180 Travel poems

Key West In the Cubano diner, tiny cups of black, black coffee, hot and sweet, and chipped blue china plates of black beans and yellowtail, fished by the fishermen as the sun came up this morning. Yesterday out on the reef, we looked through the floor of the boat, through layers of clear, clean water— windows looking into other windows— down to the floor of the world, shallow, pliant, and shifting. There, schools of yellowtail swam through the living coral, bright as stained glass, cast into underwater constellations both strange and familiar: a flower, a brain, a cathedral. Suddenly a shadow parted the school— as if a cloud had just blotted the sun— a barracuda swerving as they swerved, and nothing they could do. After it fed, the two halves joined, the missing ones unmourned, all as it was before. If I could live for a thousand years, ten thousand, would ever I see the great family of men, women, and children, both preying and preyed-upon, swimming as freely as the yellowtail? Would that be heaven or hell? Each naked human face a candle joining other candles in a procession spanning many centuries, entering the cathedral of live stone whose heavy doors are cast with scenes from our own lives, moving as moving pictures move, until the reel runs out. In that world-without-end hour, will the future read us in relief, blindly touching each raised and burnished scene with fingertips, the ejaculate word forming on their lips, an O! and then again an O! of terror and astonishment? O how will they sing knowing what they know? Streaming through time, they see our approach, we are plotted in space, our light outlives our lives and sends a signal far into the future: the past is alive! Dead and dark for a long time, we are as stars to them, stars wishing to be wished on.

One way to draw France is in scallops: Dunkirk to Brest, Brest to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, The imperceptible stone sag of certain dolmens over the Pyrenees between Saint-Jean & Banyuls-sur-Mer Then, to Nice Nice, skirting the Alps to Lauterbourg From Lauterbourg back to where you began For the meticulous, the additions of Cherbourg, Toulon, & even Le Havre, Maybe Givet Yours is a green diorama It contains several kilowatts of sun, a superabundance of flowers Men dress like they are perpetually on their way to a funeral White people, their splotch-parchment cheeks All those roast chickens, none with the fat trimmed from the rump

At a small monastery—or what had been a monastery—outside Obrégon, we stopped; you were suffering the hollow nausea of your first pregnancy, sleeping as best you could through the thousand miles of pines and rocky fields of northern Mexico, so I went ahead through the saddle-colored rooms, past the broken church and the row of empty sheds, where Indian women, according to a sign, once baked the flat bread called sapatos de Maria, to a garden in the back, over the parapet of which I could see the river through some willows: a rinsed bed of sand, dry now in winter. I didn’t want a child, and I was tired of closeness, tired of being kind, so was glad to be alone a while and lay down under a jacaranda tree, and watched through leaves the changing pattern of the sky, which I was tired of too, the scaly, stratospheric winter clouds, edged with light, like the tiny waves you pointed out, reflected on the bottom of a bridge we rowed under in a rented boat, the day you told me of the child—I was tired and slept. It was nearly evening when I woke, two mestizo women hurried talking through the tulip beds, the sky was pale. They’d set small plaques among the plants, naming them, the ornamentals and the fruit. Some, so the writing said, were descendants of the cuttings brought from Spain by monks; intermingled here—Pinot grape with ocotillo, damascena rose—they thrived. I thought of certain tenderness, and forbearance, a man might bring to vines and simple vegetables, cultivated in memory of his home perhaps, in a foreign place; and thought how sometimes what passes on from us has little to do with what we hoped, but nonetheless carries word of who we were and what we found. For a moment then, among the arbors and the flower beds, I did not feel so distant from this time and place, and the edge of my own local fears began to dull. I plucked a sprig—a leaf was all— from a holly bush, and brought it out to you, a little stronger in a portion of myself, a little reconciled, though I couldn’t know then that in a month we would lose the child, and in time you would pass, like a squandered fortune, from my life.

