180 Travel poems

On humming rubber along this white concrete, lighthearted between the gravities of source and destination like a man halfway to the moon in this bubble of tuneless whistling at seventy miles an hour from the windvents, over prairie swells rising and falling, over the quick offramp that drops to its underpass and the truck thundering beneath as I cross with the country music twanging out my windows, I'm grooving down this highway feeling technology is freedom's other name when —a meadowlark comes sailing across my windshield with breast shining yellow and five notes pierce the windroar like a flash of nectar on mind, gone as the country music swells up and drops me wheeling down my notch of cement-bottomed sky between home and away and wanting to move again through country that a bird has defined wholly with song, and maybe next time see how he flies so easy, when he sings.

As I was going down impassive Rivers, I no longer felt myself guided by haulers: Yelping redskins had taken them as targets And had nailed them naked to colored stakes. I was indifferent to all crews, The bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons When with my haulers this uproar stopped The Rivers let me go where I wanted. Into the furious lashing of the tides More heedless than children's brains the other winter I ran! And loosened Peninsulas Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub The storm blessed my sea vigils Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves That are called eternal rollers of victims, Ten nights, without missing the stupid eye of the lighthouses! Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children The green water penetrated my hull of fir And washed me of spots of blue wine And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook And from then on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent, Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks; Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight, Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres, The bitter redness of love ferments! I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts And the surf and the currents; I know the evening, And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves And at times I have seen what man thought he saw! I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors, Lighting up, with long violet clots, Resembling actors of very ancient dramas, The waves rolling far off their quivering of shutters! I have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows A kiss slowly rising to the eyes of the sea, The circulation of unknown saps, And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous! I followed during pregnant months the swell, Like hysterical cows, in its assault on the reefs, Without dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys Could constrain the snout of the wheezing Oceans! I struck against, you know, unbelievable Floridas Mingling with flowers panthers' eyes and human Skin! Rainbows stretched like bridal reins Under the horizon of the seas to greenish herds! I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes! Avalanches of water in the midst of a calm, And the distances cataracting toward the abyss! Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers! Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent! I should have liked to show children those sunfish Of the blue wave, the fish of gold, the singing fish. —Foam of flowers rocked my drifting And ineffable winds winged me at times. At times a martyr weary of poles and zones, The sea, whose sob created my gentle roll, Brought up to me her dark flowers with yellow suckers And I remained, like a woman on her knees... Resembling an island tossing on my sides the quarrels And droppings of noisy birds with yellow eyes And I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes Drowned men sank backward to sleep! Now I, a boat lost in the foliage of caves, Thrown by the storm into the birdless air I whose water-drunk carcass would not have been rescued By the Monitors and the Hanseatic sailboats; Free, smoking, topped with violet fog, I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall, Bearing, delicious jam for good poets Lichens of sunlight and mucus of azure, Who ran, spotted with small electric moons, A wild plank, escorted by black seahorses, When Julys beat down with blows of cudgels The ultramarine skies with burning funnels; I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues off The moaning of the Behemoths in heat and the thick Maelstroms, Eternal spinner of the blue immobility I miss Europe with its ancient parapets! I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands Whose delirious skies are open to the sea-wanderer: —Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself, Million golden birds, o future Vigor? – But, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter. Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea! If I want a water of Europe, it is the black Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight A squatting child full of sadness releases A boat as fragile as a May butterfly. No longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves, Follow in the wake of the cotton boats, Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames, Nor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships.

