180 Travel poems

You yearn so much you could be a yacht. Your mind has already set sail. It takes a few days to arrive at island pace, but soon you are barefoot on the sand, the slim waves testing your feet like health professionals. You toe shells, sea glass, and odd things that have drifted for years and finally washed up here. You drop your towel and step out of your togs, ungainly, first your right foot, then the other stepping down the sand to stand in the water. There is no discernible difference in temperature. You breaststroke in the lazy blue. A guy passing in a rowboat says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” And it is. Your body afloat in salt as if cured.

Walking at El Pulguero, a tarp shines next to the dog track. The dog track a bowl similar to the Colosseum, but with steel poles subdividing the voyeurs and attending bidders, tickets yellow and flapping in their hands. Greyhounds on the billboards    ... I walk under the stands. Bracelets in a jumble under the black- marker-scribbled advertisement brown board. It exemplifies the innocent rebuttal to being cultured by my particular country — the country of my birth, though not quite my teaching. The Cuba of the womb, of the in-walking-distance- of-the-beach land in my memory, with shouts beside our houses at the corner belonging to the distribution agency. Fruits, mangoes, milk, soy beef, when that traveled our way, divided and partitioned by an old minibus with a man in an apron and a smudged baby blue shirt. I remember soda bottles being carried off up our streets, but by who I don’t remember. Too vintage a memory to properly retell. Orangey glued to the burn of sunset on time that young inside — I as well draw from that very same exclusion, a pleasure from this participating memory. My childhood was a happy one, albeit the pangs existed, sharp like a battery, violent, sorrowful, but elastic, coming back at night home, be it dark inside the house. This indictment, the personal exclusion goes timid up my skin and neck. At the Pulguero or not, I’ll find something to bother about. It is that time, turbulent and worrisome until later. It is just not only this place. And so I reap from the crystalline sky, the mangled trees, the faux marble and jet furniture with gold filigree forming a subtle Chinese dragon what I can. The gold iron floor lamps. The off-brand running shoes — Fila, but not really. Always apart from what includes me. Vaguely includes me, is chummy enough, falling out of the tether when more incisive probing corners along. And so in my cooperation- less demeanor, I shuffle further into the flea market, never benefitting from the seductive resignation of allowing everything a true potential buying power. • The baby marmoset gurgles when belly-rubbed. Deserted by its mother, the video lector tells us. The YouTube bubble incarnadine in the corner. A hibiscus, a bee dropping from its flight. One dreams it could be okay to keep the little monkey for an alarm clock in the a.m. A gang of marmosets intertwines among the branches. The ground heaves an ash coloring. I bogey my apprehensions on the little primates flinging. Bug-eyed, I read their spastic jerking as uncohesive with my stock of reality. • The stony wheel gurgling in its solar pickling. Moss underhand, the water running its cataracts of limpid murk. The wheel has cracks in the stony center. • A frittata offered to us by a resident. He’s a culinary student. It was surplus practice. And oats on the bread loaves also in the offer. He’s a kind gentleman, toughened by who knows what. He’s staying here at the shelter and I’m too coward to ask about his life. Like a scouter of fumy billows, we all happen upon the hits which we must report to someone. And god knows how they’ll take it. • I listen in on the praxis applied to the nexus in accelerating, intimate make-out fondling. I feel it with every go at the mouth and lips, teeth testing their courtship at submittal, effusive biting. • The phone shelly, an onyx coat warm in the jacket pocket. A regulator’s annual finish like a yearling passerine flickering on the computer screen.

In the Egyptian café in London, I drank coffee with men smoking hookah. Draw in, breathe out. The cup was small, the coffee harsh. I had to catch a train from Marble Arch. A still point, Byzantine, one star in a galaxy of trillions, I had to find my friends. Who cares what happened? I moved like a bat, darted, skittered towards the river. An old lady inching towards her complex screamed when I tried to help her with her walker. It was my life. The rooftops fracture. If I hadn’t jostled the mosaic maybe I could stop the picture. Buildings of stirred beach glass. Cresting sunsets comb the face, refine the land. The world goes sad. Like now? Like now. Even the ancients felt slips, skips in experience plotted as mathematical fact.

