180 Travel poems

Like all great rivers The Elbe is familiar at first sight. The barges spic & span as the front parlors Of model homes in Saxony — The steam paddle-wheelers & other vessels, No less impeccable — all run With a near soporific efficiency. You lean out & the land starts up: The parcels of pastures & castles Bearing with them trees & cows & cattle-grids the crowned heads of daisies Little knots of   human habitations, Cigarette factory & garrisons Floodplains, sheet pilings Run All run, As if   by an engine, Some cement breaker from under the river torn turfs all Bob up & down, Brown like bears in bear gardens The cupolas, cavaliers Their ruinous sandstone reflections alongside. Whether this is the famous effect Of   the Balcony of   Europe Cork coasters chasing gilt coronets Maps loosely adrift on a map So many teacups clicking, Large balconies colliding Breaking up into smaller ones Valley & vineyards Mines, bridges, sugar-beet fields, villas, Museum corridors A Procession of   Princes Chimera of   Chinese porcelain palaces Cargoes of   homeland & meadows, Other Municipalities, the beer & beer mats, Coal, forestry, History atop Geography atop History Flags roll unroll — coalesce Black — red — yellow Yellow Black Red Runs White Sunk trains with passengers Trains sunk April ’45 Bergen-Belsen Run   Elbe   Run I pulled away. I have come this day to the bank of the Elbe To write a few postcards In a tearoom. On the steps up From street level to the Old Albertinum Museum some way from the tearoom A man too is minding his business On his lap a glass case For keyboard 2 rows of colored sand in test tubes Raspberry /burnt sienna /turquoise /Prussian blue /lavender /ochre Or neutral — just sand. Into a beer bottle he tips a little color & before you know Our man has tossed one up in the air like a baby & caught it roundly by the heels too, Le voilà, not one grain escapes It is shockproof, waterproof, A world like a Swiss watch, & time-proof — You count three camels It looks like 4, — any number could have been packed in the bottle Which, when turned slowly in the palm An orderly procession, : Camels against a horizon of   low sun An irradiated sky, Palm tree, undulating dunes A strata of deep watermelon subsiding to honey halva The silhouette of a tent, hint of A sandstorm in the air. Grit under eyelids & should you prefer From the array of   bottles you could take home one with A full sun, an Egyptian sun-disk & you have his word, — no fear, each hermetically sealed, Will travel. As if   to say not all the grains Are sand, our man also works With rice. He’s a jeweler. He will encrypt On a grain of rice a word, Enclosed in a colored phial of water again hermetically For all time Like the camels. A jewel, he said, The word a ruby, an emerald Of   water Should you forget, here his English broke off But you understand Yes, there is closure. As I watched, a lady at my elbow Like one at a séance, asked For the name “Christine,” her grand daughter, she said. & he, our scribe, answered he was from Iran, — not that anyone inquired. Iranian, then — Hence the camels Though here in Dresden He had looked Mexican A second before. I looked again & saw that he could be from anywhere, It depends on where you stand. This man has for good or ill the face of the world, Which he bears sadly With some mirth. I pulled away. Another moment I would have To come up with a name, a word, Another world. I was happy with my purchase of camels On the Elbe. Back home it holds Dresden & the Elbe for me in a bottle. It runs for so long as anyone would care to look, Not a drop more. I would have liked to write a card to the bottler Addressing sands sands of the world thereof My migrant, errant friend I wish you all the grains whatever you had set out for, & always Sands enough to take you, just where you stand Waiting for your No. 28 sunsets, No. 20, The watermelon sunrise & no end of camels.

