Maps

John Freeman

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Dedication

For Nicole, who gave me the world

Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.

REBECCA SOLNIT, A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST

The face of God you could hardly look at. But that day it drizzled, so I could look all I wanted. I saw the homelier side. The cracked whitewash and swallows nesting in the busted end of eaves. I saw the boards sawed the size of broken windowpanes and the fruit trees, stripped. Only the tough wild rhubarb flourished. Goldenrod rubbed up their walls. It was a poor convent. I didn’t see that then, but I know that now. Compared to others it was humble, ragtag, out in the middle of no place. It was the end of the world to some. Where the maps stopped.

LOUISE ERDRICH, LOVE MEDICINE

ONE

Rocklin

I saw it being built in the bowl

of our foothills, trees disappearing

month after month replaced by smooth roads,

empty schools, chopped-up lots and cul-de-sacs,

unfinished houses, sound berms curving

roads into long cement smiles. We’d

drive there in our parents’ cars — past

starter castles — to daisy-wheel junctions,

stoplights sheathed in muslin,

swinging slowly in summer breeze,

air so tight and piney you could hear

construction hammering miles away.

A ghost town but for that sound. We’d

sit in the unfinished high school stadium, at the

lip of what became the bleachers, a half-built

multiplex in the distance, and listen to nothing

turning into something, waiting for the sky

to go purple, traffic to hush.

Then, curfew looming, we’d race back across

the newly edgeless city, radios cranked

to drown our pounding hearts, tires whining on

the silky arterials. We felt it would never end —

the empty sky, the city that didn’t matter,

holding our breath when we clicked off

the headlamps and ran through stoplights.

Beirut

For N

That rusting water tower collapsing

on its ruin was the movie theater

where lovers sat in smoky consternation

while James Bond lit his cigarettes.

The mirrored shopping mall selling

push-up jeans and gleaming watches

used to be the souk, where an old man

sold za’atar for small change.

Here, on the corner, where your

father explained to a gun in his mouth:

he was driving back to the

apartment to pick up the dog you left

behind, here, the apartment given

to the head of the Deuxième Bureau,

because when such a man asked for a

favor, he didn’t ask, and you didn’t say no.

This corner, where the sea shines in the

near distance, where Marianne was shot

through the mouth and wondered, as she

lay, if another bullet would come. Over here,

at that shop where we found the mother-of-

pearl table, the hotel where snipers played

God and the flies on the corpses in the street

rippled when the fallen were merely

wounded, and still fair game. Here,

where everywhere was somewhere else,

and the street signs point to Paris and the

invisible city calls through its sarcophagus

a thousand years, we move like ghosts.

The light is not to be trusted. It has been so

easily redirected. We orient through

the night, following the wind, listening for a

sudden noise, waiting for the taste of ashes.

Legend

My father’s father rode the rails

west into Grass Valley and buried three children

in the shadow of a tree that spread its arms around his bakery.

Cold nights he saw stars he didn’t

believe existed, and heard wild animals

howling with a loneliness he knew.

Wife dead, every morning

he woke to the bread and chill, horses

snuffling in the dark. He’d starved

before, in Canada, winter so ragged it

killed the dog, and this grief was that

feeling, shifted north into his chest.

The heart is not a diamond pressed down

into something hard like rock, but, rather, the word

my father’s father said to himself

those too-cold California nights when

all he could see was the work ahead of him,

the dead behind —

her name.

He’d say her name.

The Unknowing

My grandfather was born after the earthquake and

fire, began work at four, buried his mother at six.

Summers he picked prunes in the valley,

sun-seared spots on his narrow shoulders.

He lost an eye. Blew out his left eardrum

in a packing-plant accident.

He didn’t make friends, a luxury

time could not afford, smoked

through college while doubling

as an accountant, dedicating nights to numbers,

pleasure in the orderly arrangement of the known.

A gift, my father was born at the end of the

Great Depression to my grandfather’s German wife — unaware of

the rubble from which he emerged.

A child among the fragrant groves

of Sacramento imported to give a desert

town some shade. Given a ’57 Chevy

at sixteen, my father rolled it twice

driving home from football games,

license never suspended, too easy

to make such things go away. His father,

midclimb into the airless summit of his

unexpected career, did not attend his games.

The sting of failure learned unobserved.

Davis, then Berkeley, then seminary,

where, among closeted homosexuals

and anguished penitents, my father felt in God

a familiar sense of bruised neglect.

He dropped out, worked as a prison

guard with teenagers put away for

knife fights and petty thievery,

one year, peripheral vision and dropstep

adjusted, never softened.

I was born in Cleveland, where he moved

for more school yet sensed the developing sinkhole.