Offshore, the Apocalypse stays contained to one island and its church. Venice's ruler's out wedding himself to the ocean while I'm ankle deep in the Adriatic, eyes raised to a book unencumbered by words: A Bible that reads from East to West. Guidebooks want only to see it as ceiling—the Basilica San Marco, where Christ's hands open on wounds embedded with rubies, and priests hold back the sea with brooms. I'm taking on incense, bowing at altars dragged out of Constantinople, sloshing across marble sacked from Jerusalem. Offshore, the sea's a bride bought with a fist full of diamonds the Doge throws into the deep— a sign of his true and perpetual dominion. Then why does walking into this church mean stepping into the ocean? The sea is a dog— Priests throw in bones just to placate it. The year's nearly 2000, but the millennium already hit once on the island Torcello, a kind of plague the Venetians contained. 999 years, and the dead still crawl from dirt towards their radiant bodies, they still gather up missing limbs: arms, legs, hands sharks and beasts keep regurgitating. We do what we know— But Christ never wanted to manage resurrections in Venice. Underdressed in the flesh from dead civilizations, he moves among us in Byzantine skin. I'm getting close to this God worshiped only by tourists. He picks at the wounds on his crucified body, the injury scabbed over with jewels.

In Tunis we try to discuss divorce And dying but give up to lounge With rug merchants under a plum tree. From its corner the lamb’s severed head Watches the flies drink from its eyes And its fat disappear into the fire. The light rinses the edge of your sandal, The two wasps that ornament the blur Of screened window. My grandmother Would have loved a night like this. In the wind chimes I can hear her tea cart With its china rolling through Cook Street’s Stony yard one summer when I was always Thirsty, and she moved like a figure On a clock from my lawn chair to the cart, Or swabbed me with alcohol, or cut My hair with the straight razor. I was a week out of the hospital. Beneath my breasts an incision was crossed With stitches of surgical thread. The scalpel came so close it gave My heart a quick kiss. I nearly died. Years later I can still see the skin Flutter on the inside of my left breast And my heart limps like a great uncle Who, because he was a Jew and lame, Was dragged by cossacks across the steppes. He became a friend asking a favor Of a horse who ran so hard, so perfectly Hard, that the green grass rose to meet him.

The guests are floating in the lobby, walking but also gliding to the front desk then away, checking in, checking out, muscular souls adorned in cotton, wool, and rayon, chewing the future inside their heads, slicing the air with ironed pleats, avoiding the camera at every turn so as, so as to get it right this time, which is the first time. “First cut, best cut!” the director shouts since this is also a silent film for the deaf and therefore everyone. His aim is to get the cast to see what they’ve been missing, to disregard the very sounds that they don’t hear to begin with, but would notice immediately if they were gone. See how they glide on the ether above the floor. The insouciance, Lord. The insouciance! They are all here in the magic of the set, every soul in the guise of a guest going about her business, a rendezvous here, as assignation there, the solitary sipping at the bar. Someone striking appears at the door. The rain outside beats down on the streets with terrible force until all you can hear is the roar of the sky as it passes above, and then below, on its narrow tracks.

