180 Travel poems

You can get there from here, though there’s no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you’ve never been. Try this: head south on Mississippi 49, one- by-one mile markers ticking off another minute of your life. Follow this to its natural conclusion—dead end at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches in a sky threatening rain. Cross over the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand dumped on the mangrove swamp—buried terrain of the past. Bring only what you must carry—tome of memory, its random blank pages. On the dock where you board the boat for Ship Island, someone will take your picture: the photograph—who you were— will be waiting when you return.

In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain. Does it rain in Spain? Oh yes my dear on the contrary and there are no bull fights. The dancers dance in long white pants It isn’t right to yence your aunts Come Uncle, let’s go home. Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart an artless fart in the home. Democracy. Democracy. Bill says democracy must go. Go democracy. Go Go Go Bill’s father would never knowingly sit down at table with a Democrat. Now Bill says democracy must go. Go on democracy. Democracy is the shit. Relativity is the shit. Dictators are the shit. Menken is the shit. Waldo Frank is the shit. The Broom is the shit. Dada is the shit. Dempsey is the shit. This is not a complete list. They say Ezra is the shit. But Ezra is nice. Come let us build a monument to Ezra. Good a very nice monument. You did that nicely Can you do another? Let me try and do one. Let us all try and do one. Let the little girl over there on the corner try and do one. Come on little girl. Do one for Ezra. Good. You have all been successful children. Now let us clean the mess up. The Dial does a monument to Proust. We have done a monument to Ezra. A monument is a monument. After all it is the spirit of the thing that counts.

What sudden ill the world await, From my dear residence I roam; I must deplore the bitter fate, To straggle from my native home. The verdant willow droops her head, And seems to bid a fare thee well; The flowers with tears their fragrance shed, Alas! their parting tale to tell. ’Tis like the loss of Paradise, Or Eden’s garden left in gloom, Where grief affords us no device; Such is thy lot, my native home. I never, never shall forget My sad departure far away, Until the sun of life is set, And leaves behind no beam of day. How can I from my seat remove And leave my ever devoted home, And the dear garden which I love, The beauty of my native home? Alas! sequestered, set aside, It is a mournful tale to tell; ’Tis like a lone deserted bride That bade her bridegroom fare thee well. I trust I soon shall dry the tear And leave forever hence to roam, Far from a residence so dear, The place of beauty—my native home.

I wanted the gold, and I sought it; I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. Was it famine or scurvy — I fought it; I hurled my youth into a grave. I wanted the gold, and I got it — Came out with a fortune last fall, — Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it, And somehow the gold isn’t all. No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?) It’s the cussedest land that I know, From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it To the deep, deathlike valleys below. Some say God was tired when He made it; Some say it’s a fine land to shun; Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it For no land on earth — and I’m one. You come to get rich (damned good reason); You feel like an exile at first; You hate it like hell for a season, And then you are worse than the worst. It grips you like some kinds of sinning; It twists you from foe to a friend; It seems it’s been since the beginning; It seems it will be to the end. I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim; I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow In crimson and gold, and grow dim, Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming, And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop; And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming, With the peace o’ the world piled on top. The summer — no sweeter was ever; The sunshiny woods all athrill; The grayling aleap in the river, The bighorn asleep on the hill. The strong life that never knows harness; The wilds where the caribou call; The freshness, the freedom, the farness — O God! how I’m stuck on it all. The winter! the brightness that blinds you, The white land locked tight as a drum, The cold fear that follows and finds you, The silence that bludgeons you dumb. The snows that are older than history, The woods where the weird shadows slant; The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery, I’ve bade ’em good-by — but I can’t. There’s a land where the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And deaths that just hang by a hair; There are hardships that nobody reckons; There are valleys unpeopled and still; There’s a land — oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back — and I will. They’re making my money diminish; I’m sick of the taste of champagne. Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish I’ll pike to the Yukon again. I’ll fight — and you bet it’s no sham-fight; It’s hell! — but I’ve been there before; And it’s better than this by a damsite — So me for the Yukon once more. There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting; It’s luring me on as of old; Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting So much as just finding the gold. It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder, It’s the forests where silence has lease; It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

