180 Travel poems

It's hard to get anywhere in Utah without going through Provo. I can't tell you the number of times I went there as a teenager, the number Of times I drove into town in the early Afternoon, hungry, and had to look around For a place to eat. You don't have to starve In Provo but you eat at your own risk. At no risk. I would never have gone to Provo On my own. I went accompanied— For reasons almost too trivial—or personal—to mention. There are moments when you simply must get into the car and drive And from Salt Lake there are only a few ways to go, Toward the Great Salt Lake or toward the canyons and to get To Zion or Moab you had to pass through Provo. I remember the population because it went With the number of miles from outskirt to outskirt, 45 miles, 45,000 people, 45 minutes (Keeping to the speed limit) $45 to spend on a suit at a 45% discount... There was nothing Provo's department store did not carry, Including pearl handled Colt 45's, But for a wider selection of fire arms, rifles With narrowing focal points, with greater precision over vast distances, You were better off Next door. O I guess it wasn't that different from entering A thousand other American towns, but this one Made my flesh crawl. I wanted to howl. The men walked with their hands deep in their pockets. The women were afraid to lift their eyes. It was as if something terrible had happened Or was about to happen. I'm not saying you have to love what you do In this life, but it isn't nice to practice The silent treatment on strangers in the desert, Strangers who would have to be wondering Where the other 44,990 people were, since Other than the one drowning potatoes in burning oil Beside the grill in the luncheonette And the one behind the register, And the three grim-faced, parchment-skinned Jack Mormons hunkered over cups, And the handful of impassive faces Placed against the windows Of one-story cinder-block houses, There was no one in Provo beyond the jackrabbits— Glimpsed in abundance en route— Who vanished as we crossed the town line, And drove past the population sign. Or was it a warning in disguise? There was something eerie in the air, An absence I could not identify. An immense single-pump gas station, Shimmering like a mirage in the heat, Took up a good part of the main drag. I pull in. Step into the heat stunned. The car is too hot to touch. I needed gas but didn't want to get it there. It meant digging up the attendant. You know the lights in hospital corridors, Those are the lights in the gas station in Provo. They're the kind of lights that show up whatever's wrong with a face; The kind of lights that make something wrong when there's nothing wrong. When I got there, I was afraid. It's hard To put my finger on the precise reason why. It's not as though something ominous rose From the sidewalks or Hell's Angels cycles Were parked outside the luncheonette. Nothing like that. Nor can I say why, even though there was almost No one on the street, I felt watched. While I slept fitfully in the tilt-back bucket seats, Someone scribbled obscenities on the headlights. I felt drawn by destiny to this nadir. You don't want to provoke anyone in Provo. It's that kind of place, that kind of absence— The desert flattens out, the plants Draw in their antennae. Provo is not where you can hope to find Boon companions. It's against the law To serve liquor in the bar And no one in the luncheonette looks up When you walk in. These are the fallen, Sunk in ashes, adrift In the smoke of unreason. They have masturbated without shame. They have coveted, envied. They have pocketed the tithe. It's hard to put it into words: Provo. It's more like a place without a name, A desert stopover with the semblance of a town. Provo is a place where there is no reason to be. A province that would never grow up to be a suburb, Like the backwaters where they exiled Ovid and Pascal. Only there is no water— Just landscape shorn of green and tawny desert colors. Burned skyline. Hills like craggy impenetrable fortresses. The rain gutters hiss in the dryness. There's a menacing blue tint on the rims Of impinging mountains.

(¡Pura vida! —Costa Rican phrase for "O.K." or "Great!") Such heat! It brings the brain back to its basic blank. Small, recurrent events become the daily news— the white-nosed coati treading the cecropia's bending thin branches like sidewalks in the sky, the scarlet-rumped tanager flitting like a spark in the tinder of dank green, the nodding palm leaves perforated like Jacquard cards in a code of wormholes, the black hawk skimming nothingness over and over. What does the world's wide brimming mean, with hunger the unstated secret, dying the proximate reality? Con mucho gusto —the muchness extends to the stars, as wet and numerous as larvae underground where the ants in their preset patterns scurry and nurture, and the queen, immobilized, pours forth her eggs in the dark. We are far from oaks and stoplights, from England's chill classrooms and Tuscany's paved hills. For thought is a stridulation, an insect sizzling, knit of the moment's headlines and temperate-zone quips, viable in the debris of our rotting educations, that thatch where peer-groups call each to each in semes ecosystematically. Great God Himself wilts with a rise in temperature, a drop in soil acidity, a new language in its grimacing opacity. The brain's dry buzz revives, a bit, as evening falls.