You recount the history of the French garden. From above, I see tight rows of trees beside threadbare grass. When the language teacher talks about le capitalisme: the gesture of three fingers rubbing imaginary fabric. I’m a tourist, vulnerable and stupid, my legs showing, shoes practical, face red. Together, we try to reconstruct an anecdote whose contents have scattered. A motorcycle passes, a French police siren you say sounds innocuous then we both laugh sourly. I hadn’t seen a woman slap a child in some time. A truck reversing, and the alarm that continues for hours one morning. Porn on a handheld device, its tinny echo in a room with bare floors and very little furniture. Across the courtyard, this T-shirt on a hanger out the window turns in the light breeze as if trying to look behind itself. I’m consumed with not knowing where to buy paper, safety pins, stamps. The window frames of that building are red, emerging from gray gables. Enormous bumblebee at the threshold investigates the doorway, doesn’t enter. The flies do; they’re promiscuous; they leave. I don’t know the word for because. So each act is disconnected from another. I can almost imagine there are no consequences, the days just pass, one sunny, one cloudy, someone unseen shouts, sirens every few hours, clouds move in a solemn procession across a wide sky staggered with chimneys, people wait to cross the street, a large tree tosses its wig a little. Other small trees in the courtyard flicker. They are responsive. The sun heats the pavement; le pavé répond. You send me a short erotic video, you’re naked, propositioning me. Do you act more like the coin or the water? Across the narrow street this bird sipping from roof puddles seems more dove than pigeon. Pacing, grandmotherly, she stops to look at me. Do you just know how to love another person like someone knew to paint those window frames red? Most of the architecture looks floral, like a boring math problem. The crosses that reach and reach. Why does the scrape of the furniture when I rearrange it sound like crass American English to me? I slept late, now I’m watching the clouds, like clouds in an eighteenth-century painting. Overly articulate. Except these clouds are not trying to symbolize anything. Where’s my dove. I always want to go look at people. A booth selling copies of copies of Louis Vuitton. The small shadow the roof makes on another roof right next to it. When my friend came to Paris she wanted to break everything. Impeccable shoes on the impeccable feet. Clothes so new they’re creamy, and to seem to never have to 
compromise. I feel tattered when I’m actually not. I’m an American, I eat. A huge decorative basket of citrus snugged beside me in the upscale bistro. The woman from a building opposite comes down, indignant: Who threw a pomelo into my window? You read to me about the history of the barricade. I picture the drab suburbs. The shoulders and elbows of people in the museum evoke more reaction in me than most of the paintings. A young lithe person with live eyes tends bar,gender trouble tattooed up their arm. I count twenty-nine sleeping bags lined up beneath the overhang and each one inhabited. I read to you about the history of enclosure. Two people talking on a balcony, their black hair blowing. One leaning over into the courtyard. Behind the cathedral, vulgar black felt stapled in the raised flowerbeds to mask their frames. The river stinks, allures, as a specific person can. A repository, a consequence, a long sentence, an ongoing story. The generous current cut through by a party boat shouting wooo! wooo! wooooooo! wooo! emitting an obscene light waving at whatever will wave back.

Beards of   water some of them have. Others are blowing whistles of   water. Faces astonished that constant   water jumps from their mouths. Jaws of lions are snarling   water through green teeth over chins of moss. Dolphins toss jets of   water from open snouts to an upper theater of   water. Children are riding swans and   water coils from the S-shaped necks and spills in flat foils from pincered bills. A solemn curly-headed bull puts out a swollen tongue of   water. Cupids naked are making   water into a font that never is full. A goddess is driving a chariot through   water. Her reins and whips are tight white   water. Bronze hoofs of horses wrangle with   water. Marble faces half hidden in leaves. Faces whose hair is leaves and grapes of stone are peering from living leaves. Faces with mossy lips unlocked always uttering   water, water wearing their features blank their ears deaf, their eyes mad or patient or blind or astonished at   water always uttered out of their mouths.

I have come again to the perfumed city. Houses with tiered porches, some decorated with shells. You know from the windows that the houses are from a different time. I am not to blame for what changes, though sometimes I have trouble sleeping. Between the carriage houses, there are little gardens separated by gates. Lately, I have been thinking about the gates. The one ornamented with the brass lion, I remember it was warm to the touch even in what passes here for winter. But last night, when I closed my eyes, it was not the lion that I pictured first.

