For years, my friend cared for her father. Delivered snug, knee-high socks, tugged rug to artful angle on his floor. She arranged his paintings, refreshed the fruit in his bowl. They attended every traveling musical at the Majestic because her father loved showtunes so much. He took a guest to each, sometimes sharing a meal before the trek downtown. She called him more than once a day. And now they are both dead. Even her husband who was sick the whole time yet assisted everybody, is dead. All these people who traded so much care are dead. Their dog is still living though, sniffing old friends curiously as if we each became an unspoken language, vaguely familiar but who? Some invisible force girding all our days. A wave we count on returning to shore but with none of them here anymore, where is it? Could this be the mystery we feel walking outside just before dawn, softening sky, breath of wings rising from ancient cypress, a crane called into the air?
The teacher who sends her tiny students to the front of the room, saying, You will speak without mumbling, and never swallow the end of a line, believes in you before you do. Calmly she sits, hands folded, golden bracelets glistening with light from the window which falls exactly onto the middle of her desk. As she will dwell forever in the middle of your mind, listening for a lifetime. There might be a stage and you could stand on it. Really? Corners of bookstores, basements of libraries. Someone might come to listen. Really? Someone believed you could. * We didn’t want much. A circle of people unlike one another with similar quietudes, smiling around questions. After such evenings it was hard to sleep. The lamps along the hallways of old hotels kept throbbing yellow, impressing themselves on your closed eyes, worrying you awake, maybe there would have been something better to say. * Finally, we went to our friend’s lighthouse. Slept in a perfect gray-shingled house at the foot of the lighthouse. The children kept climbing to the top of the lighthouse, but I was happy at the bottom waving up at them. They said they could see forever. Fishing boats glided past on the channel, the pirate tourist ship and party barges would come later, all passing at a distance. At the lighthouse we felt safe, never locked a door, crabs dozing under the stairs, soft air lifting us from silvery dawn, we had many days coming. How could we be better people after knowing the lighthouse, casting out calm reassurance the way it did, hoping for the best, letting others know they might find their ways, staying rooted by the ever-changing shore? For years it wasn’t lit. No one could find a certain lens. It was a quest. And now, every evening at sundown, the strong golden light comes on automatically, long beam reaching out across sand and rocks and your future and mine.
Naomi Shihab Nye’s most recent books are The Turtle of Michigan and Everything Comes Next, Collected & New Poems, both from Greenwillow/HarperCollins. She is on faculty at Texas State University.
Still images from Drunken Angel (醉いどれ天使, Yoidore Tenshi), a 1948 film directed by Akira Kurosawa. It is notable for being the first of sixteen film collaborations between director Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune.
