! and another she took in like a daughter, whose own little girls now call her "grandma" Come in! We have decorated a cake and drawn pictures with Xs and Os just for you! Most of them are strangers to me.

At thirteen she was like a mother when I was born. She wheeled me in a buggy around the small town, hoping she would be imagined that way. I think she was born a mother.

Dozens of us are packed tight against each other to see her face. Some standing and clapping, some sitting because they can't stand. Her second husband and love of her life at the back strains his neck to see. Everyone is young again for a few hours, because she is young. My sister is young although she has brittle bones and broken discs. Young though she has endured excruciating pain since her thirties. Young with love, young with generosity, young with selflessness. She is never without pain; it is only a matter of relativity: Is today better than yesterday?

After half the party has left, we intimates hunch around her, sluffed but regal in her chair, smaller than I remember, her hair still red without chemicals, a basket of cards and a handful of gifts on the ottoman at her knee. Nothing extravagant. All pink and vibrant.

I begin to see her as I've never seen her. Here in her world away from mine, I see that I am after all not one of the intimate ones. I grow quieter and believe I might have disappeared, which I would like. My forehead is heavy and I am in its shadow, my mind is dark with wondering what I have done with my life as I watch and listen to her effortlessly thank each one whose card she has just read, one at a time. Each one someone who receives a call from her every week to see how they are, someone who finds that they need her because they have no one better. And who could be better?

On the table at her elbow, stems of white bridal veil spray around pink roses in a vase. My eyes fill and blur while I think of her twenty years from today, surrounded by the same friends, some absent because they have passed. “All life is an act of translation,” Fady Joudah said. The question is, what are we translating?

Russian olives and honeysuckle

I was surprised, and delighted, to suddenly see the bushes and small trees of honeysuckle and Russian olive as shapes of countries as outlined on maps. . . .

* * *

Step outside into the syrup

of humidity and sweetness

run along the path through grasses

and rising goldenrod

and around the meadow

you can tour Russian olives and

honeysuckle blooming together

side by side like countries on maps

Here is a pentagonal olive bush France

there a zeppelin of Turkey floating

above two seas then

Paraguay and Uruguay small

and spaced just right easy to miss

the profile of Chad reclining

in white honeysuckle

under Niger’s rosy face and look here

a perfectly stylized Russia

in pink honeysuckle

bordering a broad Russian-olive

white-blooming replica of the United States

while we run and chase two chickens

who stay ahead frantically on the path though

they and we could so easily cross

the path’s edge and disappear

into each other and the ocean of grass

Lily of the valley

Mother robin

shuffles inside

the cedar branches

unbeknownst to me

on the side of the house

no one goes

except to mow 

fill the propane tank

or empty the septic

but I have come to fetch

lilies of the valley

squeezed against

that side of the house

hidden behind fanning ferns

and as I bend low to clip

one two three . . . fifty

slender lily stems

she screeches

to frighten me away

from her nest in the cedar

and I think too

from these flowers

so like eggs tumbling down

into their cave of ferns

so sweet and almost safe

from my hands

Visiting Chicago in May

The surface of the city

is peeled back in spring

the same as in the country. The same

tulip heads ripple from cavernous

troughs of stone

on the balcony above

a museum garden

shaded by low hanging trees

Where sunlight drops in pools

on straight beds of spring bulbs

flowering blue, pink, yellow and

weeded by two jovial gardeners

with surgical tools

next to loungers on the lawn

Inside the museum each gallery

is neatly hung and corralled

against the chaos

of the artists’ lives

While outside

on the street women open

like dancers at café tables, homeless

men hawking newspapers shout

in the vernacular

of a circus’s main event

Even the stoniest buildings

bounce with light,

with the impression of water

The last day of April

Green grass in unmown tufts,

root-bound daffodil spikes without blooms,

dandelion buttons, purple deadnettle

shawling the tomato bed, ground ivy

weeds big as couch doilies, mole tunnels

like varicose veins on the legs of the ground,

the whole uneven landscape bounding

in undisciplined exuberance

just hatched flies half-sized on the car,

unmoved when my daughter opens

the sunlit door on her way

to celebrate her thirty-second birthday

beautiful in a strapless dress with beaded belt

like American Indians made

that I remember

from camp in the wild north.

Like the one I made: tiny beads of red, blue,

yellow, green and black hooked with a needle,

organized there at the start of a life

utterly unconcerned with how it would turn out.