across shipping lanes to another,
the marvel of Rome raided for newer money,
while the snail
plods its slime trail
twenty-seven metres each century.
•
For those who cite The Matrix, Rocky
and the CGI’d prequels to Star Wars
as good reason to hate them,
remember the Aeneid is also a sequel.
And remember a thousand years
separate Homer and Virgil, only
two thousand more between Virgil
and us. War that follows rage, the care
of fields and horses, some details might
still ring so true that he seems
near each time we hear them.
Hungry, Virgil crosses the bridge
to Trastevere, adjusts his toga
beside a line of smart cars, catching
the whiff of dinner venting through
trattorie shutters. In a doorway,
he watches the chef bent over
a scratched counter, who steadies
then chops an onion’s soft, rotten
underside until he frees crisp layers
lambent at its core, sauté s them
in olive oil with garlic,
the sizzle and smell
so familiar the poet might forget
Maecenas isn’t waiting to debate
rhetoric or Aeneas’s fate
in the gardens up the Esquiline Hill.
•
Where does the Danube start?
Magris searches in his book.
He visits Furtwangen
with friends, finds a brook
that drains into a tributary,
the exact source
an argument for centuries, inch
by sodden inch. Near a clear spring
on a hill, they reach a dip
rinsed with rivulets,
and follow a slope to a house
where they knock
at the threshold, squint into a window.
Feet shuffle through half-empty rooms
to the door
which opens on a perturbed old woman
not interested in questions.
But since they’ve
come all this way, she listens, squints
and points to a rough ditch near
a woodshed
gushing cold water. ‘The water reaches
the gutter,’ she explains,
‘through a basin,
which is constantly full because of a tap
that no one ever succeeds
in turning off.’
•
I never tire of arriving.
At Pamukkale, the wind chucked
leaves and palm fronds as we crossed
the main square.
Barefoot, we ascended
the travertine rock, its stalactites’ drip
and slow froth of calcium
like an overpoured pint of Guinness
cooled to dollops of white-rimmed shelves.
Ruins at the top,
the once-bustling spa town of Heirapolis,
its paving stones still rutted
by the wear of cart wheels.
Here you can walk past the colonnades
of antiquity’s shops. Wealthy Romans
took the hot springs here, retired
and died, their sarcophagi
accumulating to another kind
of stop for tourists north of the baths.
Shells of modern tourism too, lobby fragments
from the 1970s, more evidence of
how eras settle, retreat,
each strata engraved as ghost structure.
This abandoned front desk, the green
marble floor at dusk, light like soft copper,
haunting as any wheel rut
crowded with weeds –
you can find them if you follow
these unmarked goat tracks
further still.
•
‘If I cannot bend the higher powers,
I will move the infernal regions.’
A favourite quote of Freud’s
and the Secessionist painters of Vienna,
lovers of the glimpse, the held-back, what
beats at your insides to claw a way out.
I wrote it down looking at Klimt’s Attersee
in the Leopold Museum south of the Ringstrasse.
The words are Juno’s in Virgil’s Aeneid,
a summation of alternative options
for those cast outside the party line.
The ode to Plan B.
Attersee might be landscape
as subversive frill,
the lake’s abstract surface
stroked with turquoise
over green and blue underpaint
like the bangled skies of Van Gogh.
Klimt’s lake
stretches, infinitely if it could,
to the top edge of canvas
and the dark, heavy shape painted there,
an island or shoreline that by limiting
the infinite has given it value.
•
I thought I saw Sophie Scholl
in a club underground
in Warsaw
that we found by following smokers
down an alley and steep, concrete stairwell,
through tobacco fog to air-sucking bass.
She was nodding at the mosh edge,
beer clutched in her hand
in that post-Cold War dance hall.
I wanted to ask how she got there –
roaming the rebuilt
squares of Mitteleuropa – but she looked
too happy to bother
with dredging up the past. Anyway, what
would be the question?
