fragile citadels of love

My dog has been a monster today, but now he is curled up by my legs with his head resting by my knee. I am tired and trying to remember if there was anything I had to say.

I don't mean to keep going back to Wexford, but there was a man there that I noticed standing out on the footpath by the street on the first day I was in town. By his clothes and general appearance I guessed he was probably North African. I thought he was waiting for a bus, but later I have realized that there wasn't really a bus system in Wexford. I don't know what he was doing. I saw him probably every other day after that. One day, while walking from our housing estate to another, I passed him and his wife on the road... she was wearing a veil that covered all but her eyes with bright pink flowers on it. They were just standing together, again looking like they needed a bus. Like they were waiting for something, or someone.

They've been coming up in my mind ever since, so that I want to write about them, write a poem like I wrote about Natasha last spring. But sometimes poems are closure for me. While I was working in (a really rough public housing estate outside my city) last summer every night after I had caught my bus back to the city and had my hot dinner and slipped into my bed I would think about what it would be like to live there, I would be haunted at the thought of climbing those manky stairwells everyday, the thought of living in a place that smelled like feces, coming home in the evenings to a cramped living space with seven brothers and sisters and no dad and unemployment and addiction and the darkness that is everywhere. After my week was up I would still think about Natasha here and there, and try to pray for her.

But writing about her helped. Trying to capture her essence through a snapshot, creating a picture that could take on a life of its own and exist independantly of Natasha for whoever had never seen her or those manky stairwells, listening to my class full of first-year poetry students discuss her and all I had done to recreate her-- that brought some closure. I still think about her and pray for her sometimes, but I feel less of an urgency surrounding her.

I don't want closure on that man and that woman. I don't want to stop thinking about them, because they looked so... lost, so lonely, and I can't imagine what it would be like to be Muslim, North African, old, and an immigrant to Wexford.

There is hope for them, whether they know it or not. If I was still there I would lead them to my house and make them tea and whatever they wanted, maybe a four-layer chocolate cake. I would listen to anything they wanted to tell me, I would ask all about where they were coming from and where they are wanting to go and I would arrange to meet them soon and help them around their house and I would send them home with the rest of the chocolate cake.

Maybe there is hope for me, too, that I will do this sort of thing in the future. Faith without deeds is dead, so James is telling me at the moment. My heart is expanding to hold these people and others-- my home must, too. And by must I mean will. My heart doesn't expand beyond myself easily, so when it does it must be for a reason.

"...Still, I think I know
what it is like to live
in an alien and gigantic universe, a stranger,
building fragile citadels of love
on the edge of danger."

(James L. Rosenberg, from "Wasp's Nest")