1. Far from the sea far from the sea of Breton fishermen the white clouds scudding over Lowell and the white birches the bare white birches along the blear night roads flashing by in darkness (where once he rode in Pop’s old Plymouth) And the birch-white face of a Merrimac madonna shadowed in streetlight by Merrimac’s shroudy waters —a leaf blown upon sea wind out of Brittany over endless oceans 2. There is a garden in the memory of America There is a nightbird in its memory There is an andante cantabile in a garden in the memory of America In a secret garden in a private place a song a melody a nightsong echoing in the memory of America In the sound of a nightbird outside a Lowell window In the cry of kids in tenement yards at night In the deep sound of a woman murmuring a woman singing broken melody in a shuttered room in an old wood house in Lowell As the world cracks by thundering like a lost lumber truck on a steep grade in Kerouac America The woman sits silent now rocking backward to Whistler’s Mother in Lowell and all the tough old Canuck mothers and Jack’s Mémère And they continue rocking And may still on stormy nights show through as a phantom after-image on silent TV screens a flickered after-image that will not go away in Moody Street in Beaulieu Street in ‘dirtstreet Sarah Avenue’ in Pawtucketville And in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste 3. And the Old Worthen Bar in Lowell Mass. at midnight in the now of Nineteen Eighty-seven Kerouackian revellers crowd the wood booths ancient with carved initials of a million drinking bouts the clouts of the Shrouded Stranger upon each wood pew where the likes of Kerouack lumberjack feinted their defiance of dung and death Ah the broken wood and the punka fans still turning (pull-cord wavings of the breath of the Buddha) still lost in Lowell’s ‘vast tragedies of darkness’ with Jack 4. And the Four Sisters Diner also known as ‘The Owl’ Sunday morning now March Eighty-seven or any year of Sunday specials Scrambled eggs and chopped ham the bright booths loaded with families Lowell Greek and Gaspé French Joual patois and Argos argot Spartan slaves escaped into the New World here incarnate in rush of blood of American Sunday morning And “Ti-Jean” Jack Kerouac comes smiling in baseball cap cocked up hungry for mass in this Church of All Hungry Saints haunt of all-night Owls blessing every booth ... 5. Ah he the Silent Smiler the one with the lumberjack shirt and cap with flaps askew blowing his hands in winter as if to light a flame The Shrouded Stranger knew him as Ti-Jean the Smiler grooking past redbrick mill buildings down by the riverrun (O mighty Merrimac ‘thunderous husher’) where once upon a midnight then young Ti-Jean danced with Mémère in the moondrowned light And rolled upon the greensward his mother and lover all one with Buddha in his arms 6. And then Ti-Jean Jack with Joual tongue disguised as an American fullback in plaid shirt crossing and recrossing America in speedy cars a Dr. Sax’s shadow shadowing him like a shroudy cloud over the landscape Song of the Open Road sung drunken with Whitman and Jack London and Thomas Wolfe still echoing through a Nineteen Thirties America A Nineteen Forties America an America now long gone except in broken down dusty old Greyhound Bus stations in small lost towns Ti-Jean’s vision of America seen from a moving car window the same as Wolfe’s lonely sweeping vision glimpsed from a coach-train long ago (‘And thus did he see first the dark land’) And so Jack in an angel midnight bar somewhere West of Middle America where one drunk madonna (shades of one on a Merrimac corner) makes him a gesture with her eyes a blue gesture and Ti-Jean answers only with his eyes And the night goes on with them And the light comes up on them making love in a parking lot 7. In the dark of his fellaheen night in the light of the illuminated Stations of the Cross and the illuminated Grotto down behind the Funeral Home by roar of river where now Ti-Jean alone (returned to Lowell in one more doomed Wolfian attempt to Go Home Again) gropes past the Twelve Stations of the Cross reciting aloud the French inscriptions in his Joual accent which makes the plaster French Christ laugh and cry as He hefts His huge Cross up the Eternal Hill And a very real tear drops in the Grotto from the face of the stoned Virgin 8. Light upon light The Mountain keeps still 9. Hands over ears He steals away with the Bell. . . . Writ in Lowell and Conway and Boston Mass. and San Francisco March-April 1987

I sat on the Dogana’s steps For the gondolas cost too much, that year, And there were not “those girls”, there was one face, And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling, “Stretti”, And the lit cross-beams, that year, in the Morosini, And peacocks in Koré’s house, or there may have been. Gods float in the azure air, Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed. Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen. Panisks, and from the oak, dryas, And from the apple, mælid, Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices, A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake, And there are gods upon them, And in the water, the almond-white swimmers, The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple, As Poggio has remarked. Green veins in the turquoise, Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars. My Cid rode up to Burgos, Up to the studded gate between two towers, Beat with his lance butt, and the child came out, Una niña de nueve años, To the little gallery over the gate, between the towers, Reading the writ, voce tinnula: That no man speak to, feed, help Ruy Diaz, On pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike And both his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered, “And here, Myo Cid, are the seals, The big seal and the writing.” And he came down from Bivar, Myo Cid, With no hawks left there on their perches, And no clothes there in the presses, And left his trunk with Raquel and Vidas, That big box of sand, with the pawn-brokers, To get pay for his menie; Breaking his way to Valencia. Ignez de Castro murdered, and a wall Here stripped, here made to stand. Drear waste, the pigment flakes from the stone, Or plaster flakes, Mantegna painted the wall. Silk tatters, “Nec Spe Nec Metu.”

