180 Travel poems

I only have a moment so let me tell you the shortest story, about arriving at a long loved place, the house of friends in Maine, their lawn of wildflowers, their grandfather clock and candid portraits, their gabled attic rooms, and woodstove in the kitchen, all accessories of the genuine summer years before, when I was their son’s girlfriend and tied an apron behind my neck, beneath my braids, and took from their garden the harvest for a dinner I would make alone and serve at their big table with the gladness of the found, and loved. The eggplant shone like polished wood, the tomatoes smelled like their furred collars, the dozen zucchini lined up on the counter like placid troops with the onions, their minions, and I even remember the garlic, each clove from its airmail envelope brought to the cutting board, ready for my instruction. And in this very slight story, a decade later, I came by myself, having been dropped by the airport cab, and waited for the family to arrive home from work. I walked into the lawn, waist-high in the swaying, purple lupines, the subject of   June’s afternoon light as I had never been addressed — a displaced young woman with cropped hair, no place to which I wished to return, and no one to gather me in his arms. That day the lupines received me, and I was in love with them, because they were all I had left, and in that same manner I have loved much of the world since then, and who is to say there is more of a reason, or more to love?

Leaning from the platform, waiting for a glimmer to braid the rails the eyes of the action hero cut from the poster all that concrete pressing down A fine edge gleams around your body as if it could be contained The way each finger is licked, dipped in & rubbed across the gums until the teeth go away Even my hands kiss you A night broken down into grains If you find yourself lost, dig a cave in the snow, quickly you need shelter against the night A candle could keep you alive the engine of your lungs will heat the air around you, someone will miss you, they will send out dogs You must be somewhere, right?

Sometimes they are the only thing beautiful about a hotel. Like transients, come winter they have a way of disappearing, disguised as dirty light, limp beside a puttied pane. Then some April afternoon a roomer jacks a window open, a breeze intrudes, resuscitates memory, and suddenly they want to fly, while men, looking up from the street, are deceived a moment into thinking a girl in an upper story is waving.

By the dry road the fathers cough and spit, This is their room. They are the ones who hung That bloody sun upon the southern wall And crushed the armored beetle to the floor. The father’s skin is seamed and dry, the map Of that wild region where they drained the swamp And set provision out that they might sit, Of history the cracked precipitate, Until the glass be shattered and the sun Descend to burn the prosperous flesh away Of the filthy world, so vilely fathered on The fathers, such black cinders, sitting there. Old pioneers, what lecheries remain? When schoolgirls pass, what whispers of their skirts, Cold gleams of flesh, solicit in your veined And gemlike eyes the custom of desire? None now. Their eyes are sunk in ancient flesh, And the sarcastic triumph of the mind They now enjoy, letting their lust alone Who may have kin but have no longer kind. Neither tomorrow’s monstrous tumor nor The reformation of the past they wish, Who hold in silent colloquy the world A shrivelled apple in the hand of God. They hang at night their somber flags aloft, And through the amorous dark pursue their theme Of common images, that sleep may show Them done with all disasters but the one.

The mountain skies were clear except for the umlaut of a cloud over the village. The little girl wore yellow gloves. She looked in the peephole and saw a stack of unused marionettes. Yet, she wondered.

To me myself them and others always then and now that day we was flying through above Atlantic Ocean clouds the plane and the plan O also plain language plano feet or face was in perfect harmonious bolero wavy plena to someplace a few miles away from heaven this gathered from the way the adults poke their eyes out from their natural sockets   More here in the United States the actual splendour of big cities disfigures your face even more than imagining its sweetness so much that you can’t   taste yourself the way you taste yourself when the sun shines on through your stomach   All you knew was that the birds fly with you in them too   All you knew was miles of green road eating you   One year that comes and another one that splits that’s the way the jingle puts it one December made a print in your mind   And the next December the passion and excitement the coconut rice and Eisenhower who was President of the United States used to come to our parties and sit inside the television set and I began to see paths in the wall by way of cracks how would this be interpreted Also the cracks made a perfect bear   this must be the Life of skidsofrenos without any breaks I thought I could take a small bike that I had and go exploring through the next apartment after I took the room or the road   When I told Mom she said Qué confusión so many questions   back in Aguas Buenas the water was clear and here there is no guava   They can keep Puerto Rico just give us the guava of independence   depending on no bodies   tortures dreams of the past or future within the present State no State ever of things She loves that fruit the best    Assemblage yourself for the rum- ble on Avenue D against the Sportsman we gonna kick them off the earth yet see them floating down the East River   the street was noisy and full of jumping bodies moving somewhere   One quiet afternoon the President of one gang fought the President of another gang and the afternoon changed nature with voices of O man git him Roach fought Roach fought   One of the presidents was named Roach and he fought and the other guy fought from the middle of the block to the corner and another person who was not part of the tussle kept saying Roach fight Roach fought Roach fight Roach is in it Roach is the one the one is Roach It is Roach do it Roach   Roach it is   Roach jumped up he threw him down   heat sweating glands Roach   is out he came out and is into a tumbao with Look Roach   Tropical serenity atop hammock and eating Bacalao ala Española and if news of Ponce de Leon reaches here   That he is looking for the Fountain of Youth   say just be tranquil take a bath you smell like Manhattan sewers if you get drunk don’t bite your eyes   You cannot find a plane to go back to that plane   The fight kept moving up the avenue and they fought and fought till they went over the horizon We have learned the greatest lesson in geography as we moved along through space at 29 thousand feet   eating air going to the next age over   or under or beyond   What it could have been like Sticking it into her like a root the idea that she can go back and once again feel happy that she can go to big cabaret dancing in Santurce Appreciate   the aroma of strangers   That is what it says in the Bible the one translated by the maniacs from the land where the Papaya grows to its full size like a basketball In the new landscape you can see the word escape into your roots when they are riding well and it feels hot like you into   the center   fabricating thru air motions of mountains of motional emotion scribbling   it takes a lot of concentration to move your nerves like that   Slow up within the jet   within the slow propellers of the 50’s   Hold up a second there has been a change of space but everything remains the same angles on your life   your destiny   You do your claves on the paper I will read you your secrets   Civilization smells so different within the iron trees   Sivilessensation   spread yourself out of it listen to the beat abnormalize yourself compa.

Do you remember when you began to travel? It lent you this astonishing lens and you kept a journal That rode in your breast pocket like a stone, There you wrote “Limoges — ” and “Altenkirchen”; And when you saw a peasant, kissed, or passed out — Died for twenty seconds — in the heat on the hill above Marseille you would rush out the notebook and make a note — Sometimes just an x in the top right corner — And ideally you would brood about that later. Which led slowly to the dark hot bar Where you enjoy a glass of beer across from the Winter Palace in summer. In the rose-and-blue windows of the basilica Today radiant burghers stood and learned Mercy in a circle Around Stephen, recognized By the pebble enthroned in his skull and the scarlet ooze. While in your system the amphetamines progress. The idea is they’ll give you heart to haul yourself up and cross The limestone plaza. And when at the gate of the place You pay you can enter the Palace.

Tired of walking and checking the lines of the tourist train that trundles through this town, famous for its pottery and brackish dune pools once visited by St. George and his dragon, and the lady with her unicorn, I stopped by at a convenient place to sit and shuck my sweet corn and let the local men hang their gates from my eyes. All they could offer were other versions of myself: soft and sweaty, sick of the big car diet dished up by Detroit and the cocktail-party and locker-room chatter I've had to tackle while touring this country's musky beaches. Choosing to drive to my next stop, I found perched upon a tall chalk cliff the statue of a broad-bodied chaser so large I could never easily handle him as a top. He'd been added on to so many times over the centuries, that it was only really possible to identify him by touch: a little more shy, perhaps, than other guys his age, an abstract clock-face jutting from the pack I could feel buckled around his waist, and such wee-wee nuts, he could only be named, I whispered,Patience. I camped there in his shadow 'til noon the next day, and drove away leaving a few of my burnt bones there, behind.

The King Cobra slides through our jungles, and tucked in bushes by the riverbanks the grand Kabaragoya holds court among lizards— but if you want to swim at Mount Lavinia, or fly kites on Galle Face Green, or ride horse carts in the Jaffna peninsula of your ancestors, or bear a child in Colombo General Hospital, or sleep in Cinnamon Gardens under a mango tree, or beg in the Borella Market, or ride for historical reasons on patrol boats in the Bay, or stilt-fish off Matara down South, just remember here everywhere there is only man burning and woman burning here everywhere in shallow graves in deep graves floating out of salt water washing down the sands the dead have tongues the dead have ears tongues are speaking to ears What are they saying? What are they saying? Tell us, brown bear bolting out of your cave. Tell us, leopard leaning on your branch. Tell us, flamingos. Bend your necks and pour wine pour wine Hoopoes, kingfishers, cranes, have you got your messages on the bill, are you ready to sing? Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Monsoon.

China is made of earth, of sun-dried mud. In this part of China everything is made from the earth: the houses, the walls around cities, and villages, the tombs scattered over the countryside. Even the people. There are hills below that appear to be piles of mud set out to dry in the sun, naked, without a single tree or bush. They crowd around the landscape like the coils of bulging intestines tossed on the ground outside butchers' shops, slowly unraveling. Sometimes we fly so low that we almost touch them. And then I notice that the wind has brushed some kind of pattern into the earth: a mysterious alphabet written in the mud, struggling to communicate something precise. But there is not a single animal or human being in the yellow desert below. Not a single village. Suddenly we are landing: Xian, the geographic center of China, where Chinese civilization was born, in the cradle of the Yellow River. In front of the terminal, three children are playing with a lump of earth: they are bundled up in jackets and brightly printed cotton trousers. I join them in their game until a young woman comes out of the terminal to call me in for dinner. One of the children grabs me by my overcoat, to keep me from leaving. So do the other two, clinging to me, asking me not to go. The young woman comes out again, and yells at them to stop. They let go, disappointed. One of them calls to me as I turn away: Come back soon! We eat quickly and then prepare to take off for Lanchow. My three new friends wave goodbye to me. The littlest one gives me a present: a pebble, a precious gift. In this part of China there are no stones. You have to go to Karelia to find stone, very far north; or to the Caucasus; or to southern Siberia, along the slopes of the Pamir, slanting toward the steppes of Central Asia. I put the pebble in my pocket, to take back home, to show what a precious gift I was given by a little Chinese girl: a pebble from the cradle of Chinese civilization. A civilization made of earth, a civilization without bones, without a skeleton for support. A civilization of assembled customs, which suddenly unravel, dissolving into thousands of separate gestures, thousands of calligraphic icons, thousands of smells, colors, flavors, thousands of different shades. And then just as suddenly they solidify again into tradition, memory, habit. It is this absence of stone, of solid, durable material, which makes China such an exquisite thing. Everything is reflected: an unimaginable number of movements, of patterns, thoughts, images, of which we see the copies in immense numbers, but never the originals. The originals were destroyed long ago. Here are the four elements out of which China is made: Earth, Wood, Porcelain, Silk. The most durable of these is Silk. I should add a fifth element: Poetry, which is the most durable of all.