Metal giraffes march up the bluff toward the lighthouse. In the moonlight, whales, or their ghosts, litter the sand. There is a museum by the park that houses apartheid; contained in stiff wax dummies. The tour bus stops on the road’s edge. On the right a black town, the left Indian. Pointing he says: This is the racial divide. Stopping at the bar, the drink menu offers— Red’s Divas only five rand each. Each night the pounding sea reminds me that, here, women are older than God. These people carry their dead with them, plastering them onto every met face. Yet love hums like turning forks and the fading spreading sound is the growth of something more. Their absence is loud and I long for the confetti flutter of butterflies. Abattoirs litter the landscape with the sinister air of murder, signs proclaiming:Zumba Butchery, as though this is where the Zumba’s blood- lust got the better of them. The air conditioner in my room hums a dirge to a sea too busy spreading rumors. Death skips between street children playing hopscotch in the traffic. The woman singing in Zulu, in a Jamaican bar, is calling down fire, calling down fire. There is no contradiction.

About twilight we came to the whitewashed pub On a knuckle of land above the bay Where a log was riding and the slow Bird-winged breakers cast up spray. One of the drinkers round packing cases had The worn face of a kumara god, Or so it struck me. Later on Lying awake in the veranda bedroom In great dryness of mind I heard the voice of the sea Reverberating, and thought: As a man Grows older he does not want beer, bread, or the prancing flesh, But the arms of the eater of life, Hine-nui-te-po, With teeth of obsidian and hair like kelp Flashing and glimmering at the edge of the horizon.

Above a coast that lies between two coasts Flight 902 turns west towards San Diego. Milwaukee falls away. The constant passenger, Removed from character and context, resumes His California story, gradually ascending, Reading Farewell, My Lovely for the umpteenth time, Like a book above the world, or below the noise. I recall some houses halfway in the desert, And how dry the trees all seemed, and temporary Even the tallest buildings looked, with bungalows Decaying in the Santa Ana wind. And finally Just how small it was, and mean. Is it nostalgia For the limited that makes the days go quickly, Tracing out their spirals of diminishing concern? Like all the boys who lived on Westland Avenue, I learned to follow the trails through the canyon, Shoot at birds with a BB gun, and dream of leaving. What are books? To me they seemed like mirrors Holding up a vision of the social, in which people, Beckoning from their inaccessible preserves Like forgotten toys, afforded glimpses of those Evanescent worlds that certain minor writers —Raymond Chandler say, or even Rupert Brooke— Could visualize somehow, and bring to life again. And though these worlds were sometimes difficult to see, Once having seen them one returned to find the words Still there, like a part of the surroundings Compliant to one’s will. Yet these are attitudes, And each age has its separate store of attitudes, Its store of tropes—“In Grantchester, in Grantchester!—” That filter through its dreams and fill its songs. Hume tried to show that sympathy alone allows “The happiness of strangers” to affect our lives. Yet now and then a phrase, echoing in the mind Long after its occasion, seems to resurrect A world I think I recognize, and never saw. For what was there to see? Some houses on a hill Next to a small stream? A village filled with people I couldn’t understand? Could anyone have seen the Transitory sweetness of the Georgians’ England And the world before the War, before The Waste Land? Years are secrets, and their memories are often Stories of a past that no one witnessed, like the Fantasies of home one builds to rationalize The ordinary way one’s life has gone since then. Words seem to crystallize that life in pictures— In a postcard of a vicarage, or of a canyon Wedged between the desert and an endless ocean— But their clarity is fleeting. I can nearly See the coast from here, and as I hear the engines And the bell chimes, all those images dissolve. And then I start to hear the murmur of that Constant voice as distant from me as a landscape Studied from an airplane: a contingent person With a particular mind, and a particular will, Descending across a desert, westward over mountains And the sparsely peopled scrub beyond the city, Pocked with half-filled reservoirs and rudimentary Trails with nothing waiting for me at the end —“And is there honey still for tea?”— But isolated houses nestled in the hills.