My mother, cute as a young nurse,

from an Ohio land-grant family who paid her

credit-card bills. They lived near Woodland,

he wore zipper boots, drove a dropped ’69 Mustang.

It took years to conceive. Their gratitude for children

was immense.

A brick thrown at his head from a passing bus

reminded him that though he felt an outsider,

the color of his skin appeared white.

Nights in Long Island and then

Pennsylvania, his lips on our heads,

so kind as to be unnoticed. We slept unbroken.

I don’t remember once having dinner after six.

Our biggest complaint, the wait before we could

race out into the humid falling dark to hear

the pop of the ball against our mitts.

Thirty years after he left Sacramento, we returned,

his mother long since dead. The sun poured

down on our backs at the swim club, sunspots scorched

onto our broad shoulders. Waking to mists, to tinny clock-radio top-

forty hits, we sleepwalked to the garage

in the gloaming, where at five he stood

counting newspapers sprung from their plastic

wrappers, my brothers and I pedaling into the fog to

the squeal and crank of our bicycles.

Halfway through the route, we’d come upon his car,

rear gate agape, Bach aerating the silence,

a lightship docked among the palm fronds

of an indifferent neighborhood mapped by

a developer who had long since died. He tosses

us another forty papers, packed roughly

and quickly so that we never finished later

than six.

Sarajevo (Summer 2016)

She pointed, two hundred meters: there. I was

fifteen. We were drinking wine outside

a bookshop. The shelling lasted

all night. The ruby-colored sunset, the river

close. The theater so crowded

people sat in one another’s laps. Bombs fell so near every

few minutes, parts of the stage splintered.

I’m leaning on a car, cool

metal, smoked glass. The actors,

she tells me, didn’t flinch, didn’t miss

a single line. The audience

didn’t move, didn’t

make a sound.

You’re here; you survived;

and you’re there —

floor shaking, streets buckle —

watching a play that

for eternity will last.

Swap Meet

Stingrays black as bats,

hoods forked open flashing piston heads, Lincolns

with suicide doors,

throat-red interiors, steering wheels

spoked like spiderwebs —

we admired the catch, cowl induction

scoops spit-ragged clean, Mustangs with

cherry-red drive shafts, VWs small and tidy,

an unwrapped child’s toy, then home in silence,

backs stuck to the vinyl mesh, the glow of beauty polluting

the present with an afterwash that should have cast

scale to our shabby Chevy with its

watered-down V-6 and hole in the floor.

We stopped at Orange Julius

until our backs were dry, a lesson

in possession, sweat drying

on my father’s beard.

Bomb Shelters of the Oligarchs

Five hundred feet below the park

tunnels stretch for miles.

Blast-proof titanium corridors

lit by low-voltage Bruck pendants.

Mario the guardsman crawled

to freedom to escape Tiso’s

Slovakia. Ten years he’s

put on a blue Caraceni suit

and plunged into the earth’s

inner hush, cutting a motion-

sensor’d wedge of light

into the vault’s violet dark.

He’s never had a visitor, unless

you count the butcher

who weekly restocks the Kobe

steaks, the sommelier who tests

the humidity of the cellar, the

mechanic who runs the 1969

Bentley, never driven, for

six minutes each day, and the

veterinarian who feeds the

Bornean elephant seven hundred

pounds of cabbage,

acacia leaves, and carrots

dropped into its cell

by a dumbwaiter secreted into

Holland Park’s wading pool.

Twice an hour Mario

passes the first-edition library,

the room of jewels, the

warehouse of art, as big and cool

as St. Paul’s Cathedral,

the hidden harem,

TV turned up high, reality

programs in Russian. Midday,

he kneels on the settee

by his post and unwraps a butter

sandwich and chews slowly,

drawing out the time before he

must adjust his blink rate and

return to his post, and wait for

the call, the one that never comes.

Maps

The retired consul general

lately sailed to Algiers.

He lived there in the ’70s,

his wife would find body parts

in the trash some mornings,

and their baby, born white

in a hospital room choked by

flies, doctors terrified —

a child wrenched into the

world without hair, the lone

French nurse begging them

to leave: I cannot guarantee

the safety of your child here.

But now the child is grown,

married to an Iranian, living

in Dubai, building

wealth for a multinational bank,

while the other child — the one

the retired consul general

jokes was not a pied-noir —

finds in the tiny aperture

of Stockholm’s daylight

ways to protect the foodstuffs

of Europe from infectious

diseases. It is safe there now

in Algiers, the retired consul general

says, allowing

the word’s opposite to grow

in our imagination as we pick at

artichoke ravioli and swirl

the wine, an excellent wine

from Ancona, aged

in the dark for years

for us to drink in Rome

in an apartment that looks down

on the city. It is safe, he says again,

and the light is stupendous,

and the road that inks

the coastline nearly passable

now, and he smiles at how

he has given us benediction,

an unsolicited gift, these Roman

roads, the sunshine, this dust,

the food, the gratitude

of those used to the killing

when, finally, it stops, its

architects greeted when they

sail into port with tea and sweets,

and bread and forgetting.