14 In the Wake Riding north on the bus after hours in cars or in the air or airports or bus stations, I felt almost happy for a moment as the tires hissed over the wet highway, I was both in the rain and protected from it, distracted from grief by the sensual pressure of the instant, water beading on the glass, the darkening hills. But how glad I was to be riding north! Sunoco on one side, Mobil on the other. His best friend was from Mobile. I always wanted to go there. He died too soon, or I left home, I can’t remember. Two days ago my stepfather’s body was laid to rest. Comatose, sucking air through a respirator, I can’t say he was resting; I saw him underground when I closed my eyes at night and went to bury the clock under mounds of towels and pillows—I had not heard it ticking so ferociously while he lived—and it would not quiet down. And the rain tonight, it’s not like any other, and I wish the bus would go faster. I saw the rain in the heavy hanging clouds. That’s a lie. Immense factories blackening under a charcoal sky— and rivers whose names I’ll never remember. I saw a sign reflected in my window: Milwaukee Light. * Whenever the Chicago White Sox beat the Braves it made his day. The Braves were in Milwaukee then, with lefty Warren Spahn and slugger Hank Aaron. The bus company is Peter Pan, and the Peter Pan coffee shop was our first stop in Chicago when we drove in; and that’s where I was when, though I didn’t know it then, he married my mother in Bermuda— watching Peter Pan in New York with my “real” father… And oh those prophetic lines, not to grow up, never to go to school. Never then to die! Only the living are immortal. Like these rain clouds. * The fact of death—a silence attends it; an absence with which we’re all He was the lightest sleeper I’d ever known; he’d open one eye if I merely peeked into his room. intimate. He’s there when I close my eyes but not when I reach out in the dark. At his bedside I peeled back his eyelids, rubbed his blue feet, his bloated hands, almost screamed in his ear, wake up, man, I’ll be lonely without you, I’ll be ANGRY if you don’t wake up; and in the silence of our nearness to death— the grinding hum of the generators working at their limit for too long to pump cool air in the killing heat; the glug of him swallowing through the respirator. * AT THE BUS STATION IN SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS The lateness of the bus angers a tough young woman from Montana travelling with her toddler son. And yet she knows the way: I can see it in her green peaked cap, her direct taut anger—bus late, I kill the driver—boy knock over suitcase—I kill him too. * BUS BOARDED The water bubbles on the windows break; there is less and less outside to see… And he was not even my real father. That should put a cap on it. It’s like knowing the name of the lake you pass never seeing it again and yet finding it tough to forget, that jagged square of black water just off the highway— that lake, and not another. * Baudelaire boasted that he laughed at funerals and wept at feasts. Now in the bus it’s only early evening; I turn around and everyone’s sleeping— mother and son, matron and magician. Half-awake, I stare at the tree line, and the blessing of rain, and I would like to lie down on the roadside and drink and drink and roll in the mud. * Mortifying, one’s presence in the face of nature’s sanguine gaze, green whitewashing the past. Whatever grooms the body for the afterlife pitches in this life like a tent in a night encampment before the dawn storming of the fortress. The yellow day lilies wag their heads at the first touch of wind and I see what others have always seen in flowers, a sign marked TRANSIENTS that keeps them awake; see now, as, standing catatonic at the kitchen sink, the overhead fluorescent light strip sinks into the pitch dark bottom of a coffee mug. Seeing is native to us and yet we stupefy our native sight. Not the eye’s sight. * Some mourners hurl dirt stiffly on the coffin because it seems the right thing to do. Some hold back. The flag-draped casket honors the first Army chaplain in the Pacific Theater, for praying good prayers above the bodies of the dead and of the living. Prelude to an Afterword Why should I feel compelled to write a thousand postscripts when I don’t work from life, but to hear the testimonials of people who knew the rider, the “little Rabbi,” moves me to tears while I am here to attend my mother who lies in bed with her stomach reaching toward the sky—(where Sam talks calmly to his “grandpa in heaven,” matter-of-fact celestial discourse)— and I listen to this Baptist preacher and hospice worker as he crouches beside my chair in her hospital room talk about his work with mourning; how difficult it is to get people to understand the element of surprise-over-time…; how he kissed the little Rabbi the first time he met him and the last time he saw him before “death took him so swiftly” there were no “last words” and he was enveloped in silence, in absence—“the way death often comes...” I see him more clearly through this stranger’s eyes. I wouldn’t have thought that he could help confirm my sense of what is real, but this man who knew him less than two years feels so indebted that I allow myself to think of the rider’s life in terms of the people he affected, the bizarre love he could elicit—not standard preacherly fare by any means but some connection by being entirely present for others— promiscuously present— meanwhile, as the nurses haul my mother from wheelchair to bed why do I feel impelled to turn away… (we think we have the answers) … and flash to an image of my friend caring for her father—bathing him?—but she didn’t come out of his penis, did she? or is that another wrong turning in my thought? The hospice preacher offers a prayer. He holds my mother’s swollen, psoriatic hand, the arthritic clumps poling from her fingers, and as the dry, flaky patches blaze in the unforgiving light, I find not a word to object to—except two— “religion” and “churches.” I tell him that I left home as soon as I could because I couldn’t stand being around the two of them; he admits he always felt sick “for hours afterward” when he’d been with them together; it wasn’t just quarreling, I have to add, seeking absolution for my absence, but hatred (can’t let my mother milk the bereaved widow role). He nods— matter-of-factly. And sets me free.

