180 Travel poems

Mount Olympus held nothing for them. No occasion of theirs could provoke Magniloquent debate. Nor act require That attic of gods to come swooping Onto the field, swaying the battle. Only the great booming of the ferry As it shouldered alongside the pier; Only the waitress counting their Saucers: it was this April morning That swung them by their heels. What was missing was the impersonal, The fated, a visionary marble address, The goddess skimming over blue water To whisper good news, or some stud, Swan, or bull brimming with light. Not a wingéd foot. Only Love, Recently decamped, hovered above The table, ready to be splendid. But their ten years’ war had ended.

Sometimes, at dawn, I think I hear the high sobbing cry of the muezzin hanging in the sky before it’s light but then, I drop off to sleep again.

The barstool's capacious, then ever more enclosed, with every beer, as evening erodes. A few capricious tourists off the cozy track propose unbeaten toasts. He'll soon be going back. Mannequin musicians play mandolins or thumb pianos, bleat out a reggae air on ragged banjos. The booths patter with the local lingo. Smattered English polishes the windows. An amble to the john, the mirror's random crack. The urinal's askew. He'll soon be going back. The minimal solicitudes of seven-minute flirts: blurted-out soliloquies, well-trained parting words. Insert pejorative for natives here, before a sputtered call for one more beer. Dusty carnations; carnival bric-a-brac— long-faded revaltions. He'll soon be going back.

For Sam Donsky The airport where all movies end: the scenery’s mobile, the people too (the people want to be moved), and the rounded stairways join set pieces like farewells in a series arc. I don’t understand how you write good scripts without knowing there are gods. I’ve learned the same things we’ve all learned: when a man runs through my hotel suite I can expect another half a second later. Also, tell me why I keep two keys, one of which unlocks something. Also, I know, we know, that you (hell-o) will have vanished before I finish saying this and turn around. “You’ll do that,” I’ll mention to the night, and spin my swivel chair, perusing the moment’s sunkenness. Meanwhile my antivirus angel is checking every file. We both know there’s a place you touch when your plane lifts off (I won’t say where), a little bolt that takes the plot apart, so closure is dismantled, because from here you can admit that nothing’s ever ended well. You have queued to show your documents. You have left behind your possessions for the kind scientists. The stairs have spun away and sunk, and in losing your itinerary your position is confirmed. Like, the first time a woman sees a diamond she just knows.

Brown. Brandy-brown. Leaf-brown. Russet. Malayan yellow. Express train Berlin-Trelleborg and the Baltic resorts. Flesh that went naked. Tanned unto the mouth by the sea. Deeply ripened for Grecian joys. How far along the summer, in sickle-submissiveness! Penultimate day of the ninth month! Parched with stubble and the last corn-shocks. Unfurlings, blood, fatigue, deranged by dahlia-nearness. Man-brown jumps on woman-brown. A woman is something for a night. And if you enjoyed it, then the next one too! O! And then the return to one’s own care. The not-speaking! The urges! A woman is something with a smell. Ineffable! To die for! Mignonette. Shepherd, sea, and South. On every declivity a bliss. Woman-brown drapes itself on man-brown: Hold me! I’m falling! My neck is so weary. Oh, the sweet last fevered scent from the gardens.

Can’t occupy the same space at the same time unless, of course, you land in Dhaka, rickshaws five or six abreast. They are all here: studded metal backboards ablaze with red flowers, Heineken boxes, a Bangladeshi star with blue eyes, peacocks, pink fans of filigree. The drivers sweat and strain in the plaid lungis, and each face seems to say Allah takes and Allah gives. A woman breathes into her green shawl against the dust on the road’s median. A man with a plaid scarf (surplus from The Gap) slaps the rump of a passing gray car as though it’s a horse or a dog. You are there, too, your maroon sleeves begin to stick despite your deodorant. Under your orna, a laminated map and digital camera cradled in your lap. One strand of silver wiry by your ear. Bits of children’s songs snag in your windpipe. Other words surface: sweatshop and abject poverty, and you let them. They mix with the low rumbling that began on the plane,ms and bs tumbling, amplified in the streets: the rickshaw bells’ light metal, the nasal peal of horns. On this continent, the ocean’s giant tongue has swept away miles of coastline, and bodies flood the water. Dust sifts into your lungs and sinks—feline, black, to remain long after you leave.