Au silence de celle qui laisse rêveur . —René Char By boat to Seurasaari where the small fish were called vendace. A man blew a horn of birchwood toward the nightless sea. Still voice. Fire that is no fire. Ahead years unknown to be lived— Bells from the tower in the all-at-once, then one by one, hours. Outside (so fleetingly) ourselves— In a still mirror, in a blue within where this earthly journey dreaming itself begins, thought into being from the hidden to the end of the visible. Mountains before and behind, heather and lichen, yarrow, gorse, then a sea village of chartreuse fronds. Spent fuel, burnt wind, mute swans. We drove the birch-lined highway from Dresden to Berlin behind armored cars in late afternoon, nineteenth of June, passing the black cloud of a freight truck from Budapest. Through disappearing villages, past horses grazing vanished fields. The year before you died, America went to war again on the other side of the world. This is how the earth becomes, you said, a grotto of skeletons. In the ruins of a station: a soaked bed, broken chairs, a dead coal stove. White weather, chalk and basalt, puffins, fuchsia and history shot through with particles of recognition: this one wetted down with petrol then set alight, that one taking forty rounds, this other found eleven years later in a bog. In the station house, imaginary maps, smoke chased by wind, a registry of arrivals, the logs of ghost ships and a few prison diaries written on tissue paper. Do you remember the blue-leaved lilies? The grotto, the hoarfrost, the frieze? Through the casements of glass hand-blown before the war, a birch tree lets snow drop through its limbs onto other birches. Birch twigs in wind through glass. Who were we then? Such a laughter as morning peeled its light from us! You said the cemeteries were full in a voice like wind plaiting willows—fields in bloom but silent without grasshoppers or bees. What do you want then? You with your neverness, your unknown, your book of things, you with once years ahead to be lived. Your father believes he took you with him, that you are in an urn beside your sleeping mother but I am still writing with your hand, as you stand in your still-there of lighted words. Such is the piano’s sadness and the rifle’s moonlight. Stairwells remember as do doors, but windows do not— do not, upon waking, gaze out a window if you wish to remember your dream An ache of hope that you will come back— the cawing flock is not your coming. Did you float toward Salzburg? A wind in the mustard fields?—or walk instead beside me through the asylum in Krakow? Hours after your death you seemed everywhere at once like the swifts at twilight. Now your moments are clouds in a photograph of swifts. In the hour held open between day and night under the meteor showers of Perseid we held each other for the last time. Dead, you whispered where is the road? There, through the last of the sentences, just there— through the last of the sentences, the road—

For you can travel with a screaming red rolling bag and float unnoticed on conveyors, through terminals or you can lug half a moose rack from Maine to Minnesota, carry it like a broken wing through airports as my friend Gro did, and draw only the curious touches of children waiting at gates. But dare to travel with a guitar and invite confessions from strangers in pinstripe suits of garage band summers, invite winks,gotcha smiles, and devil's horns rock on gestures. Invite finger points and winks, the long tongue licks, and the rubberneck glance to check if you are someone famous. To dare to travel with a guitar is to mark yourself charismatic megafauna of the airport terminal. Old friend, what else could I do but carry you? I have stored you in closets, propped you in corners, hunched over you late-nights, staring perplexed at the mysteries of your neck. Body of my body, string of my strings, see how the world began to hum and sing that day at thirteen when I opened the big birthday box.

I was in Asia Minor in pursuit of distant honor in a suit of finest armor in a forest of pine or planks. I was not lost. Regina (my sextant) stared into the refiner’s flare as evening grew maligner. I was in Kazakhstan collecting rarest poppies. My capstan gave out. I could no more withstand the tides than fall to the rattan mat like Tristan sailing emptily to his mutant island. I was in greater Ghana harvesting marijuana with soul-strafing Tatiana, the local swan—a mortal one, a prize among the fauna. (There should have been a lawn a- gainst her.) You see, I was in Corinth fabricating synth- etic absinthe. I was adamant. The trophy I chased for the ninth night of days was Cynth -ia, succumbing at the plinth. Then to Argentina I set forth with Ekaterina a diminishing ballerina. She pled for fina- steride, having seen a parrot turn bright green u- pon my mythic ocarina. I was in Tel Aviv. Viv- ian (my pigeon) and I were feve -rish from bouts of griev- ous liv- er malaise. We must have been naive -r than a hibernal beave -r, for soon I was in Canada as ever. Had no plan; not a home to hide in, nothing human. Ada (vulgar bird) went wan, bade a screeching goodnight to her one God, a soapstone strap-on. Alone, I ran a do- zen tests: None truer, none sadder.

