carolyn forche what you have heard is true

Not opening the door to strangers was one of them. She couldn’t watch all of us at once, she would say, so there were rules. My mother had been strict about this with her seven children. It was not my habit to answer the door when I was alone. Then the engine died and the doors were opening. At first, I might not have noticed the sound of the van pulling into the driveway, but its engine remained idling, so it wasn’t simply turning around. As it was late morning, the harvesters of Encinitas had already left for lunch, having begun their work at dawn. The typewriter was set on the kitchen table, and most days I worked there, the ocean almost audible, the air scented by the fields of nearby flower farms. Fall from where? I had wondered to myself at the time. I would need to be able to “fall back” on something, he’d said. In those days, I could type faster than I could think-my father saw to that when I told him I wanted to be a poet. The finches were singing atop their bamboo cage, as its door was usually open, leaving them to fly about the house, perching on ceiling fixtures and open doors.

A sea wind passed through the screens, lifting some of these papers into the air and sailing them to the floor. There were stacks of papers everywhere: human rights reports, students’ essays and poems, unfinished man uscripts, unanswered correspondence.

On that day, I had been at my typewriter a heavy IBM Selectric that a friend would later complain sounded like a machine gun. Knowing him as I came to know him, he would have sensed my presence and continued ringing the bell. Over the years, I have asked myself what would have happened if I hadn’t answered the door that morning, if I’d hidden until the stranger was gone.

Carolyn forche what you have heard is true