Of Rockets

Molecule torn from molecule, a path

for sound. A rumbling

like thunder, with none

of its gentleness, or light.

Our near dark. Fifty

jet engines fired at full thrust,

to go nowhere.

We needed them, to do nothing

but make the air their own.

We were their own.

Reared in the silence

of an aftermath.

Their projection of power

was our home.

Everything,

the ticking quiet of the car

when it came to rest,

the blue ridge of twilight,

the vibration in church

after the organ stopped,

before we closed our books,

it all depended

on the signal that if needed

we could rain fire from the sky.

The base is closed now seven years,

wars now fought by joystick.

The silence is deadly.

We don’t know violence exists

until it’s recorded. Queue

the usual suspects and crowds.

Across the globe, a girl rides home

in East Sacramento

bicycle spokes shining in the twilight.

The Boy under the Car

That night in Damascus

her job was to put

tea and cake,

a sprig of mint,

on a silver tray

and walk down

the crushed-pebble drive

to the boy paid

to sleep under the car.

She never said

his name, or what

he looked like,

or whether, when she came

upon him,

curled up,

eyes black and glossy,

she caught him

singing to himself,

before the clattering metal

made him silent.

The Blinding

If we

could make

an atlas

of pain

most land

would be

terra incognita.

Summer 1995

Three rooms, sight unseen, rented from a nurse and

her husband, the floors filthy, one working burner

on the stove. Every morning I left her behind

in bed, holding me with a fierceness

I did not recognize as desperation, because

both of us were blind, we had invented this,

the parenthesis of a day between lovemaking,

meals cooked naked, novels read to each other

aloud, the slow walks to a train station, floating,

holding hands as if one of us might zeppelin

away if untethered, and the pain, a knife through

the chest, at departing for just a few days.

I had six jobs, one for a traffic-planning

firm; Tom and I would drive in the dawn hours

to an intersection, lay hose, then count cars

through our hangovers as they rolled to a four-

way stop. Someone, somewhere, would use

this data to widen roads, erect new signs,

trim the summit ash and red oak so that drivers

could reduce their speed in time. Astonishing

to realize there was such a thing as too much

beauty. I was nineteen, I had another lifetime to

learn this; all I could do then was stand

near the flame, and marvel at the blisters.

Barbers

From the hotel in Martyr’s Square

drive east into Achrafieh in

search of a barber learn

there are four words for barber

three of which are spit out

the last of which — coiffeur — anoints

a tongue with its mellifluence

like the milky coffee served by

the small woman from Khartoum who

never stops bending and refilling

to sit with a group of men wearing

three-piece suits fingering

prayer beads and crosses

to watch a man larger than most

giggle his way through a

haircut he has some advice

for what one ought

to do with sideburns too long

and my beard it is not good

there are ways to fix this and

these men who in another

time would have had other advice

and other things to offer

gather around to officiate as

the coiffeur takes a blade to

the neck and trims until

my head is as smooth and

perfumed as a past

not past but present.

Coins

The crowd rotates by chemical signals

fired into synaptic gaps,

zeros and ones shot into space,

downloaded onto screens, reassembled

into words instructing Parisians to gather

at République by six, that they do in

the thousands, and begin their waltz

around the draped statue that shows

how good ideas must be held aloft,

abstracted, like twelve lives turned

to martyrs’ treasure, one side

of a coin depicting decadence

and insult, the other, tendered here,

brave insouciance before backward

ideals. A cannon puff announces

their transcendence, from

lives into paper lanterns, rising

from the hands of figures in

black who’ve mounted the plinth like security agents of justice.

Glowing white orbs drift

upward through the silvery

drizzle and thousands

cheer as one, unified,

tonight, as somewhere else

thousands are too in

agreement that a life is not

just a life, but a vessel

for the value we assign it.

The Heat

At night its

warble strummed to

silence

the crabgrass

blue, then green,

then black,

the branches relax and

gently scratch the screen like

a dark-haired woman

who years later would

pluck it so that she

could be let in.

TWO

Still Life

From after dark

until early morning,

at the kitchen

table, writing

patient notes,

the radio turned low:

Leonard with HIV,

whose steroids didn’t

work; the dying mother

of a famous rock star,

alone in her Vacaville villa

bemedaled in memorabilia,

the son’s biggest fan.