Touch and go. Our Cessna bumped the sand, thumped its tundra tires, lifted as if on wires, banked over ice and rocked its wings to land. We pitched our camp hard by the Hubbard’s face, some sixty fathoms tall, a seven-mile-long wall seven leagues from Yakutat, our base.

The dryer, uniform and squat as a biscuit tin, came to life and turned on me its insect eye. My t-shirts and underwear crackled and leapt. I was a tourist there; I didn’t speak the language. My shoulders covered themselves up in churches, my tongue soothed its burn with slices of pickle. More I don’t remember: only, weekends now when I stand in the kitchen, sorting sweat pants and pairing socks, I remember the afternoon I did my laundry in Budapest, where the sidewalks bloomed with embroidered linen, where money wasn’t permitted to leave the country. When I close my eyes, I recall that spinning, then a woman, with nothing else to sell, pressing wilted flowers in my hands.

For Rafael Heliodoro Valle I set out from the Port of Acapulco on the twenty-third of March And kept a steady course until Saturday, the fourth of April, when A half hour before dawn, we saw by the light of the moon That a ship had come alongside With sails and a bow that seemed to be of silver. Our helmsman cried out to them to stand off But no one answered, as though they were all asleep. Again we called out: “ WHERE DID THEIR SHIP COME FROM ?” And they said: Peru! After which we heard trumpets, and muskets firing, And they ordered me to come down into their longboat To cross over to where their Captain was. I found him walking the deck, Went up to him, kissed his hands and he asked me: “What silver or gold I had aboard that ship?” I said, “None at all, None at all, My Lord, only my dishes and cups.” So then he asked me if I knew the Viceroy. I said I did. And I asked the Captain, “If he were Captain Drake himself and no other?” The Captain replied that “He was the very Drake I spoke of.” We spoke together a long time, until the hour of dinner, And he commanded that I sit by his side. His dishes and cups are of silver, bordered with gold With his crest upon them. He has with him many perfumes and scented waters in crystal vials Which, he said, the Queen had given him. He dines and sups always with music of violins And also takes with him everywhere painters who keep painting All the coast for him. He is a man of some twenty-four years, small, with a reddish beard. He is a nephew of Juan Aquinas,* the pirate. And is one of the greatest mariners there are upon the sea. The day after, which was Sunday, he clothed himself in splendid garments And had them hoist all their flags With pennants of divers colors at the mastheads, The bronze rings, and chains, and the railings and The lights on the Alcazar shining like gold. His ship was like a gold dragon among the dolphins. And we went, with his page, to my ship to look at the coffers. All day long until night he spent looking at what I had. What he took from me was not much, A few trifles of my own, And he gave me a cutlass and a silver brassart for them, Asking me to forgive him Since it was for his lady that he was taking them: He would let me go, he said, the next morning, as soon as there was a breeze; For this I thanked him, and kissed his hands. He is carrying, in his galleon, three thousand bars of silver Three coffers full of gold Twelve great coffers of pieces of eight: And he says he is heading for China Following the charts and steered by a Chinese pilot whom he captured ...

Bangkok Caught in a slip of particulars, say, between the dirt road and the brand-new Seven-Eleven, a bucket of lotus, three shades of red in the mudbank giving way to workers, faces hidden behind kerchiefs, binding the copper tines of another half-constructed building, this fretwork, that rooftop’s progress up and up, the eye riding a motor’s rev, coming to a woman who leans over the seventh story’s edge for the pulley rope’s basket of rice or rubber mallets, then a sweep down into cattle now, their beige skin over bones, the look of loose tents, or taking in a bronze Buddha, hands folded over the First National Melting Company, the red gate, black gate, red, retina arriving at a man throwing straw clumps to earth so the seeds don’t wash away, and the light behind him washing away, and this desire, a gaze shot along the border which is shaped like a question mark, cramped with hotels, pink neon grammars blinking Alpha, Alpha, Alpha Is The Bank For You And Your Needs, another quick catch, the glance stippled with disappearances, a girl who lifts her skirt to bathe near the bus stop, a fire burning/burnt/burning in the field of bulldozers, an eye trying to fix itself as the vehicle turns, the mind from nascent to nation, drifting in instances, a grit in wind worrying the surface, the facts, out to finger the invisible gap we would inhabit, pulsing always in between.