For Edgar The submarine’s inside was dim. — Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, tr. by Will Petersen in my youth, I hitched a ride to San Diego, across chirping desert and distant night, I gazed upon a slow-moving dark, encasing a convex cerulean cavity each night, I stood beneath the sky for hours mesmerized at the perplex reformatory, twinkling lights of broken glass fragments spreading against a glistening sunset a faceless man behind a lost reflection of glass at a drive-up window informs me, too bad, you know nothing of your own past how far will I walk against the night? conforming to a captivity I had never realized some years later, under the kitchen table, they all huddle, as the rampage continues toward the back of the house, a clash of debris from the other room recoils and broken sounds escape the barricade of doors I remember I returned in 1970, all they remember is me sitting at the edge of my bed, with the war still in my hands

i Walking across the PCH, we looked Up and saw, big as the butt of a pen, Jupiter, fat with light and unheighted. I looked back at the waiting traffic stalled At the seaside road’s salt-rimmed traffic lights As they swayed to the Pacific’s not-quite- Anapestic song of sea and air — The raw and sudden crick of crickets — The cars, suddenly silent as cows — And blue Malibu blackening like a bee. ii A poem is a view of the Pacific And the Pacific, and the Pacific Taking in its view of the Pacific, And the Pacific as the Pacific (Just like that: as though there’s no Pacific) Ends. A poem is the palm of the ocean, Closing. It or she or he is merely, Which means it or she or he is a mar. But a mar made up of  temperament and Tempo — the red weather in the heart. iii I’m about to get this all wrong, I know: Santa Monica behind me, the ocean To my left, Jupiter high above me, And Malibu somewhere in my mind, flecked With mist and dusk and Dylan and strange grays In the sunsets that stripe the seaside hills Like the tricolor of a country made Of  beauty, the dream of beauty, and smog. Sadly, in my mind it’s always snowing; Which is beautiful but austere, unlike here. iv Along the thin pedestrian passage Beside the PCH, just off Sunset, Mel Gibson chants of beginnings and ends And lies and facts — Jews and Blacks being Both the lies and facts. His face is ruddy Like bruschetta. He storms at the police Because fuck them. He’s wearing his T-shirt Like a toga. He schools them his toga Wisdom from toga times. He offers them His toga. They offer him a ride — . v Arun’s car carried us like metaphor In a poem or painting; moving meaning; Moving the current; being the current; The terse tug of tides: still the great glamour; Still, even as we speed on the 110, The music in my head, the Jupiter Of the mind’s unstemmed Pacific Ocean As it unfurls in the vapor trail of Malibu, fragrant in far-off fluorescents, Like a nocturnal flower calling you. vi Then, Downtown LA and LA Live surged Up, like marginalia on a newly Turned page, spangled with bland suggestions, Fiery accusations of its own Brilliance that descend into indifference. We speed nearer and it grows. We veer and It grows. We park and it grows. Close your eyes. Now look. And it has grown. Yo la quiero. But I should know better, if just because You can smell the injustice in the air. vii The Pacific encircles me. Slowly. As though it doesn’t trust me. Or, better Said, I only understand it this way: By feeling like a stranger at its blue Door. The poet with the sea stuck in his Enjambments can’t call out to some Cathay As though some Cathay exists and be glad. No, the differences we have should be felt And made, through that feeling, an eclipsed lack; A power to take in what you can’t take back. viii The old hocus of this ocean’s focus On pulling its waves over the soft surf Like a skin pulled down tight over the top Of a drum was, to her, a new hocus. We stared out with her, out toward Hokusai’s Tiny boats and rising lace-fringed sea swells No chunk of haiku could think to charter. It was like the eighth day of creation In the eighth line of a poem — she sang, She didn’t sing, the sea sang, then stopped.

