{"id":1110,"date":"2019-06-10T17:30:09","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T22:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thespectaclstg.wpengine.com\/?p=1110"},"modified":"2023-02-15T19:12:59","modified_gmt":"2023-02-16T01:12:59","slug":"poetry-by-fady-joudah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=1110","title":{"rendered":"Poetry by Fady Joudah"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

The Old Lady and the House<\/h4>\n
Forty years ago, Lucy bought the land, split the lot, \nbuilt two houses, sold one, lived in the other.\nTen years ago, we moved in next door. For months\n\nwe only saw Paul, her husband, faithfully out for a smoke \non the front lawn, with Sue their playful grey Shih Tzu in tow. \n\n\u201cShe loved the previous owners\u2019 kids,\u201d \nwas his welcoming remark, her poop across our lot. \nOur son was one-year old, Paul \nwas about to enter his seventies, and Lucy, \na good few years older, was fitter, \nmore vigorous, but neither walked their Sue. \n\nPaul watched the chronicles of the neighborhood, \na paradisiac Bantustan, our little city of god.\n\nA year earlier Fatima and I visited San Miguel de Allende \nto restore our minds in eco-friendly destinations. \nShe was five months pregnant.\nWe were living in an apartment complex \n\nthat a hurricane would also drench\nafter toppling its papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 chimney.\n\nIn San Miguel, the Gringo-run B&B was a fairytale \nStructure, out of the palaces in Sentra. \nHalf-owner, the local wife cooked us Christmas \ndinner, denounced the natives who \u201clike being poor,\u201d \nas her husband radiated his traumatized Californian youth \n\nthrough a book\u2019s help\nthat scored all religions \nto a barometer of Zen. \nIslam scored lowest.\n\nPaul was a veteran \nwith an enlarged prostate.\nHis advice was that I should \u201cwatch out for them\u201d \nwho blow my live oak leaves, they\u2019re bound \n\nby law to dispose of the waste \n\u201cfree of charge,\u201d leave none \nof it in black plastic bags on my curb, an eyesore \nfor other residents. A month later, I asked Jesus\n(leader of the landscapers who\u2019d come\nto the US during the Zapatista Revolution)\nto trim the live oak branches \n\nincluding those that straddled the corners of the two backyards, \nand Jesus remonstrated\nthat as dogs and fire hydrants are as good\nas apple pie, he wouldn\u2019t cut a single branch \nthat covered a parallax \nof that man\u2019s yard. \u201cYour neighbor, he\u2019s, \n\nhow you say it,\u201d as Jesus stuttered \na rhyme with a cystic illness \nattributed to Ra, the ancient sun god.\n\nI corrected Jesus\u2019s pronunciation. \nPaul\u2019s health began to change. Lumbago \nherniated his golf swing.\nHe quit smoking. The body \nthat nicotine infused turned diffuse. \nHis abdomen grew rotund. \nHe contracted diabetes. \n\nSoon there was no more small talk, \nno navy stories. I\u2019d find Paul outside,\nhis shoulders closed toward a street\nI couldn\u2019t call him back from. \n\nDementia and hospitalization \nstarted their record of his life. \nLucy struggled with the decision to put him away \nin a nursing home. \u201cI remarried a younger man \nso that he\u2019d take care of me when I\u2019m older,\u201d \n\nshe said woefully to me, \u201cand I hate fat people,\u201d \nshe added with a shiver as she bearhugged herself. \nThin throughout her life, \n\nand always in proper robe on the grass, \nand if intercepted in greeting, she\u2019d quickly apologize \nfor her hair and the Texas sky, \nthough I\u2019d never seen her or Paul \nout to Church on Sunday. \nPaul was now well cushioned \n\ninto his dying. When he stopped \nrecognizing her, she stopped visiting him. \nI began to see her daily, watering\nher yard and plants, mowing her grass, a sloth \n\nborn a bee in a solo hive.\nOne day she knocked at my door,\nher voice trembling, and I let her in. \n\nShe said her landline was out of commission,\nthat she\u2019d just been released\nfrom the hospital for hypertension, a minor\nstroke, a fibrillation.\n\nI plugged her phone back into the wall. \nI thought her end was near. Our niceties atrophied. \nShe was the tea-drop-stained\nfigure in a photo. She no longer heard my car \ncome up the driveway, my doors slam \nopen and shut, my half-hearted hellos.\n\nThat was five years ago. And yet\nwhen she and I had hardly exchanged a word, \nwhenever she\u2019d run into my mom outside our front door,\nLucy, unprompted, would praise me. A testament \nto her classy decorum, thoughtful \nof another mother\u2019s heart. \n\nThen rain fell biblical, anthropogenic.\nAnd all the houses on our street flooded,\nleft us hydrophobic of a swollen sky.\n\nWhen water receded, \neveryone on the street walked out to talk \nwith each other, nouveaux ions in calamity\u2019s bonds. \nLucy\u2019s son \n\ncame to her rescue \nand cut to the chase: \na woman of 90 can\u2019t live \nin a house under repair\n\nunassisted. The property \nwould be sold. But his mother\nwouldn\u2019t sanction the sale,\nand a few months later moved back in.\n\nDuring remodeling, amid the rubble \nthat lined her front lawn and engulfed the white crape \nmyrtle that stood on the border zone between us, \na burgundy leather shoe\nbulged like a boat. \n\nIt was Paul\u2019s right edematous foot. \nFor two months it stayed there waiting \nfor the city\u2019s waste management services. \nTwice I stood by the heap \n\nlooking for the left shoe,\nand what would I have done \nwith it had I found it?\n\nLucy is still living\nin her house \nand will die there.\n\n\n\n<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Fady Joudah has published four collections of poems, The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu,<\/i> a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; and, most recently, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance<\/i>. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal\/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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