A current like a noise machine through sleep. Blue lichen fields. Mossed boulders. Waking up to ice cubes cracking in a plastic cup and voices (“awesome for the Hong Kong branch . . . well, most of all we miss our daughter . . . ”) I still see it: the climb up slate as runnels spill from some bare misted summit like a source. Whatever sense this dream might make to others. And whatever when they wake they also have been dreaming. Rivers of faces down hallways, merging, as desires mesh and fissure. Cash for clothes or arms or flesh. And if there is no towering sublime where all comes clear to all, no final climb through cloud, like some old Bible illustration: how could that ever stop the current flowing out of the glass at jfk : skin glowing plumb and peach as we walk inside the sun.

The Santa Fe Depot's Moorish architecture of displacement— squeaky kids trawl satchels through the shed, happy voices mystically far from home, the waiting room's fizzled, tiled light of life lived imperfectly between one where and another. Everybody's here. Cowboys, Mennonites, Tijuana illegals, Muslim cabbies at prayer on loading docks as dark clouds fuss above the southerly sun past its prime. Killing time, a life mostly miscues and hesitance, I want something to take me over so looked for you near the baggage claim's glide, who could have been anybody from everywhere, like Ellis Island's ghosts, their dump of cardboard valises, bindles, baby-fat sacks strangled by hemp, and around me here long-haul lovers who in sleepers last night loved to exhaustion. Scorched roughnecks, perfumed girls in heels grabbing Samsonites and golf bags schooling the carousel's louvered U-turns and straightaways. It must be why I'm here, to wait and see who claims what looks too much like your brown suede duffel, no "Antigua" or "Cancun" decaled in its hide, nasal music threading the scene while tonight you weave through songs somewhere else. That floppy bag and us— the Garment District, two Venices, South End, South Philly, scraped nap, brass clips, gaunt warmed handle. . . A teenage girl two-hands it off the belt and waddles into the runny sun, your bag five years late thumping freshened thighs and dimpled knees. Where are you now that you're here again for me? Hear these thrilled voices, the engine horn howling? Smell these acid residues?

The Eiffel Tower erected itself in my head, we couldn’t find the lifts, climbed the stairs. Of course there were fireworks. We stared at each other, rare exhibits in the Louvre — you licked my Mona Lisa smile right off. Of course we were both in imaginary Chanel. We drank warm cider and ate pancakes, yours flambéed. I got drunk, my tights laddered on both legs. Of course we experienced tachycardia at the Moulin Rouge. Our hotel, a boxed macaron on a navy boulevard — we spun around in the dark outside, rain-dizzy. Of course we slept at the Ritz. Our little room tucked into the corner, a pink pocket you slipped into that night. Of course our fingers hunted for change. In the mirrored elevator I couldn’t meet your eye, I crushed you into the laminated sample menu and died. Of course it was only la petite mort.

