180 Travel poems

With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas, We sailed for the Hesperides, The land where golden apples grow; But that, ah! that was long ago. How far, since then, the ocean streams Have swept us from that land of dreams, That land of fiction and of truth, The lost Atlantis of our youth! Whither, ah, whither? Are not these The tempest-haunted Orcades, Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar, And wreck and sea-weed line the shore? Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle! Here in thy harbors for a while We lower our sails; a while we rest From the unending, endless quest.

I hate the travel logs that tell you more about the pain than the place, yet here I am again, narrating the same old story to myself time after time. The papers circling in an alley, watched by a hunchback, mimic my plans and their preventer; when an old man treats the drycleaner to a lengthy sermon on spotting, I collect it; bloated clouds spell messages that people stopped hearing long ago, and as for the hag who runs at me, arms open, mouth bleeding? She’s my future, my terrible double. Always I head out, hot for details, and always the details start revolving around brave ingénues who put their innocent hands in wicked bonfires. I could never go for ten minutes without seeing fissures as faces, and I confess a hopeless weakness for the types who come back from travels, gather their fans around and tell them stories of order or of wonder: seashores and meadows sometimes get so muffled and many-voiced that tourists storm in and do their talking for them— It’s addictive, magical, vital. But I’ve observed how, more and more, these promising outings are becoming meta-walks and mechanized phrases: “When I ventured into the outback, how it blared back echoes of me, my bright dreams and tragic uniqueness.” Meanwhile forces of good and evil squirm and flourish under the carpet, mocking the visionary moment’s sweeping appeal. I’ll go on going out for scenes of horror and pleasure, but I’ll start pursuing clues leading to the return of that enormous, fertile ground between shouting and silence.

All zodiac all radar your voice I carried it across the Atlantic to Barcelona I photographed cathedrals cacti mosaic salamanders I even photo- graphed my lust always your voice skimming a woman’s skin mattress springs so noisy so birdlike you filled her room with cages camera bright in my pocket map unfolding in my mind I explored a park leaves notched & enormous graffitied boulders then three men tall & clean closed in they broke open my body with their fists insufferable your red wool cap insufferable the way you walked away from me come back please the buttons on your jacket are finches I wanted to yell as you vanished into a hotel to drink with your friends there was nothing more you could do after my attackers left before I got up I touched my face almost tenderly

The plane is packed and over sweaty heads, rumpled hair, the movie glows in the transatlantic nighttime murmur of priests and nuns and Riverdancers returning home—a baby is cooed by an older mother, a boy feels for his seat in the dark. I’ve read my books already, 2 days traveling, the difficulties technical.I hate that money, says the priest beside me, and he orders another scotch, his third. The Feast of the Epiphany tomorrow, he studies religious journals for a message, writes in a notebook impossibly small.We are having problems with sound, the flight attendant announces, it is not your headset, and so the oceans swell in silence, bright blue tumbles across the screen mutely, foam collapsing over a tiny nimble figure but she darts through to a green glow, sunshine through a veil of wave, her surfboard tense between her feet and the world’s largest ocean. Her ride is long, impossibly long—her hips stay low, a friend drops onto her wave and, together, they glide towards the shore. No music. Just water and that blue. I check the SkyMall catalogue for something I might need and didn’t know. There are reasons I am flying over the ocean, reasons I I wish I were sure of. Someday I might say,yes, I chose him, and it wasn’t wise. Or maybe we’ll be old and surrounded by our own. The screen flashes; the surf is wild, but the bright sky makes me whisper, Hawaii, where nothing could be that beautiful but is. The waves are bigger and she sets out, flowered bikini, hair pulled back in a serious bun. But too soon she’s underwater, arms above her head, spinning down into a champagne sea. The priest asks would I like some English chocolate. I say no at first then say yes. I say, how many Euros for the scotch? The baby Jesus is about to be adored by black men, foreign kings, in fact, tomorrow. They’re stumbling, the Magi, 12 days across an ocean and through the desert. It’s hot so they must travel at night— who wouldn’t? And there was that star, sudden and perhaps a sign. We’ve already tried to get there once, I want to say to the kings. It’s cool in this 747, which later the pilot will land with only one engine. A problem with compressors. But what a sweet, sweet ocean, and those few younger girls who try to ride it. And what a night, warmed by the sun-shocked smell of saddle and sweat, the strong breath of camels. What carved, fragrant trunkfuls born across deserts and ready to be opened before an infant god.