Her own disease

lying in wait.

Then, as we slept,

it crept to her shoulder,

capped her pen, locked

her files, and

clicked off the music.

Mail

We wrote one another a lot

those days, long winding

letters that crossed a country, in which

I asked if she knew my gratitude;

her replies so generous

it’s only now I realize

my gratitude wasn’t gratitude

but another request.

On Generosity

She gave so easily

we didn’t know acceptance

was training us

to give back

when you opened a door

she went through first, because

the tide goes both ways.

Reherseal

Rehearsal

The hardwood is dusty, whorled from last night’s dance,

fifteen of us lie starfished around the gym, legs bent

this way, then again, beneath dome lights caged

in their own protection, turned on half an hour ago,

flickering and blinking as if a drill, while below,

I’m having a thought about a thought,

that years from this moment I’ll remember it:

lights, ceiling, handprints on the backboard —

of all topographies, this is one I hoard.

Allowances

I gave myself excuses.

This is for my pain —

and this, and this.

Terrible things.

Pain. My pain.

All of it

so I could

get on a train

twice a month

to witness yours.

The Money

The money, he asks, haven’t you

thought about the money?

We’re feeding her

apple sauce and yogurt.

Days later, alone on the East River

I say aloud to myself:

I don’t have a fucking wallet in my heart

to put the fucking money in.

The Last

Stars beat back your kindness,

night blot the sun;

for days we counted her breaths —

and then there was only one.

Tattoo

Driving around

L.A., top down,

my brother

and I discussing how

to remember when

this yellow light

tells you to forget

and to turn around

to do something

else, just stop

being you and

become another.

We decide

on a tattoo. At

first it’s not big,

it’d be discreet,

the kind you notice

like the glint of

a watch.

But, of course, as

we talk it

gets bigger, it

elaborates.

It crawls up

arms, down

our thighs, like it

needs to keep

moving, growing

to outpace

what it replaces.

I say the neck is

off-limits. Finally

we have to admit

there’s only

one way this

will end. What if

I get a tattoo

of her face

on my face,

is that

enough? We drive

in silence

for a mile, before

I realize that

is exactly

what a face is.

Via

In Paris

of men in red

trousers,

women with dogs.

I follow you

through their maze.

It was cool for July,

the lavender

blossoms, dusty

slap of the streets,

motorcycles, and

cigarette smoke.

Then there was

the Seine,

ancient, night with

the dignity of an un-

attended funeral.

One limestone pebble

at a time given and

never received,

the river knows everything

is taken in the end.

I lost you at the bridge,

behind Pont Marie,

twilight’s night trick,

that moment a

river is a road, a path,

eternal brightness.

Repeat

I tell it so many times

on 10th Street, over lunch

in a bar, to tender eyes,

it begins to sound

like a piece of news —

but once I decide

I’ll tell it how

it happened —

how she starved to death,

mumbled her pain,

clung, shat, moaned,

how I was too frightened

to sit with her

through the night

so she wouldn’t die alone.

Blackout

I’d been to the building

in ’96, the upper floors un-

finished, balconies perched on

air, a new gouge at the sky below

Houston, the only rooftop with-

out a water tower. Brick by brick

it claimed the neighborhood from

mean streets, its lobby swirled

with mirrors and gold, its pools

of senseless water, Albanian

doormen with tattooed wrists

who came to this city with

sacks of their dead mothers’ jewels

and lethal skills to make it safe for

us. We moved in four years later,

arriving to a white box without

furniture.

Year by year, as the cafés closed

and reopened, and bodegas

shut and stayed shut, it became

a home. Here is where I learned

to paint a wall. Here is where

I discovered garlic, and poetry again,

where she held my hand when

I got the worst news, and where

we began our night walks and

had dinner and I proposed and

she said yes and we went away,

and where we returned, and it

was home, because a home is

where you return to.

And month by month as we fell out

of love, a tomb we returned to at night,

the lid drawn shut, the night

heaved, and the lives we

both lived on pause.

How much we loved each other!

We couldn’t turn over in the dark to see

we were decreating something greater

the longer we waited. The lights

outside showed her face in sleep,

I should have known. Her leg gave out first.

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Maps

Cover

Note to Reader

Dedication

ONE

Rocklin

Beirut

Legend

The Unknowing

Sarajevo (Summer 2016)

Swap Meet

Bomb Shelters of the Oligarchs

Maps

Of Rockets

The Boy under the Car

The Blinding

Summer 1995

Barbers

Coins

You Are Here

The Heat

TWO

Still Life

Mail

On Generosity

Reherseal

Allowances

The Money

The Last

Tattoo

Via

Repeat

Blackout

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