180 Travel poems

i thought you had a summer home in barcelona       because i had seen pictures of you in front of la sagrada família        and knew your father had money. so maybe that’s why when i first met you i didn’t know what to say,    someone too worldly to have anything to learn from me. then there was your halloween party where i managed not to be in any of the photos.     perhaps it was for the best. upstairs,     on a couch i’ll never sit on again, an image of us has started to yellow:        me, blushing because    jamie lee curtis’s breasts are on screen, and you, nervous because all your other guests                            left us alone. nothing happened. at least for another year or so. sometimes it’s hard to guess how long film                 needs to be exposed. i wanted to get the colors right.

The incoherent rushing of the train Dulls like a drugged pain Numbs To an ether throbbing of inaudible drums Unfolds Hush within hush until the night withholds Only its darkness. From the deep Dark a voice calls like a voice in sleep Slowly a strange name in a strange tongue. Among The sleeping listeners a sound As leaves stir faintly on the ground When snow falls from a windless sky— A stir    A sigh

We've packed our bags, we're set to fly no one knows where, the maps won't do. We're crossing the ocean's nihilistic blue with an unborn infant's opal eye. It has the clarity of earth and sky seen from a spacecraft, once removed, as through an amniotic lens, that groove- lessness of space, the last star by. We have set out to live and die into the interstices of a new nowhere to be or be returning to (a little like an infant's airborne cry). We've set our sights on nothing left to lose and made of loss itself a lullaby.

Warsaw, October: rose-madder by four, the soldierly grey boulevards slippery with tickets to winter. After forty years rebuilding, the Old Town is like this beautiful girl I knew whose face was wheel-broken in a crash, and remade so well it was hard to say how she looked wrong. I’d brought two questions here— holding them as if they might slip:who were my mother’s people? Where did they die? In an attic-archive—deep card indexes, ink turned lilac with age—I handed my questions to a love-laborer in a yarmulke; with sad palms and a shake of the head he regretted that any answers now lay probably beyond our reach. So I abandoned questing and went back to tourism; joined the passeggiata, drank black tea, got stickied under sooty lime trees, saw boisterous children, all knees and elbows, skyline-capering on the wall at the river-divide. Beyond their frail silhouettes against the petrol dusk huge cranes were moving, courtly, confident, building another new Warsaw across the Vistula.

—Brook and road Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass, And with them did we journey several hours At a slow step. The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent, at every turn, Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light— Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first and last, and midst, and without end.

The last two sherpas were the strongest, faithful companions, their faces wind-peeled, streaked with soot and glacier-light on the snowfield below the summit where we stopped to rest. The first was my body, snug in its cap of lynx- fur, smelling of yak butter and fine mineral dirt, agile, impetuous, broad-shouldered, alive to the frozen bite of oxygen in the larynx. The second was my intellect, dour and thirsty, furrowing its fox-like brow, my calculating brain searching for some cairn or chasm to explain my decision to send them back without me. Looking down from the next, ax-cleft serac I saw them turn and dwindle and felt unafraid. Blind as a diamond, sun-pure and rarefied, whatever I was then, there was no turning back.

We’re headed for empty-headedness, the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration. We’re taking the train so we can see into the heart of the heart of America framed in the windows’ cool oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds; we want the golden broth of sunlight ladled over ponds and meadows. We’ve never seen a meadow. Now, we want to wade into one—up to our chins in the grassy welter—the long reach of our vision grabbing up great handfuls and armloads of scenery at the clouds’ white sale, at the bargain basement giveaway of clods and scat and cow pies. We want to feel half of America to the left of us and half to the right, ourselves like a spine dividing the book in two, ourselves holding the whole great story together. Then, suddenly, the train pulls into the station, and the scenery begins to creep forward—the ramshackle shapes of Main Street, a Chevy dozing at a ribbon of curb, and here is a hound and a trolley, the street lights on their long stems, here is the little park and the park stuff: bum on a bench, deciduous trees, a woman upholstered in a red dress, the bus out of town sunk to its chromium bumper in shadows. The noise of a train gathers momentum and disappears into the distance, and there is a name strolling across the landscape in the crisply voluminous script of the title page, as though it were a signature on the contract, as though it were the author of this story.

What we will remember—we tried to take the dog, packed around him, making a cozy spot at the back of the Subaru, blocking out the sun, resisting the obvious— he was too old, he would not make it. And when he died in Minnesota, we smelled and smelled his paws, arthritic and untouchable these last many years, took those marvelous paws up into our faces. They smelled of dark clay and sweet flower bloom decay.

I. There’s a little square in Paris, Waiting until we pass. They sit idly there, They sip the glass. There’s a cab-horse at the corner, There's rain. The season grieves. It was silver once, And green with leaves. There’s a parrot in a window, Will see us on parade, Hear the loud drums roll— And serenade. II. This was the salty taste of glory, That it was not Like Agamemnon’s story. Only, an eyeball in the mud, And Hopkins, Flat and pale and gory! III. But the bugles, in the night, Were wings that bore To where our comfort was; Arabesques of candle beams, Winding Through our heavy dreams; Winds that blew Where the bending iris grew; Birds of intermitted bliss, Singing in the night's abyss; Vines with yellow fruit, That fell Along the walls That bordered Hell. IV. Death's nobility again Beautified the simplest men. Fallen Winkle felt the pride Of Agamemnon When he died. What could London’s Work and waste Give him— To that salty, sacrificial taste? What could London’s Sorrow bring— To that short, triumphant sting?

Surfeit of distance and the wracked mind waiting, nipping at itself, snarling inwardly at strangers. If I had a car in this town I'd rig it up with a rear bumper horn, something to blast back at the jackasses who honk the second the light turns green. If you could gather up all the hornhonks of just one day in New York City, tie them together in a big brassy knot high above the city and honk them all at once it would shiver the skyscrapers to nothingness, as if they were made of sand, and usher in the Second Coming. Christ would descend from the sky wincing with his fingers in his ears and judge us all insane. Who'd want people like us up there yelling at each other, trashing the cloudy, angelic streets with our candywrappers and newspapers and coffeecups? Besides, we'd still be waiting for the next thing to happen in Heaven, the next violin concerto or cotton candy festival or breathtaking vista to open beneath our feet, and thinking this place isn't quite what it's cracked up to be, and why in hell does everybody want to get here? We'd still be waiting for someone else to come and make us happy, staring through whatever's in front of us, cursing the light that never seems to change.