I never much liked forsythia, never liked yellow, but liked the sounds: for     syth       i       a for Kythera for sight for sky for Sylvia. Forsythia made an okay divider between our place and hers. Sylvia used to trod through it to see us too often so we let all of it grow massive and dense hoping she’d go blind in it then hop aboard a bumblebee who’d follow his lovely great queen as she flew to her dream isle of Kythera.

Off with the wristwatch, the Reeboks, the belt. My laptop's in a bin. I dig out the keys from my jeans and do my best Midwestern grin. At O'Hare, at Atlanta, at Dallas/Fort Worth, it happens every trip, at LaGuardia, Logan, and Washington Dulles, the customary strip is never enough for  a young brown male whose name comes up at random. Lest the randomness of it be doubted, observe how Myrtle's searched in tandem, how Doris's six-pack of Boost has been seized and Ethel gets the wand. How polite of the screeners to sham paranoia when what they really want is to pick out the swarthiest, scruffiest of us and pat us top to toe, my fellow Ahmeds and my alien Alis, Mohammed alias Mo— my buddies from med school, my doubles partners, my dark unshaven brothers whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends, ourselves the goateed other.

Tagus, farewell, that westward, with thy streams, Turns up the grains of gold already tried, With spur and sail for I go seek the Thames, Gainward the sun that show'th her wealthy pride, And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams, Like bended moon doth lend her lusty side. My King, my Country, alone for whom I live, Of mighty love the wings for this me give.

Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert: the emptiness there. Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert at seventy-five, leaving all words behind: the cry of the emptiness there. Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert: I can no longer stand the world’s greed or mine. There, in the Taklamakan Desert, the silence of a thousand-year-old skull. Translated from the Korean

As usual, the first gate was modest. It is dilapidated. She can’t tell which bridge crossed the moat, which all cross sand now, disordered with footsteps. It’s a precise overlay of circles on squares, but she has trouble locating the main avenue and retraces her steps in intense heat for the correct entrance, which was intentionally blurred, the  way a round arch can give onto a red wall, far enough in back of the arch for sun to light. If being by yourself separates from your symmetry, which is the axis of your spine in the concrete sense, but becomes a suspension in your spine like a layer of sand under the paving stones of a courtyard or on a plain, you have to humbly seek out a person who can listen to you, on a street crowded with bicycles at night, their bells ringing. And any stick or straight line you hold can be your spine, like a map she is following in French of Tan Tien. She wants space to fall to each side of her like traction, not weight dispersed within a mirror. At any time, an echo of what she says will multiply against the walls in balanced, dizzying jumps like a gyroscope in the heat, but she is alone. Later, she would remember herself as a carved figure and its shadow on a blank board, but she is her balancing stick, and the ground to each side of her is its length, disordered once by an armored car, and once by an urn of flowers at a crossing. The stick isn’t really the temple’s bisection around her, like solstice or ancestor. This Tang Dynasty peach tree would be parallel levitation in the spine the person recording it. Slowly the hall looms up. The red stair’s outline gives way to its duration as it extends and rises at a low angle. In comparison to the family, the individual hardly counts, but they all wait for her at a teahouse inside the wall. First the gold knob, then blue tiers above the highest step, the same color as the sky. When one person came to gain confidence, she imagines he felt symmetry as flight after his fast among seven meteorites in the dark. He really felt like a globe revolving within a globe. Even the most singular or indivisible particle or heavenly sphere will adjust when the axis extending beyond itself is pushed, or the sphere it is within is pushed. What she thought was her balance flattens into a stylized dragon on the marble paving stones. Yet she’s reluctant to leave the compound. Only the emperor could walk its center line. Now, anyone can imagine how it felt to bring heaven news. She is trying to remember this in Hong Kong as the tram pulls suddenly above skyscrapers and the harbor and she flattens against her seat, like a reversal occurring in the poles, or what she meant by, no one can imagine how.

Where they will bury me I don't know. Many places might not be sorry to store me. The Midwest has right of origin. Already it has welcomed my mother to its flat sheets. The English fens that bore me have been close curiously often. It seems I can't get away from dampness and learning. If I stay where I am I could sleep in this educated earth. But if they are kind, they'll burn me and send me to Vermont. I'd be an education for the trees and would relish, really, flaring into maple each October— my scarlet letter to you. Your stormy north is possible. You will be there, engrossed in its peat. It would be handy not to have to cross the whole Atlantic each time I wanted to lift up the turf and slip in beside you.