Travels & Journeys

[The giant takes us]

The giant takes us
down. A man with no arms.
Unbreakable.

What made today
is concordant,
transforms
the brief decisive phase we call fear.

I look to that whited-over part and see a face.
Then I look to the black and
see the same face.

There were tunnels… chambers
beneath some of the sidewalks… page after page of places…

The last thing you think of.
Won’ t be my fluffy blonde hair.

The Snake Doctors

IPig

I was in the outhouse
I heard somebody at the pump
I looked out the chink hole
It was the two fishermen
They stole fish

One man gave the other one some money
He flipped a fifty-cent piece up
I lost it in the sun
I saw the snake doctors riding each other
The other man said “You lose”
He took something else out of his pocket
It shined
They had a tow sack
I thought they were cleaning fish
I looked up
I saw the snake doctors riding each other

No One Goes to Paris in August

A Montparnasse August
with view of the Cimetière. A yard of bones.

We wake to it. Close curtains to it.
Wake to its lanes. Rows of coffin-stones in varying light.

Walking here. Late with shade low, low, long.
We’ re passing through, just passing through
neat aisles of gray mausoleums.

(From Paris. Send this postcard. This one.
Calm water lilies. Water lilies.
Nothing colorless.)

It’ s morning. Baudelaire’ s tomb.
Tree limbs casting shadow west.

Hard Work

Tricky work sometimes not to smell yourself,
ferment being constant — constant as carnival sweat
(a non-stock phrase I palmed from a girl from Canada,
a land where I once saw this graffiti: life is great).

And I have tasted myself, especially when I spilled
sinigang all down my arm in a Pinoy workers' caff
in Little Manila. I drank sinigang (is soup drunk?)
in Big Manila too, with all its dead skyscrapers.

Fortune

At a small monastery — or what had been
a monastery — outside Obrégon, we stopped;
you were suffering the hollow nausea of your first
pregnancy, sleeping as best you could
through the thousand miles of pines
and rocky fields of northern Mexico, so I went ahead
through the saddle-colored rooms, past
the broken church and the row of empty sheds,
where Indian women, according to a sign,

To the Returned Girls

Will you read my little pome,
O you girls returnèd home
From a summertime of sport
At the Jolliest Resort,
From a Heated Term of joys
Far from urban dust and noise?

You I speak to in this rhyme,
You have had a Glorious Time
Swimming, golfing, bridging, dancing,
Riding, tennising, romancing,
On the springboard, on the raft —
You’ ve been often photographed.

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