It is a soft thing, it has been sifted from the sieve of space and seems asleep there under the moths of light. Cluster of dust and fire, from up here you are a stranger and I am dropping through the funnel of air to meet you.

I’m jotting down these lines, having borrowed a pen from a waitress in this roadside restaurant. Three rusty pines prop up the sky in the windows. My soup gets cold, which implies I’ll eat it cold. Soon I too will leave a tip on the table, merge into the beehive of travelers and board one of the ferries, where there’s always a line to the loo and no one knows where the captain is. Slightly seasick, I keep on writing of the wind-rose and lobster traps, seagulls, if any—and there always are. Check the air and you’ll see them above straw hats and caps. The sun at noon glides like a monstrous star- fish through clouds. Others drink iced tea, training binoculars on a tugboat. When I finish this letter, I’ll take a gulp from the flask you gave me for the road in days when I was too young to care about those on the pier who waved goodbye. I miss them now: cousins in linen dresses, my mother, you, boys in light summer shirts. Life is too long. The compass needle dances. Everything passes by. The ferry passes by ragged yellow shores.

Cloiseann sé fós é: díoscán an oighir, tormáil i bhfad uaidh, ciúnas an tsneachta. Is cuimhin leis go fóill an t-aer úr a shlogadh, an dá scamhóg aige glanta, fuacht naofa ag beannú a chnis. Thug sé grá a chroí don ghoimh gheal, don díseart tostach don tírdhreach glan. Ach b’éigean dó filleadh ar an taiseacht is ar an mbaile. Bhí air cúl a thabhairt don mbáine. Is iomaí oíche a iarrann a bhean air go caoin an chistin a fhágaint is dul léi a luí. Is aoibhinn leis uaigneas an tsileáin ón sconna. Is ceol aige srannán an reoiteora: Nótaí doimhne á seimint go mall, Gliúscáil ochlánach a labhair le gach ball dá bheo. He can still hear it: the glaciers rasping, their ratcheting in the distance, the snow-quiet. And still he remembers gulping unsullied freshness to clarify his lungs, the holy coldness blessing his skin. He gave his heart to that stinging brightness, that taciturn redoubt, that uncluttered country. But no choice except a return to dampness and home. He had to turn his back on blankness. On so many nights his wife asks him tentatively to abandon the kitchen and join her upstairs. He loves the irregular loneliness of each tap-drip and it’s music to him the refrigerator’s drone: basso profundo slow in the recital, grinding sighs that call out to his being’s every melting element. Translated from the Irish