Written January 1718 in the Chiosk at Pera overlooking Constantinople Give me Great God (said I) a Little Farm in Summer shady, & in Winter warm where a cool spring gives birth to a clear brook by Nature slideing down a mossy Rock Not artfully in Leaden Pipes convey'd Or greatly falling in a forc'd Cascade Pure & unsully'd winding throu' y e Shade. All bounteous Heaven has added to my Praier a softer Climate and a purer Air. Our Frozen Isle now chilling Winter binds Deform'd by Rains, & rough w th blasting Winds y e wither'd Woods grown white w th hoary Frost by driving storms their scatter'd beautys lost The Trembling birds their leaveless coverts shun And seek in distant Climes a warmer Sun The Water Nymphs their silenced Urns deplore Even Thames benumb'd a River now no more The barren Meadows give no more delight by Glist'ning Snows made painfull to y e Sight. Here Summer reigns w th one Eternal Smile And double Harvests bless y e happy Soil. Fair, fertile Fields to w ar m Indulgent Heaven Has every Charm of every Season given! No Killing Cold deforms y e Beauteous Year The springing Flowers no coming Winter Fear But as y e Parent Rose decays & dies y e Infant Buds w th brighter Colours rise And with fresh sweets y e Mother-scent supplys Near th e m the Vi'let glows w th odours blest And blooms in more than Tyrian Purple drest The rich Jonquils their golden gleam display And shine in glorys emulateing day. These chearfull Groves their living Leaves retain The Streams still murmur undefil'd by Rain And growing Green adorns y e Fruitfull Plain The warbling Kind uninterrupted Sing, Warm'd w th Enjoyment of perpetual Spring. Here from my Window I at once survey The crouded City, & resounding Sea In distant Views see Assian Mountains rise And Lose their Snowy Summits in y e Skies. Above those Mountains high Olympus Tow'rs The Parliamental Seat of Heavenly Powers. New to y e Sight my ravish'd Eyes admire Each guilded Crescent & each Antique Spire The Fair Serail where sunk in Idle ease The Lazy Monarch melts his thoughtless days The Marble Mosques beneath whose Ample Domes Fierce Warlike Sultans sleep in peacefull Tombs Those lofty Structures once the Christian boast Their Names, their Honnours, & their Beautys lost Those Altars bright w th Gold, w th Sculpture grac'd By barbarous Zeal of savage Foes defac'd Convents where Emperors profess'd of old The Labour'd Pillars that their Triumphs told. Vain Monuments of Men that once were great! Sunk, undistinguish'd, by one Common Fate! How art thou falln Imperial City, Low! Where are thy Hopes of Roman Glory now? Where are thy Palaces by Prelates rais'd Where preistly Pomp in Purple Lustre blaz'd? So vast, that Youthfull Kings might there reside So Splendid; to content a Patriarchs pride Where Grecian Artists all their skill displayd Before y e happy Sciences decay'd; So vast, that Youthfull Kings might there reside So Splendid; to content a Patriarchs Pride; Convents where Emperors proffess'd of Old, The Labour'd Pillars that their Triumphs told, Vain Monuments of Men that once were great! Sunk, undistinguish'd in one common Fate! One Little Spot, the small Fenar contains, Of Greek Nobillity, the poor Remains, Where other Helens show like powerfull Charms As once engag'd the Warring World in Arms: Those Names that Roial Auncestry can boast In mean Mechanic Arts obscurely lost Those Eyes a second Homer might inspire, fix'd at the Loom, destroy their useless Fire. Greiv'd at a view w hi ch strikes vpon my Mind The short liv'd Vanity of Human kind In Gaudy Objects I indulge my Sight, And turn where Eastern Pomp gives gay delight. See; the vast Train in various Habits dress'd! By the Bright Seymetar and Sable Vest; The Vizier proud, distinguish'd o're the rest! Six slaves in gay Attire his Bridle hold; His Bridle rough with Gems, his Stirups Gold; His Snowy Steed adorn'd with lavish Pride Whole Troops of Soldiers mounted by his Side, These toss the Plumy Crest, Arabian Coursers guide. With awfull Duty all decline their Eyes, No bellowing Shouts of noisy Crouds arise; Silence in solemn State the march attends Till at the dread Divan the slow processions ends. Yet not these Objects all profusely Gay, The Gilded Navy that adorns the Sea, The riseing City in Confusion fair; Magnificently form'd irregular Where Woods and Palaces at once surprise Gardens, on Gardens, Domes on Domes arise And endless Beauties tire the wandering Eyes, So sooths my Wishes, or so charms my Mind, As this Retreat, secure from Human kind. No Knaves successfull Craft does Spleen excite No Coxcombs tawdry Splendour shocks my Sight; No Mob Alarm awakes my Female Fears, No unrewarded Merit asks my Tears; Nor Praise my Mind, nor Envy hurts my Ear, Even Fame it selfe can hardly reach me here, Impertinence with all her Tattling Train Fair-sounding Flatterys delicious Bane Censorious Folly; Noisy Party Rage; The Thousand with which she must engage Who dare have Virtue in a Vicious Age.