Is everything changed, or the same?
knowing any answer won’t change
the hour of closing time. In that basement’s low ceiling
and sticky floor, furnished
in the dumpster vogue
of old fridges and mismatched chairs,
Sophie hardly blinked, swigged
her drink, her silence meant
as challenge to ‘put up or shut up’
or just ‘shut up and listen.’
In the speakers’ blare
I left her there.
•
We were returning from the north,
an overnight train
from Sa Pa, sharing a sleeping berth
with two young women from Switzerland.
It was 4 a.m. as the rubbed glow
of the station platform settled in our window.
We lugged backpacks
through the puzzle of Hanoi’s Old Quarter,
amazed at its paused frenzy, dark shops
locked behind metal gates, a few motorbikes
chainsawing past. A cafe opened at 5:30
and agreed to hold our packs
so we wandered to Hoan Kiem Lake
to watch the tai chi groups
balance inner tensions at sunrise.
By then, completely transformed,
the market and streets were stacked
with baskets: crab, pork,
pineapple pyramids, oysters
and sleek trout hawked by vendors,
attendants sweeping park paths
with long, wiry brooms. Police brewed tea
in their dawn kiosk, caps
angled back
off their foreheads
near stereos wired to trees
for the tai chi grannies, conjuring
longevity with techno beats.
Hanoi’s traffic and street life,
no history but the deal, offers
and banter, the good price of fish
caught that morning
in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Fuck silence or permanence.
Fu
ck elegy. Fuck time and pain.
•
Dawn sky, sriracha red,
Chiang Mai lunch, khao soi and mango,
a stockpile of sun before
another carousel of departure level,
the sucker-punch intake of takeoff.
Past weightless snatches of sleep,
the drop
to the terminal bus, that sub-zero palanquin
aloft over road drifts
of Baltic night:
watch as we hurried through snowfall
to brew tea and read in the lamplight
of a Helsinki hostel.
•
Olduvai, really Oldupai,
named for the fronded sisal plant
that grows here. Seen from space,
the Rift’s a patchwork
in algal patina, the gorge
a grey-green collage splayed
with evaporated rill beds,
steep cracks tracking the landscape
like plate sutures on a skull. Snacking
on sandwiches, we sat under
corrugated tin, protected
from the sun’s hazy weight,
rock monolith and broken scrub
hedging the Earth’s curvature.
Three and a half million years back,
three apes, predate of humans,
walked past at Laetoli through drops
of soft rain, the shapes of their prints
left by the ash layer, cemented
in tuff, stable enough to last
as the hot and grey ash fell.
Other marks: birds, a hare,
a three-toed horse
and its foal turning
in the opposite
direction. Dimpling the site,
rainprints too. But this trio, tracks
tagged 61, 62 and 63,
we know walked upright, as a habit;
left no knuckle marks, the gait
a ‘small-town walking speed’
like a stroll through the agora.
Tempting to speculate
about the story of their travel,
a family or hunting group
looking for signs of a water hole
in the wake of the volcano’s
tremors, one set of their prints
nested in the hollow of another,
the way we can follow
someone through snow
to make the going a little easier.
•
On a charity box in the Hanoi airport:
‘For Especially Difficult Children.’
Or ‘We Beg for Silent Behaving’ outside
the Basilica of St. Euphemia
in Rovinj, Croatia.
I mention this not from smugness
but as point of argument. If language blurs
across cultures in the same decade,
how will our songs and stories
translate across ticking inches of drift?
The challenge of Onkalo,
‘hiding place,’ a toxic dump
cored through granite in Finland.
Blasters descend through rock
five kilometres deep,
bore igneous strata, each layer
another geologic age.
So when they drive
their pickups down and walk
through curtains of dust, are
they descending back through time
in corridors designed to be resealed
and forgotten for a thousand centuries?
How silent it will be, down
there, when the ventilation fans
stop whirring,
the new Ice Age crested
and gone, Earth’s surface scoured
like a child’s ribboned aggie found
in the grass near a gravel road.
