180 Travel poems

I love roads: The goddesses that dwell Far along invisible Are my favorite gods. Roads go on While we forget, and are Forgotten like a star That shoots and is gone. On this earth 'tis sure We men have not made Anything that doth fade So soon, so long endure: The hill road wet with rain In the sun would not gleam Like a winding stream If we trod it not again. They are lonely While we sleep, lonelier For lack of the traveller Who is now a dream only. From dawn's twilight And all the clouds like sheep On the mountains of sleep They wind into the night. The next turn may reveal Heaven: upon the crest The close pine clump, at rest Ancl black, may Hell conceal. Often footsore, never Yet of the road I weary, Though long and steep and dreary, As it winds on for ever. Helen of the roads, The mountain ways of Wales And the Mabinogion tales, Is one of the true gods, Abiding in the trees, The threes and fours so wise, The larger companies, That by the roadside be, And beneath the rafter Else uninhabited Excepting by the dead; And it is her laughter At morn and night I hear When the thrush cock sings Bright irrelevant things, And when the chanticleer Calls back to their own night Troops that make loneliness With their light footsteps’ press, As Helen’s own are light. Now all roads lead to France And heavy is the tread Of the living; but the dead Returning lightly dance: Whatever the road bring To me or take from me, They keep me company With their pattering, Crowding the solitude Of the loops over the downs, Hushing the roar of towns and their brief multitude.

Northward I came, and knocked in the coated wall At the door of a low inn scaled like a urinal With greenish tiles. The door gave, and I came Home to the stone north, every wynd and snicket Known to me wherever the flattened cat Squirmed home to a hole between housewall and paving. Known! And in the turns of it, no welcome, No flattery of the beckoned lighted eye From a Rose of the rose-brick alleys of Toulouse. Those more than tinsel garlands, more than masks, Unfading wreaths of ancient summers, I Sternly cast off. A stern eye is the graceless Bulk and bruise that at the steep uphill Confronts me with its drained-of-colour sandstone Implacably. The Church. It is Good Friday. Goodbye to the Middle Ages! Although some Think that I enter them, those centuries Of monkish superstition, here I leave them With their true garlands, and their honest masks, Every fresh flower cast on the porch and trodden, Raked by the wind at the Church door on this Friday. Goodbye to all the centuries. There is No home in them, much as the dip and turn Of an honest alley charmingly deceive us. And not yet quite goodbye. Instead almost Welcome, I said. Bleak equal centuries Crowded the porch to be deflowered, crowned.

Someday our buried life will come to this: a shaft of sunlight touching the Etruscan surfaces, the basin still intact as if awaiting hands. How many centuries sequestered is an expert's guess, you tell me. I admire the tiles some craftsman spiraled in the ceiling's dome detailing Neptune's beard. Or someone's. What will they say of us, who have no home (we like to say) but one another? When they pry our hearts apart and excavate the sum, is that the place we'll lie? Where the words lie?

So you see why it could not have been a more humble moment. If there was any outward sign of regalia It might have been the twilight crowning of the day, just then, A perfect moment of dusk, but changing, as a wave does Even as you admire it. Because the southbound stop Mirrors the one northbound where we so often find ourselves At the beginning, southbound’s return holds the memory Of northbound’s setting-out, and the grassy median between With its undisturbed trees defines an elusive strip of the present Where no one lives. After twenty-eight years of the trip, It’s like two beakers of colored water — one green, one blue — Have poured themselves back and forth, because On one side we are tinted by remembering the other. But this aspect of the journey, at least, we know we will repeat. As dusk cohered that moment — aquas, pinks, violets — Just at that moment as I was returning to the car A woman came the other way, her two young daughters Holding her hands, and the gloaming sparkled around them So that I froze, as they were backlit, starry, They were the southbound reminder of who I had been beginning The trip. She didn’t look like me, but what I did recognize Was her clarity of purpose, in what Sharon Olds called the days of great usefulness, making life as nice As she could for them, always writing the best story, And also, beneath her skin, living with delight as quiet As the shoots anchoring grass beneath the earth. I walked back to my car. My husband sat in the driver’s seat, Our weekend’s luggage thrown in back. Tell me we really had those girls, I said, and that they held my hands like that. When I got home I pictured her helping them each into bed — I knew it was Later than she had hoped — then reading Each section of the paper’s terrible news, finally alone.

