180 Travel poems

I The teacher said inner truth and the chalk said like a fresco inside the earth that no one has ever seen and one day decides to be discovered and begins to breathe— do you know what that means? II The child broke the chalk. The mother said be strong. The child said when I die I want to be a dwarf. III A detective has just drawn a circle with a piece of chalk, a private circle from which the victim will eventually look up, not at random, not at will, but when it calls to her, the chalk, the crushed bones of sea creatures who ringed the earth when it was under water. IV A man sits in the bath house in a deep tub of fizzling yellow water that surrounds every hair on his body and makes it stand upright. When the attendant comes, she will clean the tub by moving her hand slowly around the ring, like a snail. V An atoll is a ring of coral protecting a tureen of plankton. It is easy and Japanese to be sad knowing something is going to pass. He put the ring on her chalky finger. VI Long after chalk had passed out of use, carpenters still felt for it in their pockets and looked aimlessly at the sky. VII The cathedral was roofless. It began to snow inside. A half broken pillar in the nave grew taller.

Of ox and luncheon tongue, six hundred pounds; of Wiltshire bacon, seven-tenths of a ton. Seventeen hundred miles they walked, and it was pony meat that saved them. But one biscuit, this one Of thousands, baked by Huntley & Palmers, a special formulation fortified with milk protein, survives—the men Long dead, and the ponies, whose lives flew through Bullet holes easily over the frozen labyrinth of the Fortuna Glacier, all gone to powder. Found a century later in the wrecked Larder of one of Shackleton's way stations, it remains perfectly nutritious, and sold at a Christie's auction Is worth a thousand-some sterling.We had seen God in His splendors; we had reached the naked soul of man, He wrote. And:This biscuit, said a Christie's director, is an object that really catches the imagination.

The ship, solid and black, enters the clear blackness of the great harbor. Quiet and cold. —The people waiting are still asleep, dreaming, and warm, far away and still stretched out in this dream, perhaps . . . How real our watch is, beside the dream of doubt the others had! How sure it is, compared to their troubled dream about us! Quiet. Silence. Silence which in breaking up at dawn will speak differently.

Long before you see train The tracks sing and tremble, Long before you know direction Train come from, a hum Announces it soon arrive. So we tend to drop on all fours Even before we look left or right. We skip the sleepers or walk Along by balancing on a rail. We talk about the capital Where the train ends its run From the interior stacked with The outsized trunks of felled Trees and open-topped cars of bauxite. We always hide from it unsure What the train will do if we Stand next to the tracks. It flattens our nails into knives, It obliterates any traffic Caught by it at crossroads, It whistles a battle cry, Steam from the engine a mood Not to mess with or else. Rails without beginning or end, Twinned hopes always at your back, Always up front signaling you on, Double oxen, hoof stomp, temper Tantrum, stampede, clatter Matter, head splitter, hear us, Stooped with an ear to the line— greenheart, mora, baromalli, purple heart, crabwood, kabakalli, womara.

The fake Parthenon in Nashville, Stonehenge reduced by a quarter near Maryhill on the Columbia, the little Statue of Liberty taken from the lawn of the high school and not recovered for months, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in the tile maker’s shape of a ship to sail home in, the house in the shape of a ship near Milwaukee where once before the river below rose up to swallow the bank, World’s Fairs where one can enter the cell of a human body or see Paris, London, Marrakech and the Taj Mahal in one afternoon, the headache that may be sinus or bad eyes or allergy or a tumor, the bruise that was blue now yellow the effect of labor or abuse, the cataclysmic event in a personal life not totally forgotten, the memory of doing well that turned to unexpressed anger just because love was everywhere preventing helpless mistakes— achievement and perfection for the first time considered in error, the end of life being life itself, life itself ignorance, we never tire of making the world smaller, looking in doll houses, and a mailman who has picked up every bright piece of glass and tile in forty years of rounds retired to build a house of glass and tile which is his life, no kick coming, while in a suburb of Chicago a leaning tower of Pisa drawn to scale signals a shopping plaza where goods come in from around the world, for the people who live there. And Vico says gods and goddesses are the self writ large— selves to make earthquakes, tornadoes, eclipses, selves to lift the sun— and Vico says all things having been named for the namers, us, we give a chair arms, legs, a seat and a back, a cup has its lip and a bottle its neck, and ever after rivers flow from their headwaters and a well-oiled engine purrs at the center of good feeling. So take your misery down a notch in aches and pains and little diseases, in years of photo albums, in journals of dreams interrupted by mornings, in furniture you built yourself, in copies and imitations, in scale-model wars and families and the age of fancy automobiles. And when once in your life you make the big trip to the original, chances are you’ll mainly see your own face in the glass that protects everything of which there’s one only in the form of its only maker.