Two women on a train sit beside me. I am young and the world is flying and I am watching. One of them is frosty. The other turns like a leaf to hand me something — it looked for all the world like a page. I thought at the time that it needed me and I was right. The letters fell into place and simple flowers grew. Now it talks unceasingly in long white verses as if at a wedding, something women understand and gently want and then regift. I myself agree with Herbert, who in a dark mood conjured the mushrooms underfoot unseen by bride or groom and with him I say, Perhaps the world is unimportant after all, though this is not what one discusses with women on a train, no matter how long the journey, or untroubled the land.

All the way north on the train the sun followed me followed me without moving still the sun of that other morning when we had gone over Come on over men at the screen door said to my father You have to see this it’s an ape bring the little boy bring the boy along so he brought me along to the field of dry grass hissing behind the houses in the heat that morning and there was nothing else back there but the empty day above the grass waving as far away as I could see and the sight burned my eyes white birds were flying off beyond us and a raised floor of boards like a house with no house on it part way out there was shining by itself a color of shadow and the voices of the men were smaller in the field as we walked on something was standing out there on the floor the men kept saying Come on over it’s on a chain and my father said to me Don’t get too close I saw it was staring down at each of our faces one after the other as though it might catch sight of something in one of them that it remembered I stood watching its eyes as they turned away from each of us

The only time I’ve been to Switzerland was early one spring on a train through the mountains. There was a lake—I guess it was Lucerne? Above me cliff tops ridged with snow fanned out so that where I stood at the edge of the platform light bathed the empty siding all around with a diffused opalescence off the water. Behind the station must have been a town, spires of churches, municipal arcades, and coffee squelching in the fogged caf és. I never saw the place, though I remember thinking this is Switzerland and took a mind-shot of the pines, breathing in the cold as the porter whistled at us to reboard.

1 Desert heat, high clouds, and sky the color of lapis. On this journey, anything seems possible, so we stop by an ancient cottonwood to kiss. The beauty trembles, doesn't say a word, just watches me, so open. Small birds fly by, flock in the shady tree above us. What settles in her heart? What congeals? Hope? Despair? Far off, the river churns in its sandy banks, swallows veer, turn in fiery air. Will these kisses seal her to me? I her lover, she my wife? Is all of this a dream, my whole life? 2 She is just this side of wonderful, and suddenly the glamorous world fills itself with shining and we laugh at highway monuments that explain how hard the trek had been for Franciscans in the Indian wilderness, poor fellows— conversion is the devil's own work! Then the stones of her dream turn up under her feet, the back of a huge land turtle. I know we must be circling Paradise because the ants enter the fleshy petals of the roadside flowers with evident joy and purpose (oh, my dark, pretty one). 3 Music, my adored. When is there never music? My accordion puffs up with drinkable melodies. I spill her tunes into your listening ear, one after the other: the squeeze-box enters the dance of the plaintive gypsy with its hard rhythms, lilts the back- breaking labor song the worker croons to earth, warbles romantic notes of dissolving borders. You melt like a woman beneath her lover's touch. Music is happy and pitiless when it sets fire to combustible souls. Even the raspy bandoneon's voice is lyric. 4 Sacred. Sacred. Sacred. Sacred. (Speak in a whisper.) We slip into this space half cognizant. The land is very large indeed: bones of the earth worn down, though she is a living thing. See how she exposes her grace? Antelopes graze on the far plain—their high, white tails—the red soil throbs its slow heartbeat, and the blue sky clears so smartly, perfectly, like radiance. Are the ancestors near? What can we know? We decide to wander around this prairie, mistaken for Utes, buy commodities in little towns. 5 Late afternoon we head west along the willow-banked Malheur after the long curve of the Snake River plain. (Above the falls where the Shoshone went to pray we soaked our feet in cold water, and I observed the arch of her brown foot.) Rabbitbrush and sage along the highway, juniper on far hills and bluffs. Sundown, and dusk falls over the wide basin of land. In Burns we eat eggs in a cafe, take a room in the Motel 6. In the dark, I can see her black hair, black against the pillows. Its clean scent makes me think of corn. At dawn, I hold her and there are kisses. Then more kisses. Then more. The day is cold; a north wind blew last night. But the land is open. Rain falls in showers of light. 6 Her hand on my thigh, my shoulder, in my hair. She leans over to kiss my cheek. We look at each other, smile. For miles we travel this way, nearly silent, point with eyes or chins at the circling hawk, the king- fisher on the snag above the swollen creek. One night I weep in her arms as she cries,"Oh, oh, oh!" because I have touched her scars lightly: throat, belly, breasts. In that communion of lovers, thick sobs break from me as I think of my love back home, all that I have done and cannot say. This is the first time I have left her so completely, so alone.