We’ll have no language
to warn of what we built, no marker
left to explain the world
wiped clear of any signs of us.
‘My bones would rest much easier,’
Virgil wrote, ‘if I knew your songs
would tell my story in days to come.’
•
Let me be quieter. Go
slow and listen.
Near Lake Manyara,
the unhurried swish
of elephants
gnashing through branches
as we sat for an hour
just watching. Ibises rested
in the umbrella acacias,
velvet monkeys
in the grass. Remember
the Ngorongoro Crater?
We stood on its rim
past dusk; uninterrupted herds
of wildebeest and zebra
migrating below
the distant lightning storm.
Go slow, I thought. Listen.
That morning, as we left
Arusha, our truck passed
a group of Masai
headed to town.
‘How do they get around?’
‘They walk. They’ll walk
to Nairobi. You can’t
walk like the Masai.’
The warriors leaned
on their spears, waiting
to cross the red dirt
of the Serengeti road.
Easy to imagine
their indifferent looks
as pre-Homeric,
outwaiting time
with a cubist view,
so looking out
is always looking in,
so wherever you turn,
you arrive just
as you’re leaving,
though I knew
a likely goal in town
might be the internet,
or to change
from dyed shuka
to tailored suits
and a government posting.
•
At the check-in counter at Heathrow,
I took a snap of our backpacks.
Who knows what we really need?
Baggage for some estate lawyer
to inventory, and meanwhile we’re carried
like stowaway snails on shipped marble
through Earth’s shallow atmosphere,
that dark shape near the edge of the canvas.
•
Virgil, don’t be our guide; you wouldn’t
know the way around now.
Wandering below the Palatine
in hopes of a dinner invitation,
you’d need to pause at every turn
between fountains, churches,
papal scavenging
or Domitian’s renos further on.
The Christ thing? Long story;
born nineteen years after you died,
he changed the architecture, to put
it mildly. That’s just the start.
Since I’m buying lunch, let’s stop at one
of these pizza counters that line
the tourist route and I’ll explain
coffee, tomatoes and pasta to you.
Here’s the Pantheon, its columns and porch
propped on the sudden rotunda.
You know the site as Agrippa’s temple,
gone now, yes, but step inside,
they’ve done wonders.
Marvel at the symmetric swirl
of its ceiling tiles, the open dome
tipping light and rain across the stone.
Hey, I know a good fish place
not far from here, just down
from the Campo de’ Fiori, that serves
battered cod and antipasti
with a decent jug of vino sfuso.
Nothing fancy. A lino floor, white linen
thrown across a few rough tables; the waiters
Old World Romans who rush
to shake your hand at the exit.
It’s around here, I swear, somewhere,
though it’s been a couple of years
and you never know
how business will go, I don’t need
to tell you. All that’s fallen or torn down
evades our partial gaze
yet ruins still wait to brush against us
from the afternoons they were raised.
If you’ve asked us to wait
by this intersection, it must be the feel
of something familiar, a turn
in the street where the plastered
porticoes of insulae once stood.
You could close your eyes, cued by pigeon trills,
and hear the cart wheels on basalt,
or smell the reek of garum
before engines interrupt, and cellphones.
Contrails rib the sky.
‘In Event of Moon Disaster’
– William Safire (July 1969)
After Borman,
NASA’s liaison, calls
and urges ‘some alternative posture’
should things go south – unforeseen glitch,
miscalculation,
technical whatever – leaving
Armstrong and Aldrin
stranded on the moon,
does Safire walk or run
to the Oval Office?
The president’s aides rustle
around the furniture, their minds
touchy and tentative
like bees
in a cactus patch.
You can imagine Dick’s face
when advised: cut all
communication, commend
their souls to ‘the deepest
of the deep,’ like a burial at sea.
Then call their wives.
As for text, it’s left
to Safire
to get the spirit right. Christ,
A Pretty Sight Page 3