Return The taste is strong as ever, figs and cheese and wine. I recall each savor; the taste is strong as ever, even if it will never be quite so fresh again. The taste is strong as ever, figs and cheese and wine. Obverse Two sides of one coin love and worry seem. Both of them are mine: two sides of one coin, two links in one chain, left/right of one brain? Two sides of one coin love and worry seem. Metamorphosis Why does transformation sneak up on us so? In life, not just narration, why does transformation creep up—yes, in slow motion, inexorably, though? Why does transformation sneak up on us so? Technology Where are worry beads now people have cell phones clamped against their heads? Where are worry beads? Ancient human needs, new millennium; where are worry beads? People have cell phones. Fortress Before we reach the top, street sounds fade away. Many steep steps up before we reach the top; just when did they stop? Silence; scalding sky. Before we reach the top, street sounds fade away. Dactylic Tino's counting on his fingers. Syllables and rhyme; a faint Sapphic cadence lingers. Tino's counting on his fingers. Generations of singers keeping, conquering time. Tino's counting on his fingers; syllables and rhyme.

Today in Rome, heading down Michelangelo’s Spanish Steps, under an unchanging moon, I held on to the balustrade, grateful for his giving me a hand. All for love, I stumbled over the past as if it were my own feet. Here, in my twenties, I was lost in love and poetry. Along the Tiber, I made up Cubist Shakespearean games. (In writing, even in those days, I cannot say it was popular to have “subjects” any more than painters used sitters. But I did.) I played with an ignorant mirror for an audience: my self, embroiled with personae from Antony and Cleopatra. Delusions of grandeur! They were for a time my foul-weather friends— as once I played with soldiers on the mountainous countryside of a purple blanket. 2002

EAST OF EDEN is mountains & desert until you cross the passes into India  . It is 3 o’clock in the afternoon or twenty of 8 at night, depending which clock you believe  . AND WEST IS WEST It’s where the cups and saucers are, the plates, the knives and forks  . The turkey sandwich comes alone or with onions if you like The old newspaperman always takes his hat off & lays it atop the cigarette machine; the younger, so-hip journalist, leaves his on old-style . The old man sits down in the corner, puts his hat back on. No challenge, but it’s visible, the beau geste  . The cigarette hangs from the side of the younger man’s mouth, he’s putting himself on  . East of Eden is mountains & desert & every thing creeps up on you & comes in the night, unexpectedly  . when one would least put out his hand to offer, or to defend  .

They all are asleep, below. Above, awake, the helmsman and I. He, watching the compass needle, lord of the bodies, with their keys turned in the locks. I, with my eyes toward the infinite, guiding the open treasures of the souls.

Driving west through sandstone’s red arenas, a rodeo of slow erosion cleaves these plains, these ravaged cliffs. This is cowboy country. Desolate. Dull. Except on weekends, when cafés bloom like cactus after drought. My rented Mustang bucks the wind—I’m strapped up, wide-eyed, busting speed with both heels, a sure grip on the wheel. Black clouds maneuver in the distance, but I don’t care. Mileage is my obsession. I’m always racing off, passing through, as though the present were a dying town I’d rather flee. What matters is the future, its glittering Hotel. Clouds loom closer, big as Brahmas in the heavy air. The radio crackles like a shattered rib. I’m in the chute. I check the gas and set my jaw. I’m almost there.