The owner smiles as if she knows me and pulls out a chair. Beside the doorway a copper basin lies on its side. Nana Ross had one just like it, in the kitchen, behind the grocery shop. As a child I imagined my soul was that color and sanctifying grace was red, dripping rosary-like, a kind of divine sweat that smelt of frankincense, myrrh, milk and straw. By age nine I had committed a mortal sin, let Nicki Walshe touch me there and didn’t tell, made a bad confession, took communion paper thin and white on my black-spotted tongue. Nana sprinkled us with holy water, gave me a blessed rosary from Lourdes, all blue and purple it was, but I lost it like I lost the library book, sins mounting up; the row over contraception with a priest in the confessional box in Stillorgan. Sister Anne, white musty face, those thin lips “How dare you, a girl, question holy men.” Lying bare-breasted in the long grass with Ciarán, drinking Guinness followed by Harvey Wallbangers, vomiting it all up on Pearse Street, a guy from Tuam holding my forehead. Walking away from my father’s house, my marriage, my job, to dance barefoot in a circle of women who prayed with wrists, hips, feet and drums, bellies painted gold, Magdalene red. In the Duomo di Firenze the air stinks of old blood, paintings heavy with pigment and suffering. I rinse my mouth with the Signora’s wine and that copper basin is only a basin, a thing.

after Kees' "Travels in North America" 1.Santa Fe "The walls are old," he says. I turn in the plaza and nod to Weldon Kees, his face as dark as the cool shadows that surround us, walls keeping him safe, honoring his silence, though he comes to me to be led away. "The mountains out there are not old," he claims and slips his hands into his coat. We cross the street, each Indian blanket on the ground holding jewelry I would love to touch, but Kees and the Navajo man selling his crafts are whispering to the ground. Kees surprises me by entering the Museum of Arts. I follow him, the stone floor ringing with our footsteps, empty arches blending above. Kees stops and turns to me. "One can see only so much," he says. He leads me to the twisted dwarf, the tangles form of faith and death, arrows bristling from its muscled body, a sacrifice of the ugly encased in glass, Kees staring at the sculpture as if he knows why we really can't see it. He points to the deepest arrow and places a hand on my shoulder. "When you believe this, you are home," he tells me and walks out. 2.Albuquerque The Sangre de Cristo mountains are old and he is driving my car to the highest ridge, the valley below avoiding the bright moon, the same white light in the bay Kees wanted to touch before he left. "Mist and clouds are a lie," he claims. "Look down there. Men are running away." He drives slowly to the top and we get out, the autumn sun burning terraces into scrub cedars and piñon pines he wrote about when he crossed here long ago, standing on the edge of the cliff as if this is the only way for him to go. "Look past what you want to see," he sighs as the wind takes his slick hair and makes him into someone I have seen before, the streets of Albuquerque down there as dusty as his closed eyes. We stand on the edge and I wait at this elevation with Kees who wrote that the towns we will not visit are places where home truly lies. "I must go," he decides. "Where to?" I ask. "Anyplace you haven't seen," he says, and walks down the mountain. 3.Tyuonyi Kees and I are happy when the sun splits the tree for a moment because yesterday controlled this mountain dawn, burning mud deeper into the adobe. Cottonwoods catch fire here, give the people time to hide inside turtle shells, though they come out to watch us. I stop as the drawings come to life under the arches, symbols familiar to those who sleep by crossing the street each night. As I stare, I realize a man who diappears wants to understand and not hide, yet the designs tempt me to walk in the wrong direction and leave him behind. To go farther up would mean a canyon where I have been. A dirt street inside another path, tiny houses falling back, letting me pass beyond their locked doors, as if the smoking windows know where I must go. When I enter the placita, the old woman is not there because this is about bringing Kees back. The dirt street opens to the last scorched tree breaking out of walls to shade what can't be blessed, its branches confusing until their cracks enter the ground in search of peace. 