October – November 1975 Autobus on Paseo de la Reforma with destination signs: bellas artes insurgentes .Exactamente. Just what’s needed: Insurgent Arts.Poesía Insurgente. This is not it ... 1 Bus to Veracruz via Puebla + Xalapa ... Adobe house by highway, with no roof and one wall, covered with words: la luz del mundo . 2 Passing through Puebla late Sunday afternoon. A band concert in a plaza next to a Ferris wheel — I have passed through many places like this, I have seen the toy trains in many amusement parks. When you’ve seen them all you’ve seen One. 3 Halfway to Xalapa a great white volcano snow peak looms up above the hot altiplano— White god haunting Indian dreams. 4 A boy and three burros run across a stubble field, away from the white mountain. He holds a stick. There is no other way. 5 Deep yellow flowers in the dusk by the road, beds of them stretching away into darkness. A moon the same color comes up. 6 As the bus turns + turns down the winding hill, moon swings wildly from side to side. It has had too many pathetic phallusies written about it to stand still for one more. 7 In Xalapa I am a head taller than anyone else in town — A foot of flesh and two languages separate us. 8 At a stand in the park at the center of Xalapa I eat white corn on the cob with a stick in the end, sprinkled with salt, butter, grated cheese + hot sauce. The dark stone Indian who hands it to me has been standing there three thousand years. 9 I’m taking this trip from Mexico City to the Gulf of Mexico and back without any bag or person — only what I can carry in my pockets. The need for baggage is a form of insecurity. 10 Two hours in this town and I feel I might live forever (foreign places affect me that way). The tall church tower tolls its antique sign: pray . 11 In early morning in the great garden of Xalapa, with its terraces and immense jacaranda trees, pines + palms, there are black birds with cries like bells, and others with hollow wooden voices like gourds knocked together. The great white volcano shimmers far off, unreached by the rising sun. 12 Brown men in white palmetto cowboy hats stand about the fountains in groups of three or four, their voices lost to the hollow-sounding birds. Along a sunlit white stone balustrade, student lovers are studying each other,novios awaiting the day. The sun beats down hot and melts not the mountain. 13 On the bus again to Veracruz, dropping down fast to flat coast. A tropical feeling — suddenly coffee plantation + palms — everything small except the landscape, horses the size of burros, small black avocados, small strong men with machetes — each still saying to himself Me llamo yo.

Stunned heat of noon. In shade, tan, silken cows hide in the thorned acacias. A butterfly staggers. Stamping their hooves from thirst, small horses drowse or whinny for water. On parched, ochre headlands, daggers of agave bristle in primordial defense, like a cornered monster backed up against the sea. A mongoose charges dry grass and fades through a fence faster than an afterthought. Dust rises easily. Haze of the Harmattan, Sahara dust, memory’s haze from the dried well of Africa, the headland’s desert or riders in swirling burnooses, mixed with the greys of hills veiled in Impressionist light. We inherit two worlds of associations, or references, drought that we heighten into Delacroix’s North Africa, veils, daggers, lances, herds the Harmattan brought with a phantom inheritance, which the desperate seeker of a well-spring staggers in the heat in search of— heroic ancestors; the other that the dry season brings is the gust of a European calendar, but it is the one love that thirsts for confirmations in the circling rings of the ground dove’s cooing on stones, in the acacia’s thorns and the agave’s daggers, that they are all ours, the white horsemen of the Sahara, India’s and Asia’s plumed mongoose and crested palmtree, Benin and Pontoise. We are history’s afterthought, as the mongoose races ahead of its time; in drought we discover our shadows, our origins that range from the most disparate places, from the dugouts of Guinea to the Nile’s canted dhows. II The incredible blue with its bird-inviting cloud, in which there are crumbling towers, banners and domes, and the sliding Carthage of sunsets, the marble shroud drawn over associations that are Greece’s and Rome’s and rarely of Africa. They continue at sixty-seven to echo in the corridors of the head, perspectives of a corridor in the Vatican that led, not to heaven, but to more paintings of heaven, ideas in lifted sieves drained by satiety because great art can exhaust us, and even the steadiest faith can be clogged by excess, the self-assured Christs, the Madonnas’ inflexible postures without the mess of motherhood. With this blue I bless emptiness where these hills are barren of tributes and the repetitions of power, our sky’s naive ceiling without domes and spires, an earth whose roots like the thorned acacia’s deepen my belief.

