180 Travel poems

culture is richest where there’s the greatest ratio land : coast — After Barry Cunliffe • this patch of the western ocean’s coruscating garden recalls my favorite song (mishearing)the sea’s very hum- drum

A blind man was riding an unheated train, From Bryansk he was traveling home with his fate. Fate whispered to him so the whole car could hear: And why should you care about blindness and war? It’s good, she was saying, you’re sightless and poor. If you were not blind, you’d never survive. The Germans won’t kill you, you’re nothing to them. Allow me to lift that bag on your shoulder— The one with the holes, the empty torn one. Let me just raise your eyelids wide open. The blind man was traveling home with his fate, Now thankful for blindness. Happy about it.

The huge scar-pocked palm leaf outside the papeterie in Papeete. The bikini billboard at the bus station of a busy mining town in Bohemia. That moment’s hesitation in the photo studio: how did I come to appear in this light? The philologist’s pink index card, his commentary on a line from the Iliad. Letters that the lazy postman left behind in a sack labeled “Destination: The Azores.” Now it’s turned out different after all, so different from what we imagined in our evening courses. No idea who it is will one day give the speech to summon up an army of heroes. Fighting machines were the latest hit when our children’s children still went to the movies. What now? How should I pass my days, with the world exposition long since over? Discovered by divers, far from the coast, a yellow pianola at the bottom of the sea. The calm of images thick with dreams in the banana republic of the real. Translated from the German

A dirigible powered us through the first leg, traversing snow-capped mountains where goats leapt from crags, and men with wrinkled apples faces looked up, pointed. Smiling to cold air, I slept under a bear skin, touched your lips in the night. On our pleasant soap bubble journey, we dropped baskets down each morning, hooked meats, cheeses; in later weeks, nothing. Still, we took notes, detailing the weather conditions, the migrating elk numbers and their steady decrease. Northward by cracked compass, the sleet sheeting the balloon drove us low, then lower— In time we cut through the ice, sank fathoms into the sea, chaperoned by seals that are not mermaids at all. Else you think this a hoax, know my hand— down here still—please send help.

one sketch of the stormy petrel one set of clothes not to be worn during the voyage one log of the harm that came you miss a man so much music for Haul On the Bowline slop chest small stuff prayer book Green- lander with a stitch through his nose coin in his mouth his custody broken holy stone at feet sailmaker stitches you inside a sail last to touch your craft slipped starboard pig on foot does no good to stay afloat to assure identity one pot of ink one paragraph on a miscellaneous custom quit the American shore quit the shore of Green- land miss a man pot of wood ash box of blank cards beef bone sculpture deducted form wages what you bid seldom mentioned in leisure his form forecastle slip cliché poor guy . . . the oath and the laugh boom skylark flicks a card in another’s face

The Book of Company which I put down and can’t pick up The Trans-Siberian disappearing, the Blue Train and the Shadow Train Her body with ridges like my skull Two children are running through the Lion Cemetery Five travelers are crossing the Lion Bridge A philosopher in a doorway insists that there are no images He whispers instead: Possible Worlds The Mind-Body Problem The Tale of the Color Harpsichord Skeleton of the World’s Oldest Horse The ring of O dwindles sizzling around the hole until gone False spring is laughing at the snow and just beyond each window immense pines weighted with snow A philosopher spreadeagled in the snow holds out his Third Meditation like a necrotic star. He whispers: archery is everywhere in decline, photography the first perversion of our time Reach to the milky bottom of this pond to know the feel of bone, a knuckle from your grandfather’s thumb, the maternal clavicle, the familiar arch of a brother’s brow He was your twin, no doubt, forger of the unicursal maze My dearest Tania, When I get a good position in the courtyard I study their faces through the haze Dear Tania, Don’t be annoyed, please, at these digressions They are soldering the generals back onto their pedestals for A. C.

Difficult shacks of Kushiro, too far afield, at least theirs are not our roofless griefs even farther in the marshes that are huge buckets of green tea in the rainy season—you glisten as you go, Bashō, wring out your sleeves. Frog keeps its knees in its armpits on plant flotilla and Duck of all the birds is shaped most like a canoe. We were not built for this and anyway, standing smack dab in no-man’s-land you can stop and say,Here is a place made famous in poems. Aren’t you such a place? Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones .

I have a need to ventilate, to have my porous body—sockets and holes—open to the bald-faced wind and have my heathen   inner-stuff tweedled like a reed flute and this piffle floats out. But walking on the open road, I know even open roads, to be roads at all, are ruts. With a careless beanfield on either side, off one more time, even you, Mr. Out-in-the-Woods, might as well be stuffed in your hometown bucket. And if these grim beams of trees are truly home, Sweet, as you say they are, then the timberwolves would reclaim you by singing and that would be all. The Moon would reclaim the timberwolves—not a snarl—soft keepsakes asleep in the palm of Her hand. I would reclaim the Moon by picking a white silk chrysanthemum and resting it on the branch beside Her. Who would reclaim me? and say, “Blossom, we are not two. There is no road to or from. You cannot write a love poem. You cannot walk away.” Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones .

Here is a coast; here is a harbor; here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery; impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains, sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery, with a little church on top of one. And warehouses, some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue, and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist, is this how this country is going to answer you and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last, and immediately, after eighteen days of suspension? Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming, a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brillant rag. So that's the flag. I never saw it before. I somehow never thought of there being a flag, but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume, and paper money; they remain to be seen. And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward, myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen, descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters waiting to be loaded with green coffee beans. Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook! Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy, a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall, with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression. Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall s, New York. There. We are settled. The customs officials will speak English, we hope, and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes. Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impression they make, or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter, the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps— wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter do when we mail the letteres we wrote on the boat, either because the glue here is very inferior or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once; we are driving to the interior. January 1952

Where the Story Leaves Off We had set out, the four of us, like pilgrims. It’s a quick jaunt to Guanajuato from San Miguel, over long stretches of restless earth, not desert, not valley, patchy green on tawny ground, head to head in the passing lane with a pick-up sprouting children and a blunderbuss fifties’ Chevy with no hood over its engine, with its insides exposed. A quick jaunt to the underworld, the gauzy mummies. But we lingered in the marketplace: the two women—my cousin’s wife, my lover— poring over shawls and serapes; my cousin clicking away with his Nikon and zoom at the gargoyles’ leering and capricious faces, while I lost myself among the hawkers’ masks— swinging like lanterns on the standards— blessed and damned with edgy, angular, yet impassive facades. And made of no special wood. I wanted one anyway and forked out eight pesos. It’s hard crawling through the crypt. You have to get down on your hands and knees and the openings were meant for smaller people, unless the getting down was part of a solemn ritual. It was a relief to be in the cool of the underworld, away from the tension of the light. The dead were well preserved. They stood upright. They stayed together. I couldn’t have known it then, but soon my cousin, his wife, my lover—soon we would all be lost to each other forever— not taken by death, just gone into another kind of dust.