4.Santa Maria Water disappears to settle as clear glass that contains memories of thirst, the ancient hole found in the ruins, Kees' hand keeping the others from skimming the surface of the still water, reaching to be alone under the mountain wall, though eyes that watch have seen this before, men entering and never coming out. One hand keeps the other from touching the surface. Pulling back allows the echo of falling rocks, the deep swimmer breaking through walls to emerge on the other side of the well where the first figures to emerge in centuries are sitting and rubbing sand over their wet, shivering bodies. 5.Fort Selden Kees is getting tired in the desert heat and sits on a historic slab of western settlement, this old fort a museum where thirsty men come to drink from the bitter well. Kees smokes too many cigarettes and shakes his head at me, "Look at the moth and the deep iris in your garden because the equation I found in San Francisco is an eclipse drawn on paper by my trembling hands." He pauses and takes a drag, my head bathed in sweat and confusion as he coughs this, "It is too late because jazz has gone away. I placed a stone deity of a bird next to an eggplant on my desk, its smooth purple skin as significant as the gathering of birds in your head, their chirping coming from sorrow, even from the bay where I never told a lie, though the grand steps lead to the burned church where the musicians used to trace my forehead." I stare at him and he tosses smoke on the ground because we are close to home. 6.El Paso Kees waits at the bus station in my hometown. We cannot go farther because the border here is out there and as violent as the reasons he disappeared in San Francisco a long time ago. I want to tell him who I think he is, but I grew up here and must hide how things have really been, drawing the light off the mountains as if the doubters of history are simply starving boys offering to shine Kees' shoes on the corner of Paisano Street. My hometown has a bridge, but Kees won't go near it because he says to cross it would be to admit there is something wrong on the other side of my family's house. He can never cross because we have found our way here, El Paso dreaming its population of mute men must keep growing because the border keeps taking too many of them away. Kees looks at the bus schedule, runs out of cigarettes and everything is closed. He nods at nothing and waits on the bench with someone he swears looks like me.

One day we will all be like this—the boat’s sickening pitch, & the delicateness needless, consumable. How everything here naturally passes into night, a room w/o walls. Could mindlessness keep us alive? Could bright colors? Tonight I am thinking of the young woman who dreams of her father being shot in the head. Imagine needing to believe the one you love has been destroyed. Now it is after midnight—the spindrift lunar & diaphanous. Here alone on deck could I make peace w/it all in thirty seconds—the water’s inherent rising, the gasping for air? I have never seen such omnipresence, such vast dreamlessness— but I too am such things. What does it mean to be eroded? What would be the significance of slipping one leg over the rail & straddling the indifference? Yes. Once upon a time we spent three days on a boat out of Kobé, Japan. All night the waves. All night the somnambulistic urges. Or how as children we would swim in a hard rain—the lake’s surface ragged & torn, but underneath the roots of the water lilies like ladders trailing down into the marvelous.

