THEY WERE FRIENDS OF MINE
(American dreams)
She was gruff like a sergeant, because she was one—
had been one in Tehran. When the revolution struck,
she paid a smuggler five thousand dollars, all she had,
and snuck out. Her husband and children got here
by other routes and means. Now, twenty years on,
she marshalled motley shock troops, Iranians,
Somalis, Ethiopians, scrounging whites like me,
to end-line posts manning barricade registers
collecting the cash, running the credit point
of sales for Portland, Oregon, city parking lots.
There was the center lot boss too, Eritrean,
forty some years, huge toothless grin, humor
as quick as his cigarettes, at home he’d worked
in loans and currency exchange, Italian lira,
noi parlato malo Italiano, he ran the nightly
graft from the cash parking revenues, petty
pocket moneys to keep the sundry families in
rent and clothes and food, he’d scurry round
picking up receipts, dropping off deposits,
making sure it all seemed to add up proper.
Somali girl, your story haunts me still, how
you told me what nobody should have to know,
fleeing as an orphan refugee out of Mogadishu,
the road a blooming cemetery of newly fallen graveyard
children, bullets hailing in a futile civil war,
what do you know, all you see through tears
is what no one knows, why it goes to hell like this,
but somehow you’d smile your big white toothy
smile and talk about college classes in the fall,
your headphones alive under white head scarf.
And you, you know your name, a city street
between Flanders and Davis, with your Zulu time
and conspiracy theories and crazy constant smoke
and joke, missing molars from meth amp jags,
veteran of the signal corps in Desert Storm—
to get out you smoked a ton of weed and failed
a drug test, got Other than Honorable Discharge,
convinced me the numbers at the parking lots
didn’t add up, how merchant validations were
manipulated to skim the cash and charge the stores.
Then you appeared, from the dark broken heart
of Rwanda, entered costly as a smuggler’s bride,
faked you didn’t speak English, yet so proper,
worked for the United Nations Truth Commission
investigating genocide, not twenty years young,
I didn’t dare pry too deeply into what bones
rattled bleaching in your memories, you eager
to get a handle on this new place and way of living,
the Iranian sergeant boss brought you on and
I showed you how the bus schedules worked.
And you too were reticent to speak of what
you’d known and been through, sick veteran,
whose testes cancer was currently in remission, chemo
hardly over twenty, smoking like a chimney,
yet you taught me at the first the ropes of this
tawdry business, and we chatted over smokes
about politics and gastrointestinal health,
alternative approaches, in the Portland rain,
to boosting the good bacteria in the gut
and keeping the mind from sinking in a rut.
You Ethiopian women, how could I forget you,
with your dark coffees, flatbread, and spicy stews,
reading your Bibles and saying your prayers,
holding aloof from everyone but yourselves,
like a holy cabal awaiting the end of the world?
And Robert, where are you now, my friend?
Hopefully among the living, or maybe not,
but probably. You had it figured out, my man.
Once you stitched leather jeans for Jim Morrison,
surfer boy, you fled in sixty-five to Brit Columbia,
faked names and stuck to edges, didn’t come back
until the amnesty was called, lived a pure cash life,
staked out and bought a little Eastside bungalow
the bank foreclosed on (you got an in by throwing
the “for sale” sign in the bushes until you bid)—
We had a gay old time investigating Perry Mason-
like the ring of graft running round the city lots,
and though the suits at City Hall didn’t give a shit
and nothing came of it, we both know the truth
even if the mayor has better things to think about.
This was all ages ago, back before the towers fell,
anyway, so I can recall fondly now the memories
in these new times, how they were friends of mine,
and honor here in my mind their wraiths of graph
and cry out in my sleep till the morning laughs.