The suite on the side facing away from the sea is the suite with the fireplace and two plasma screen tv s. Better luxury compensates for lack of view. Before the perpetual gas fire, stunned as if into stone, entering as you enter your Anne Brontë, a world muted, chemically arranged, I try renewal of a mind remade. Mind is book is water is fire, all change. Fear is the wake-up call at three, too early, for planes. Airport quiet. Leave the hotel without baggage, fly direct to Geneva. They await you there. What occurs is only the turning of a page, imagined for screen. Unseen is greater. Is attested to, as we rise in Mass. Water should be avoided by all those who get into difficulty with ease, and cats. Searching for the blackberry in the fur-lined coat, I roam and ring, opening a closet, from which tumbles a victim, providing a fitting climax. Mrs. Pontifax is staying across the hall. The glamour. She is the Minister of Finance’s daughter. She sees the cold winter sea rise from her vantage. Our age is blinded by celebrity, seeing with the gilded orb of a bronze, dull god. The domes of our room service cool after we have slaked and fed. As you read this becomes the first one written under the influence of an anti-depressed self, whatever that is to be. What is, is taken off a shelf, a remaining wrack that half emerges from the brackish ruins of the year. Will love reunite? Will Ireland be solvent? All nights, holiest, least holy, be still, be silent. Ireland, Christmas2009

1 This one’s on Route 80 south of Water’s End, Arizona, speeding anywhere else when I’m tired of reading the yellow dash-and-dash, highway’s old adage. Sunglasses coaxed yellows to reds, though there are none where I look into the camera. Behind me, a blur of roadside cactus called “succulents,” for the moisture they save for years. The sky cut from indigo to blue to white until I wished for the sunset’s truncations to stay there, thinking, too, that the verge of its curve could flirt me into the absolute. 2 Moving on, in Bangkok, I’m always crouching in these, wanting to keep my head lower than his to show I know he’s Mother’s father. Asked, on going in, not to say anything if he brought up the distant old dealings, metallic shrillings of long-dead women, asked to ignore what they’d do for him, offerings he could almost eat a meal on. And this from the aunt who was asked to leave the family when she was young, “for the sake of the children,” drawing the bad lot. No one told me why. That’s my foot in the foreground. That was the daylight’s assignment of unwavering white, the background. These are only the circumstances. As for an end to the glare getting the last word in, there was none. 3 He’d set the machine on the tripod himself, return to read the newspaper, wait for the click, and want to keep it, the stop-time, that is, the pretending to read the newspaper. Held half in the shadow fans of the palm tree, half in a browbeat of sun. So that the machine had to catch him quickly, the clarity, the shot of his legs as suddenly: brown leather sheaves holding bone. 4 Say the moment arrives at the frame, and she who is about to enter the picture approaches. At the end of the road trip, she turns back in the hopes of memorizing what’s been passed, the colors that changed, the mirror-winks, the real moisture, invisible, along side mirage. His face was a once-darker shade of dust in his country. Some days he’d set the aperture, the opening, as wide as he could, to ruin the picture, to let all the light in.