for Lawson Fusao Inada and Alan Chong Lau I. A Porphyry of Elements Starting in a long swale between the Sierras and the Coast Range, Starting from ancient tidepools of a Pleistocene sea, Starting from exposed granite bedrock, From sandstone and shale, glaciated, river-worn, and scuffed by wind, Tired of the extremes of temperature, the weather’s wantonness, Starting from the survey of a condor’s eye Cutting circles in the sky over Tehachapi and Tejon, Starting from lava flow and snow on Shasta, a head of white hair, a garland of tongue-shaped obsidian, Starting from the death of the last grizzly, The final conversion of Tulare County to the internal-combustion engine, Staring from California oak and acorn, scrubgrass, rivermist, and lupine in the foothills, From days driving through the outfield clover of Modesto in a borrowed Buick, From nights drinking pitchers of dark in the Neon Moon Bar & Grill, From mornings grabbing a lunchpail, work gloves, and a pisspot hat, From Digger pine and Douglas fir and aspen around Placerville, From snowmelt streams slithering into the San Joaquin, From the deltas and levees and floods of the Sacramento, From fall runs of shad, steelhead, and salmon, From a gathering of sand, rock, gypsum, clay, limestone, water, and tar, From a need or desire to throw your money away in The Big City, From a melting of history and space in the crucible of an oil-stained hand— Starting from all these, this porphyry of elements, this aggregate of experiences Fused like feldspar and quartz to the azure stone of memory and vision, Starting from all of these and an affectionate eye for straight, unending lines, We hit this old road of Highway Ninety-Nine! II. A Samba for Inada Let’s go camping Let’s go chanting Let’s go cruising Let’s go boozing Let’s go smoke Let’s go folk Let’s go rock Let’s go bop Let’s go jazz Let’s go fast Let’s go slow Let’s go blow Let’s go Latin Let’s go cattin Let’s go jiving Let’s go hiding Let’s go disco Let’s go Frisco Let’s go blues Let’s go cruise Let’s go far Let’s go near Let’s go camping Let’s go chanting Let’s go lazy Let’s go boozing Let’s go crazy Let’s go cruising III. Cruising in the Greater Vehicle/A Jam Session “Well, goddamnit, Lawson! Whyn’t you play in key and keep to the rhythm? First you say you wanna go back to Fresno, back to the fish store and Kamaboko Gardens on the West Side, and then you say, forget it, I take it back, let’s go to the Sacto Bon-Odori instead.” “Yeah. And this ain’t even shoyu season yet, chump!” “Awww, hell. What’s wrong with you two? Can’t you improvise? You know, I’m just laying down a bass, man. Just a rhythm, a scale, something to jam on, something to change, find our range, something to get us going. Once we get started, we can work our way around to Weed, put on some tire chains, or break down in Selma, refuse to buy grapes, raisins, or Gallo, do a pit-stop at a Sacto sporting goods, pick up some air mattresses shaped like pearl-diving women, and float all day downriver to the deltas, sipping Cokes and saké in the summer heat.” “Shit. Whyn’t you just solo and forget the rest of us? You start chanting and pretty soon we’re hearing the entire Lotus Sutra.” “You two Buddhaheads just a pair of one-eyed Japs with dishpan hands and deadpan minds, man. This is the Champ Chonk talking, and we’re playing Chinese anaconda. Eight-card, no-peek pak-kai, roll your own, hi-lo, three for sweep, four for hot-sour soup stud, and neither of you’s put down your ante yet. So shit or get off the shu-mai, fellas.” “Calm down and watch the road, Alan.” “Who’s driving this heap, anyway?” “I thought you were.” “I thought Lawson was.” “Don’t worry. This is a dodo-driven, autopiloted, cruise-controlled, Triple- A-mapped, Flying-A-gassed, dual-overhead-cam, Super-Sofistifunktified, Frijole Guacamole, Gardena Guahuanco, Chonk Chalupa Cruiser with Buddha Bandit Bumpers, Jack!” “Where we going, Alan?” “Where do you think? We’re going to Paradise.” IV. On the Road to Paradise Distances don’t matter nor the roll of the road past walnut groves. It’s sky that counts, the color of it at dawn or sunset, a match more true to the peach than a mix of oils by Matisse. Or maybe it’s actually the weather we love most, the way it shifts and scatters over the state like radio waves bouncing off the face of the moon. The