I came to encounter a coyote I left all sorts of things behind You couldn’t get on a plane unless you traveled light Back then there were weight restrictions for planes, they don’t have them any longer, American bodies have no restrictions, they’ve become so big that there aren’t restrictions on the weight of bodies or luggage any more, but back then, I can’t even count how many times I picked up my bags and stepped on the scale, no matter how many times I weighed myself, I still wasn’t the least bit lighter Not knowing what else to do, I took out my books Then I took out my clothes Then I went to the bathroom and defecated Then I took out more clothes Then I threw up Then I took out more books Then I stripped off all my clothes, held my bag, and stood on the scale, but I wasn’t the least bit lighter Know what I mean? That’s what it means to go on a trip That’s what it means to leave the place where you live Trips and then more trips There are things you need to carry with you to survive Not knowing what else to do, I called my husband, filed for divorce, talked to my children and told them Mommy wouldn’t be home for a while, in other words, it was only after I abandoned my relationships, my attachments, and even my language that I was light enough to get on the plane, when I arrived, all I had was a few changes of clothes, some cash, my passport, my visa waiver, my credit cards, and an 
international driver’s license In California, the sky was blue, there was nothing but seashore, wild land, and housing developments, it was hazy and hard to see in the evenings, it was as if everything was immersed in mother’s milk, my toes got cold, I bought some socks, but after wearing them three days, the cheap things were ready to fall apart, I looked long and hard at them, feeling like a coyote (Yeah, I tell people I came alone But that is not entirely true I was always thinking about the coyote The two of us traveling together) I saw dead raccoons I saw dead skunks I smelled them too Someone I met the first day said to me The whole place smells like skunk, must be a dead one somewhere It was an unfamiliar scent, but now I know it well The whole place smells like skunk, must be a dead one somewhere I know to say that to people now In any case, I didn’t see Any coyotes (Two traveling together) Someone in the street Told me to get the hell out of here Why had I come? I couldn’t find what I wanted, I had come so far but,get the hell out, this isn’t the place where the coyotes are, they’re farther away, in deeper places, where there is nothing, where there is much more emptiness So I headed east From the western edge of the continent to the east The interstates With odd numbers run north and south While even numbers run east and west Those in the 500s are the bypasses for I-5 (north-south) Those in the 800s are the bypasses for I-8 (east-west) I took I-5 south to I-580 I went further south to I-8 then went east East, east, east And even further east In Arizona, I took I-17 At Flagstaff, I took US Route 89 I dashed into a roadside motel, slept, and woke And started driving again The morning light shone brilliantly Each time I stopped to fill up with gas, I bought some brownies, each individually wrapped, I tore off the wrappers with one hand and ate them as I drove, the ridiculously sweet lumps stuck to the roof  of my mouth, when I stopped in front of a motel that night, my fingers didn’t want to leave the steering wheel, at the registration desk, the words I needed to say in English didn’t rise to my lips, even though 
I knew them all too well (Two traveling together) There was a woman standing at the side of the road, I called out to her in broken English, asking her what was the matter, she answered in what was also broken English Would you mind taking me to the nearest gas station? She sat in the passenger’s seat I’m Navajo Where are you from? From California, I answered No, that’s not what I meant What tribe are you from? she asked (Two traveling together) From Kayenta I took US Route 163 toward Monument Valley I had heard that coyotes lived there long ago That it’s an amazing place, the moon rises, the sun sets I imagined it would be like seeing the ocean But when I got there, it wasn’t like the ocean at all Rocks soared into the air Rocks, rocks, even more rocks Red rocks In the dust I watched the sun set over them By the time I got back to Route 163, the sun had sunk deep beyond the horizon, the only thing I could see was the road in front of me, 
I drove on looking for a place to sleep, but I didn’t see a thing, there wasn’t anything to see, air rushed through my cracked window, 
letting out a long, thin, high-pitched whistle Hii-iuu-uuuuu Hii-iuu-uuuuu Like a reed flute My thin, hard window was slightly open, the wind rushed in but couldn’t escape Hii-iuuu Uuu-uuuuu Uuu-hiiuuuuu (Two of us heard it) I drove a long way before spying a large motel, I saw the vacancy sign as I approached, I thought I’d have to drive for hours and hours before finding a place to sleep, I thought I wouldn’t stop, that I’d drive all night without stopping, but the place I found was part of a chain you see in every city, the bed was big and deep, and there was lots of hot water in the tub (Two of us were there) The next morning The car was completely filthy The whole thing was covered with bright red dirt and sand The windshield was covered with the splattered bodies of countless insects No one knew I had slept there, nor that I was leaving, nor which direction I was headed, no one knew It was a day that invited Death along the roadside I hadn’t even driven for five minutes before I saw it — A single, dead coyote Lying on its back, legs in the air (It was both me and My travel companion, too) Translated from the  Japanese