A clumsy hillock Unmolded like a cake on the meadow In the Laguna Mountains. Tough yellow-green grass growing up to a tree As thick as a tooth. In winter, on the road from San Diego, Thousands of cars crawl up to the snow And their passengers get out to investigate it And then drive, discoursing, back home. And that’s California, Solemnly discharging its responsibilities. Meanwhile we breakfast on pancakes the size of a plate While the console radio goes on the blink. Miss L’Espagnole looks out from her frame on the wall, Completely prepared (though for what it is impossible to say). Her left arm is white and dips into a puddle of fire Or a pile of cotton on fire. And each thing is severe: The house hemmed in by pepper trees and Mexico (This one is white and in Chula Vista), and the paraphernalia Strewn around home: a few magazines summing up politics, A matchbox with a lavender automobile on the cover, And a set of soldiers of several military epochs marching off to war on the raffia rug. Unless, you’ve grown up amidst palm trees (and buildings that are either unbuilt, or hospitals) It’s impossible to appreciate a reasonable tree. I sometimes consider the parrots that live in the zoo And are sold on the street in Tijuana. Colored like national flags, Their heads are always cocked to pick up something behind them. And unless you have lived in a place where the fog Closes in like a face, it is impossible to be (even temporarily) relieved When it lifts to expose the freshly painted trim of the city, and it seems Like a fine day for knowledge: sunlight sleeping on top of the rocks And lots of white clouds scudding by like clean sheets Which, when the air in the bedroom is cold, you pull over your head And let the temperature slowly increase while you breathe. But California has only a coast in common with this.

marine to noon on AméricasAirplane First the dark meer begins to breathe gently into green into light & light green until there are like blue ribs upon the water. dreaming and the ribs of water’s colour are the gills of the first fish breathing the first land the first eye -lann until there is what shd not be here on the water white footsteps of sand from the bottom of the ocean become the thin road to Eleuthera long & thin upon the water walking until there is suddenly a black stone a dark veil kabala surrounding by whorls of worship green water scallops folding into themselves like soft jewels the first huge fish out of creation w/ribs veins glimpse of a tail & deep channels in between where they will be mountains & ridges & villages & ozure indigo sunsets of lapis lazuli & white salt marking its finely corrugated edges & stretching out into thousands of tongues. miles of soft drifting labials. like pellucid love on the water. this fish from the air of so many so many untangles & 10 thousand years later there are trees glistening sunlight & listening rain & white streets & houses & people walkin bout & talkn to each other on the water & across its blue echo & thinking of horses & houses & now soon after midday there are great ob -long blotches like a stain of milk & a great spider spreading itself along the pale glazing bottom of the water. and this great planet passing upwards towards us out this silence & drifting & blessing of the water

Where the remote Bermudas ride In th’ ocean’s bosom unespy’d, From a small boat, that row’d along, The list’ning winds receiv’d this song. What should we do but sing his praise That led us through the wat’ry maze Unto an isle so long unknown, And yet far kinder than our own? Where he the huge sea-monsters wracks, That lift the deep upon their backs, He lands us on a grassy stage, Safe from the storm’s and prelates’ rage. He gave us this eternal spring Which here enamels everything, And sends the fowls to us in care, On daily visits through the air. He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night; And does in the pomegranates close Jewels more rich than Ormus shows. He makes the figs our mouths to meet And throws the melons at our feet, But apples plants of such a price, No tree could ever bear them twice. With cedars, chosen by his hand, From Lebanon, he stores the land, And makes the hollow seas that roar Proclaim the ambergris on shore. He cast (of which we rather boast) The Gospel’s pearl upon our coast, And in these rocks for us did frame A temple, where to sound his name. Oh let our voice his praise exalt, Till it arrive at heaven’s vault; Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may Echo beyond the Mexic Bay. Thus sung they in the English boat An holy and a cheerful note, And all the way, to guide their chime, With falling oars they kept the time.