82. Going Back to California

Yes you swore
you’d never return,
said all that sunshine
was making you soft;
you were blunt to the
glamorous charms of a
bright state by the sea.
Still you knew it for the
black hole it always
would be. No escaping the
center of things, the brightness
all drawn in and the pull
increasing with time. Each
eventual horizon will one day
hold sunshine and San Francisco
on the other side.

81. Widower

Sometime after the fact you tried growing a capsicum pepper plant in the backyard. Something with roots, you thought, but also that yields fruit, that wants to be useful. Isn’t it what we all want? But not too useful: it was a bitter pepper. When the battery in the wallclock died you first thought time was miserably slowing down, but no, then it stopped entirely and here you still were with only a lame clock for company. You didn’t bother to replace the battery. In your dreams you see water. Oceans ask you for their desired hurricanes. You lack speach until you wake. So you put off sleep, residing in the backyard and waiting for the late-summer sun to set, just you and the plant, waiting.

80. Love

Love:
hearing the word “gun”
blanked out
on German radio

79. Quetch (Old Country II)

The first time I got drunk
was at this table,
drinking little fistfuls of
the young, white wine with my aunt and uncle,
waiting for a cousin’s delayed train
to deliver her.
In the morning
my father and I drove
to the old village
and in the graveyard
he told me the stories
written in his language on the tombstones.
We passed orchards of the small,
bruised-purplish fruit my aunt kept
in a bowl on the foyer table.
My father filled his pockets
with quetch and walnuts
from the family house,
empty now, in Schengen.
We sat on the car and threw the pits
and shells in the river.
We want to stay
what we are.
And don’t we:
now forever later here’s
my uncle pulling out the bottle of quetch
my great-grandfather distilled
and measuring it into
little decanted glasses;
it’s mellow after all these years
he says, but you can still taste it
the sweet small fruit
strong language in the mouth.

78. Untitled

On a canalside bikepath
hardly a better interruption
than an idle Shetland pony
could grace even a Dutch
master’s landscape.
He (she? Ignorant in the business
as I am, who knows) casts two
supremely lazy eyes up the
path, enough to stop me,
to debate and finally succumb
to the desire to touch, to
extend a tentative finger or
two towards that shaggy
shock of a mohawk sprouting
from his admirable head.
And, yes, acceptance: none
greater than the blink and
snorted breath of this
remarkable thing.

77. Don’t Rain

Not while I’m still twelve miles
from anything resembling a destination.
Don’t let me be soaked
in my own improvidence and disregard
for forecasts. I would like such
behavior to be rewarded, noted as
courage and, should the venture succeed,
form-breaking insight.
But you can’t have it both ways;
most turns at genius fail even
more often than their more methodical
meteorological counterparts.
So we return to blind hope:
let me get at least to the bridge overpass
before I’m proven wrong.

74. Catalog of a Life-Lover

Maybe you will sit making a list of things
you love about the world
one afternoon in a coffeeshop full of women,
writing first on the list “coffee,”
then “women.”
And by the time you’ve gotten
to “early October in Rotchester” you’ll wonder
what you’ve been doing with your life,
your whole, uninterrupted existence.
You’ll think you should have spent
more time on overnight trains (#237),
but also sleeping outdoors (#120)
and certainly having sex (#17).
17? You’ll surprise yourself, it took
16 other things? But you could not stop
yourself from waiting until you remembered
the phrase to do it justice,
the whole body of the term
as you read in a book once:
“the endless exploration, the ancient
discovery, the long flight
to the new world.”^[1]

[1] Cf. Ursula K LeGuin, “Forgiveness Day”

73. Habit

This is how slowly it happened. One whole day holding the pack, noting how satisfying its corners felt, how certain. It never stopped being surprisingly light, something so sturdy and rectangular should be heavier. But how sturdy was it? That whole first day it shuffled from pocket to pocket, upsetting the normal ordering and placement of pocket-dwelling articles (standard issue: wallter, notebook, pen, change, paper scraps). The next afternoon the wrapping came off, a long ten minutes beside a sidwalk trashcan. Out comes the first of 19 Class A cigarettes, which are known to cause cancer, emphazema, and loss of virility. Two afternoon hours with a cigarette unlit smoldering between fingers walking in and out of department stores and clothing boutiques and down the crowded streets. And every time the pace quicked no, no. Slow the legs down. Don’t walk too quickly, as if there was a rush, or anywhere to go. Savor it.

72. On an exhibit at the Mudam (2)

The body is distended across the room, each particle present at the next particle, each antiseptic run a component machine. Plastic, oilless, clean. Seemingly the antithesis of growth, rather, pointed achievement, and stagnant. Still the green growth interferes, is welcomed, was always necessary; the seedling-generator succinct in its contained world.

71. Old Country

The first time I got drunk
was at this table
when I was 15 and my parents
had gone to bed, I stayed up
with my aunt and uncle drinking
white wine in little fistfuls
waiting for my cousin’s train
from Brussels. The next day
my father and I drove to the Moselle
where the old family graves are, the old
bodies who spoke a language
I don’t, my father interpretting.
Their story is his story and also mine,
I only don’t know the words,
just the places and
outlines on a map.
A generational cartographer.
And now here’s my uncle
pulling the bottle of quech
out at the dinner table,
the one my father’s grandfather made,
all writing gone from the label
and mellowed a little fifty years on
but still bitter,
still strong language in the mouth.