A spring day oozes through Trastevere. A nun in turquoise sneakers contemplates the stairs. Ragazzi everywhere, the pus in their pimples pushing up like paperwhites in the midday sun. Every hard bulb stirs. The fossilized egg in my chest cracks open against my will. I was so proud not to feel my heart. Waking means being angry. The dead man on the Congo road was missing an ear, which had either been eaten or someone was wearing it around his neck. The dead man looked like this. No, that. Here’s a flock of tourists in matching canvas hats. This year will take from me the hardened person who I longed to be. I am healing by mistake. Rome is also built on ruins.

Costa Rica The bus arrives in the orchid heat, in the place where coffee grows like rubies in the valley’s black soil. We disembark, walk in twos so we don’t slip on the genesis mud. The woman next to me carries three cellphones as gifts for cousins and a bucket of chicken to share. How is it that I have come this far with nothing, that I am empty- handed in this country of blessings? A procession of rust-colored macaws glides above us. Their ashy shadows draw crosses onto all of our heads.

It was a beach like all beaches, only perhaps more beautiful. And the sand was pink not red. We would arrive in caravans, hampers overflowing with food and drink like Aziz and his party on the way to Malabar. The colonials and their servants away on an outing. We would stop under thatch umbrellas, towels and tablecloths spread out against the sea. My mother in her skirted swim suit surrounded by fathers of other children, her olive skin lit through her straw hat. They would laugh and drink beer and leer while the children did the usual beach things, boring futile tunnels to China, running at waves and then away, daring each other to be swallowed. I would go out by the forbidden rocks and pick off oysters, then give them to the men to pry open, cover with lime juice and suck dry. Once, I saw my mother sucking an oyster out of another daddy’s hand. Her dappled face bobbed and smiled and her tongue searched the shell for pearls.

Jamaica, 1960 Ignoring the local reliquiae— neoclassical arches in ruin, courtyards, their fountains toppled, prados flourishing in prickle-weed, esplanades no longer level enough to collect rainwater, much less respect for the Imperio de España tarnished by an islander’s mock-British accent— two fisherman returned at sundown. Antiquaries themselves, these fishermen schooled in the currents, the tide, the tunneled limestone of the coral reefs, preferred the graceful curves of the £. At the landing, five children, single file, marched away the birds like soldiers, the learned lyrics escaping their lips: Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves.

Dear Folks, (Smile) Enclosed, is the Ordinary River. It is called “That Devil,” In whose name the locals are baptized. Finally that river twists Like a hurt thing— They say it’s nothing. It has become a new road In a naked place. Then, I am nothing And it is that dream I dreamed I dreamed. Sincerely, ~ Hello, I have just passed “Doubt,” It is near “Milk Teeth,” And “Nothing,” and “Falling Out.” There are flowers and evidence Of ambiguous winds. “Doubt” is like a man Walking in his sleep, seriously. Offhand, it reminds me Of a Jamesian novel With the motives, the motives, the motives. Have Mercy, ~ Say, To get to Innocence, You take the narrow trail From Deep. You squeeze into the mountain’s waves. If you meet savage rock, It is the wrong way. Turn left. . . There, then, in our hearts’ Honeymoon, lay I. Queequeg ~ J.P., Today is Friday. We are still on the hill Called Spirit of the Wind But we are down real low Like new flame Just to be close. Dad ~ Baby G., Sunday, And what you are probably babbling I seem to see, (I.e.) at 60 mph This is the alfalfa field Of my heart. There is no museum here, And in a convertible, Where birds can sing, Anything is possible. Dad ~ Milton, There is a mountain called Can She is blind with snow But all seers are blind What we need In the morning when we always see her And are always reborn Is a magnificent horn And the strangely uneven voice Of her life Thanks, ~ Bill, I checked this out. . . You know that ridge up there Is north, because you know For no reason (except this). A great wind blows. Behind it, the stars come out Virtually human. And here you are, apparently Crude, like the sound Of a breaking string That seems to come from the sky. So Long,

The limit of the song is this prelude to a journey to the outer islands, the generative sentence, waltz project, forms, qualities, suns, moons, rings, an inside-outside then an outside-inside shaped with her colored clays. The days yet propse themselves as self-evident, everything there everything here and you are reading in a way natural to theatre a set of instructions that alters itself automatically as you proceed west from death to friendliness, the two topics upon which you are allowed to meditate under the first broad drops of rain. The planes will be piloted by ancestors who have come back to life. Why the delay.