I find I am descending in a propeller plane upon Pasco in the state of Washington. I accept this; I have reasons for participating in the experiential sequence that has brought me here. Down below the land is printed with huge circles, doubtless an irrigation system, doubtless it makes sense. There are people who understand it living with dignity in square houses and the result possibly is one billion radishes. Now some so-called time has passed. This nation is a huge nation in which the infinity of for example Washington State is just one segment of an even less thinkable hugeness and yet zim zim zim zim United Airlines has me here in my Eastern metropolis with its ten thousand makers of third-rate pizza uncannily far from the possible radishes of Washington State. The taxi driver experiments with narrow streets to shorten our detour caused by sports fans and he says the Eagles will out-tough the Steelers. I defer to his judgment, I am conserving my powers. After “a while” I have this unsettlingly smooth tuna salad with a pale pickle in a drugstore designed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, reading a few poems by David Rivard. I have thoughts. I have my Uncle Ralph’s jacket soft and droopy giving me a Sense of the Past. The rain out there on the roofs of retail outlets is saying No Guarantee and in a way I am nowhere, in another way maybe definitely not. In a wide wet parking lot I turn back toward the store to explain to the cashier that she charged me for six cans of seltzer when in fact I only had one from a six-pack but the idea of justice seems so fatiguing I would rather read a surprisingly serious detective novel so I vibrate with indecision in the parking lot till all the car windows rattle imperceptibly. Then an alleged interval ostensibly intervenes, at the mall a woman at a piano has played 1800 songs from memory according to the radio personality who stands with a mike explaining her bid for the Guinness Book of Records. I am walking away at an unplanned angle singing “Tiny Montgomery” which I bet she wouldn’t have been ready to play. I have this inner life, I think of my father lonely in Vermont, I think of myself lonely in Syracuse and my old poem about a detective who can’t solve his biggest case and as a result I have feelings—but my teacher said the future of American poetry can’t be merely the notation of sensibility. When he said that I felt a chilly fear at the edge of consc-consc-consc-consciousness like an ice cube in the corner of my stomach. That’s how I felt. So then, so then consequently I thought “I must gather up some serious ideas” but then Ashberry phoned and left a message after the beep. “Don’t be a sucker, ideas are where it isn’t.” This made my throat get sort of dry so I drank a Classic Coke and then another Classic Coke two hours later as time so-to-say passed. What was always there? Texture, that’s what, how it was/is, the how of how; when I pick up my color prints at the camera shop the disappointment I always feel is actually a blessing is it not? I can say “I’ll go along with this charade until I can think my way out” even though I’ll never think my way out. I’ve come this far; that day in 1971 I hitchhiked all the way to Montpelier didn’t I? And here I am. Suddenly I have a son who focuses with tremendous insistence upon dogs, balloons, air conditioners, hats, clocks, and noses. To him I convey that the world is okay: life is good: we accept it. Your dad is a little mixed up but your shoes got tied, right? As Barbara Cohen in high school said about politics it’s interesting, giving the word four earnest syllables, in-ter-est-ing.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Passage O soul to India! Eclaircise Eclaircise elucidate the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables. Not you alone, proud truths of the world, Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science, But myths and fables of eld eld old times , Asia’s, Africa’s fables, The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams, The deep diving bibles and legends, The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions; O you temples fairer than lilies, pour’d over by the rising sun! O you fables, spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting to heaven! You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled pinnacled a small, ornamental turret on top of a building or tower, usually resembling a pyramid or cone. , red as roses, burnish’d with gold! Towers of fables immortal, fashion’d from mortal dreams! You too I welcome, and fully, the same as the rest! You too with joy I sing. Passage to India! Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? The earth to be spann’d, connected by network, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, The lands to be welded together. A worship new I sing, You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours, You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours, You, not for trade or transportation only, But in God’s name, and for thy sake, O soul.

The yellow line could be seen for as long a time As the highway desired And if you fell asleep at the wheel It fulgurated in the dozing soul Like a brutal revelation That allows you not to feel In the dream’s snapshot Your brain getting smashed Against the milestone or the windshield It was an ideal line Crowned with horizontal blue That unwound day after day Like a clothesline Flags and scalps and washed-out roses Our countries our combats our wars Mingling lassitude with involuntary starts A gymnastic in disorder That sickened our hearts

it doesn’t matter when I cross. two seconds and they’re gone. the ferry facing Ulus. the trees that spanked of green. the narrow bags of temples. beyond that – just – these Peri scenes when the human body sweats the skin produce an oil when Peri bodies sweat it does not produce the oil the ropes fall to the pavement their waters slap me still their green glow sweats into the pavement waters slap me still – I could curl among the roses I would make an aqualung we will reach the edge of this walk soon. all lights torn out for fuel. move my fingers in the dark awoke without a start. Peri here – my name is Peri – my name is Perihan

I spied everything. The North Dakota license, the “Baby on Board” signs, dead raccoons, and deer carcasses. The Garfields clinging to car windows—the musky traces of old coffee. I was single-minded in the buzz saw tour I took through the flatlands of the country to get home. I just wanted to get there. Never mind the antecedent. I had lost stations miles ago and was living on cassettes and caffeine. Ahead, brushstrokes of smoke from annual fires. Only ahead to the last days of summer and to the dying theme of youth. How pitch-perfect the tire-on-shoulder sound was to mask the hiss of the tape deck ribbons. Everything. Perfect. As Wyoming collapses over the car like a wave. And then another mile marker. Another. How can I say this more clearly? It was like opening a heavy book, letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower.