180 Travel poems

From Stirling castle we had seen The mazy Forth unravelled; Had trod the banks of Clyde, and Tay, And with the Tweed had travelled; And when we came to Clovenford, Then said my " winsome Marrow ," "Whate'er betide, we'll turn aside, And see the Braes of Yarrow." "Let Yarrow folk, frae Selkirk town, Who have been buying, selling, Go back to Yarrow, 'tis their own; Each maiden to her dwelling! On Yarrow's banks let her herons feed, Hares couch, and rabbits burrow! But we will downward with the Tweed Nor turn aside to Yarrow. "There's Galla Water, Leader Haughs, Both lying right before us; And Dryborough, where with chiming Tweed The lintwhites sing in chorus; There's pleasant Tiviot-dale, a land Made blithe with plough and harrow: Why throw away a needful day To go in search of Yarrow? "What's Yarrow but a river bare, That glides the dark hills under? There are a thousand such elsewhere As worthy of your wonder." —Strange words they seemed of slight and scorn; My True-love sighed for sorrow; And looked me in the face, to think I thus could speak of Yarrow! "Oh! green," said I, "are Yarrow's holms, And sweet is Yarrow flowing! Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, But we will leave it growing. O'er hilly path, and open Strath, We'll wander Scotland thorough; But, though so near, we will not turn Into the dale of Yarrow. "Let beeves and home-bred kine partake The sweets of Burn-mill meadow, The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow! We will not see them; will not go, To-day, nor yet to-morrow; Enough if in our hearts we know There's such a place as Yarrow. "Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown! It must, or we shall rue it: We have a vision of our own; Ah! why should we undo it? The treasured dreams of times long past, We'll keep them, winsome Marrow! For when we'er there, although 'tis fair, 'Twill be another Yarrow! "If Care with freezing years should come, And wandering seem but folly,— Should we be loth to stir from home, And yet be melancholy; Should life be dull, and spirits low, 'Twill soothe us in our sorrow, That earth has something yet to show, The bonny holms of Yarrow!"

John F. Kennedy New York City I saw him across the lobby flight 161 St. Louis Albuquerque. Coyote looked in control cool fitting right into the city smiling when a pretty woman passed him figuring out his flight making calculations from behind the New York Times. Slick right down to his Tony Lamas Coyote I’d recognize him anywhere Copenhagen New York Gallup. People say you can dress ’em up but once a coyote always a coyote.

In the southern Adriatic, where the blue begins, We came to rest awhile and play On sun-drenched islands known as Tremiti, Where the breeze blows fresh And pine trees shiver and the salt sea Washes the likes of you and me, In the southern Adriatic, in the wind-blown spray. In the bluest water, just where it begins, We came to play awhile, came to rest On rocky shores of barren coves, As the swells arrived and water splashed And reflected sunlight jumped and shimmered Among the cliffs and overhangs and grottoes, In the Adriatic, where that sort of thing begins. In the clear blue water that the swells bring by Out of the sunny Adriatic Sea, We came to rest and play and bathe ourselves, As the pine trees swayed on the bluffs above And wind dispersed the salt sea spray, In the sunny Adriatic, where a way of life begins. We came seeking an immersion, to find ourselves In waters clear enough to fathom A bottom profoundly blue, to see it seemed All the way to Greece or any other site That water washed as well or sun could so ignite, Came to see ourselves in a world of dreams, That words might furnish what place implies, That place might finish what a word begins. We came seeking clearest water, sunniest sky, Came, you and I, to see what would be seen Immersed in waters consummately blue, In sunlit swells that carried their dark secret, Tiny hosts known as meduse, whose fragile arms Glanced and stung and burned all day And raised the blush that blossomed on our skins, Aggravated by the sun and spray, By our own attempts to hold each other, As we swam out of ourselves and were swept away, In the southern Adriatic, where the blue begins.

Glove box rummages itself & dumps: fuzzy cough droppings & stuck (menthol) among them a misdirectional map intrigues me: say clotheslines’ fripperies hopping the breeze off the alley & garbage lids clanging downhill to the sea: say there in the sea floes of penguins bobbing up to Argentine flamingos. How hard is it to get lost? Listen to lost useless horses whingeing for home & hames, a lost grail stuffed with dirt deaf to human legends long unstrung of sacred tune & lost, children prodded along in the loops of war, hopscotch mistake, the cast stone skipped off the lake instead & lost the tournament to the nice policeman there with the ice cream precinct & his body buddy Dad. Dad declares he knows by the spit & stripe of her this’s no one of his own, his kids mope,& he goes. Ear to ear I must look lucky at last, librarian at the dictionary of things looking-up ever since I hid in the glove box, pretending to be directions.

You will need to state the reason for your visit. Don’t say because I want to walk down old roads and caress stone walls the color of my skin. You will need to state the reason for your visit. Don’t say because the olives are ready for harvest and I will coax the fruit from the trees, press it into liquid gold. You will need to state the reason for your visit. Don’t say because my parents’ house still sits empty on a bluff overlooking the sea, the green shutters my grandfather had just painted remain sealed shut and the army listed the property’s owners as absentees. You will need to state the reason for your visit. Don’t say because I am carrying prayers in my suitcase for a people who wait, and I’ll unfold them embroidered linens of verse and spread them out across the land.

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation. He went flying down the river in his boat with his video camera to his eye, making a moving picture of the moving river upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly toward the end of his vacation. He showed his vacation to his camera, which pictured it, preserving it forever: the river, the trees, the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat behind which he stood with his camera preserving his vacation even as he was having it so that after he had had it he would still have it. It would be there. With a flick of a switch, there it would be. But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities, These pale window box poppies of the laughing class, Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight, Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’s foot, Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert It’s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel, Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing On its way out. Prince Valiant vowed to sew the horizons Into a single idea, to put on the blue dress of distance, Looping past rivers and mountains as one leaps from bed To bed to make loneliness lonely, the suburbs were for him A relief, a pageant of calm desire where he settled, All the king’s horses grazing on forsythia out back While the evening tilts back out of the night, a kindly drunk Uncle, and asks you to stay. Was this the end of traveling? Or just a change in the story over time, as for example how Tous les chevaux du roi become Josie and the Pussycats From one version to the next? So all heroes are deranged By something quite common yet unexpected, a constellation Redrawn and named again through the stars Above the porch don’t shift but seem to sink Through winter’s pitcher of noircotic ink, Leaving a single streetlight that burned happily, Thinking it was the sun, after all it was the day Of the night and turned the world around it, We were good sentences and forgot where we started.

Waking on the train, I thought we were attacked by light: chrome-winged birds hatching from the lagoon. That first day the buoys were all that made the harbor bearable: pennies sewn into a hemline. Later I learned to live in it, to walk through the alien city— a beekeeper’s habit— with fierce light clinging to my head and hands. Treated as gently as every other guest— each house’s barbed antennae trawling for any kind of weather— still I sobbed in a glass box on an unswept street with the last few lire ticking like fleas off my phonecard I’m sorry I can’t stand this, which one of us do you love?

1Once in Mexico an old man was leading on a string—was it a cat? And we saw it was a tarantula sidling along in the dust, writing a message from God for people who thought they knew where creature-life ended. 2We came upon scenes like that, the world back of a lurid pane of glass. Like in Reno—they have emptied Hollywood and ordered the extras and the stars to go get married and divorced in Reno, making up their stories as they go and letting their little dogs decide which machines or churches to put nickels and dimes into. 3One day in a cut quick to the bone it was white, white; and then the world came in. I got a tourniquet going, but the snow had learned a whole new way to look at the sky, as in Maryland in the red fields, how the stones come startlingly white, on the battlefields, the cemeteries, along the gouged-out roads. There history blows about on dandelion seeds. 4On the plains near Wakeeney, above the ground, short of the earth, at the level of the eyes, a sunset ray extended for miles. We drove along it, and let our thoughts down gingerly to touch what happened, where Genevieve lived. She went out of the world, for death. Her town holds quiet in the big plain. Lights witness one by one all over what still abides. There was no one better. Her town, her town, her town, the tires repeat as we go by. 5For those my friends who want me to know, to discover and combine: all my best thoughts I roll up and let fall carelessly. It is better than no one follow even the pattern I look onto the back of my hand, for many visions I haven’t dared follow may gather and combine in a flash. Away off. in a space in the sky, I let the sky look at me, and I look back and do not say anything.

Water opens without end At the bow of the ship Rising to descend Away from it Days become one I am who I was