one over there, near Yuba City, rising over a backyard garden of onions, tomatoes, squash, and corn. The one with the spider scrambling through celery, harvesting moths and mayflies from the web it has strung between stalks. Sometimes I wish I could harvest the weather, reap it like wheat or rice, store it in a silo announcing steady rain or clear skies on its sides. When the prices rise, I could ship hailstorms or Santanas in orange crates, make Safeway go broke, do something politically efficacious for a change. But all I really do besides write these poems is allow my mind to wander while I drive. There it goes, down the arroyo, through manzanita and Mormon tea. Or there, up the mustard and Indian pipe on the hill. Might as well let it. Nothing but God and Country on the radio now. Wolfman Jack’s syndicated and the Dodgers haven’t made it to Vero Beach. I wish this road would turn or bend, intersect with a spy movie some Spanish galleon, or maybe a Chinese poem with landscapes in brocade, mist, wine, and moonlight. This California moon is yellow most of the time, like it was stained with nicotine, or sealed in amber like an insect. Why is it always better somewhere else? Why do I always wish I were Tu Fu? V. Palmistry Fantasia There, the pasteboard and neon hand! Just past the interchange by the bowling alley. The one with silver rockets, small green stars, and a trail of red comets flashing through the smog. It’s still here, the hand held up in greeting or command. “Halt!” it says, or “Peace be with you, brother,” while the map across its palm traces excursions into blue trees, green skies, and mushroom-colored lives. Blue dun is the color of its neon, the same as the throat feathers of a teal scudding over the marshes of Merced. It matches the purple mascara the gypsy woman wears, matches the pools of velvet-blue darkness in her eyes. Her name is Alma Josephina, and she designed the sign herself, imitating the figure of her own hand, the neon indicative of its natural aura. That was twenty years ago when Eisenhower was President and all her customers wore pedal pushers or Bermudas, and never noticed the fireflies in the marshes at night. * You’re Oriental, aren’t you? Can you read tea leaves? I tried to once, years ago, had a Chinese woman teaching me, but her fees were too steep. I like a joke. It loosens up the customers. Well, come here towards the light. Let me get a good look at the ghosts in the grave of your palm. They’re there, you know. All the people you’ve ever been, all the trips you’ve taken and the towns you’ve settled in, back before the birth of Christ, back before people were people, before this paw was a hand. You see?   The whole palm glows like purple mist over a cemetery. Move closer.   Clamp it around the glass. See it flare on the inside? That’s the light your bones make, not the crystal at all. Look at your hand now. You can see yourself dancing on the heel just above the wrist. You must be a happy man. You’ll be born again and again, get to the threshold of Heaven, never enter but keep coming back, here, for fun, for friends, until this will be Paradise, and Paradise just an old resort the highway’s passed by. Well, have a nice trip. You’ll make it yet. Says so right in that curvy line around the Mound of Venus, that thumbstump there, right where the long straight line cuts across like an interstate. VI. Postcards Sent Home 1. Dust rolls out of the hills like fog, and it’s too hot for shoes or shirts. I’d like to take my hair off too, peel it from my head, dip it in a bucket of ice, and wear it around my neck like a bandana. 2. Crickets attend the night, add a falsetto drone to the sound of us pissing in the tumbleweeds. 3. There’s a Tastee-Freeze in Fresno, A & Dub’s closed down, Jack-in-the-Box keeps popping up, and McDonald’s owns the town. 4. Somebody’s drying tobacco leaves on the laundry line. There, see them furl and flap next to the nylons? 5. A giant oak uncurls over the road, sprinkles a fine yellow powder on the windshield. The sun hits, touches it off in a spasm of golden-red light. VII. Body & Fender/Body & Soul At the grill, the Indian girl with buckteeth and dimples serves us a round of coffee and sweet rolls. We’re waiting for the guy at Henley’s Texaco, down the street, to find us a fan belt that’ll fit.   