Maps. John Freeman

       Witness This

       Benchmark

       Return

       Pumpkins at Night

       Fish

       Waiting

       Paris (Bastille Day)

       Repair

       In the Heart of the Night

       About the Author

       Also by John Freeman

       Acknowledgments

       Copyright

       Special Thanks

      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