It’s early, the sky’s still in the john, shaving, and the sports page has to wait to get in. Everybody’s grumpy. We sit around, jab at raisins with our forks, and try to look as tough as the waitresss. Her name’s Rita. Her brothers jump fires and pump oil in Alaska. Her sisters string beads and make babies back on the Res. Her ex is white, a logger who threatened never to come back and didn’t. She doesn’t hold any grudges. That’s why she’s so nice, why she pops her gum filling the salt and pepper shakers, why she adjusts her girdle so we can see, why the egg spot on her dress doesn’t show. Outside, the sun eases up over the parking lot, scrambles across the freeway, and runs for cover behind a pile of pumpkin-colored clouds. 99 starts shuffling its deck of cars and pickups, getting set to deal a hand of nine-to-five stud. We don’t watch. This is Redding, and ain’t nothing thing going on besides the day shift. Alan says, “Look, there’s Venus,” and points to a piece of light draining the sky. I want to order a country- fried steak, talk about the Dodgers, but there isn’t time. Lawson hums a few chords, stirring the changes with his coffee spoon. Rita cruises back like a bus bound for Reno, starts dealing some ashtrays. She says, “How’s it going boys?” I answer for all of us—“Hey, Rita. It’s almost gone.” VIII. Pilgrimage to the Shrine Six hours since the Paradise Cutoff and running on empty. No gas stations or rest stops, no weigh station, no cops. Just miles of straight road and a long double-yellow unrolling in front of us. Alan recognized nothing. Lawson pops the glove, pulls out a penlight, and fingers the map, pronouncing a few mantras. Our headlights slide over a scarecrow made of tumbleweeds standing by the road. He’s wearing a kimono, a dark-blue stovepipe hat, his shoulders cloaked in a wreath of chrysanthemums. We pull over, back up, and he disappears into the pale- grey darkness. It’s smoke. We can smell it, so somebody’s got to be close by. But our eyes go blined, fill with tears and ashes as we stumble down the off-ramp. The smell of frying trout and steamed rice reaches us when we come to. An old hermit, dressed like the scarecrow, crawls out of his barracks and brings us tea. “Drink!” he says, “It’ll pick you up!” And so we drink, feeling drugged. Soft blues in the key of sleep suffocates the air. From up the mountain, the sound of obsidian, flaking in the wind. Clouds of black glass waltz around us. We dress ourselves in shrouds of tule reeds stitched with barbed wire, stained with salt and mud. We refuse to cry. We drift back to the highway, holding our fists like rattles, shaking them like bones. IX. Confessions of the Highway/The Hermit Speaks I know the rituals, the spells of grapes, the ceremonies of tomatoes, celery, and rice. I know the color of wind dressed for fiesta, and the names of carnivals in Spanish and Japanese. I am familiar with the determination of campesinos who migrate up and down the stretch of the state in search of crops ready for harvest. It’s all a dull ache in my back, small cuts on the throats of my fingers, and the alkali of a dry lake in my lungs. For me, the oracle of the giant orange always predicts good fortune, yet, it never comes true. My stomach is full of sand and tar, a little bit of paint, a few crickets. I stand in swampwater up to my hips, and the stink of rotting figs escapes my armpits in small brown clouds. Scrub oak and tumbleweed sprout from my scalp, make a small grove behind my left ear. I don’t know why sparrows and starlings refuse to approach me, to take the grass seed tucked in the cuffs of my trousers. Maybe it’s the stain of asphalt around my ankles, this copper sheen of sweat on my back. Sometimes, when the valley heat makes the bones in my feet start to hiss and burn, the desire to escape comes over me again. I can’t help it. My arms pull down a few telephone posts, my shoulders churn against the bindings. I feel myself wanting to sit up, begin to walk again, and thresh my way across rice fields and acres of alfalfa. For once I’d like to lift my face straight above Shasta into the sky, shout in unison with thunder, roar with the assurance of Santana wind, leap out of these bonds of copper and steel, slough off this skin of cement, and walk south or north or even west into the weather and the sea.