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I take them home with me, the opera, the stolen tea
My poems "Fasti" and "Cherries in Winter" have been accepted by Heliotrope and Goblin Fruit, respectively. Look for one of these later this month, and the other at its appropriate season.
For the fun and profit of pixel-stained technopeasants everywhere, I offer my poem "Postcards from the Province of Hyphens," written in April 2002 and published in Hadrosaur Tales #21 in December 2004. I am just returned from traveling: it fits.
Postcards from the Province of Hyphens
for Luis Ellicott Yglesias
I.
No barbed wire barred our path. Where the roads met,
a turnstile stood open to the wind and faint salt
flavor of the sea beyond the hills, looking less
like a border checkpoint than the museum remnants
of some highroad preserved for eyes accustomed
to four-laned asphalt, stations and sirens,
the quiet governmental lean over the shoulder
before the bags are unzipped, the sneakers removed,
the clothes unfolded and lifted to the light
and replaced again in apologetic, tired earnesty.
When we drew our passports from our pockets,
riffling confirmed identities like a hand of chancing
cards, the man at the gate began to laugh; he shook
his head and said, put those away. Soon enough
we'll know who you think you are. And then you'll know
who you might be. We shuffled; whispered worries;
wind blew his hair back, grey as frost or desert
dust, and he shaded eyes the rich, illegible color
of butter melting over gold. We conferred. One by one
the turnstile creaked to let us through. Simpler
to go around the thing entirely; we crossed
without thinking, subway familiarity, and imagined
the sea was that much nearer for the single step.
No buses to meet us, no tour guides, no runway
and no police. When we looked back, someone's dog
was trotting away from the abandoned gate: lean,
grey, tongue between its teeth in a golden-eyed
grin. Somebody took a picture. Long after,
we looked it up. Coyotes by the sea. Who knew?
II.
No names for the streets that maze their way down to the sea; your feet know them already. Meanwhile, your head knows it's lost. Find a phone. Call to let them know you're in. From your window, your gaze travels over the crowded roofs—strange land of slates and aerials, tar-beach gravel and copper rusted green, flash of light from slanted panes and somebody's laundry jouncing colorful in the wind—to the plain of the sea pleating sunlight like shattered glass, scored with small boats that raise painted sails to the turning curve of the air. Watching the wind change, you lose track of what you're saying, you have to apologize, you hang up and forget for a moment that you don't know quite where you are. You write yourself a note, leave it for tomorrow. In the street below your window, a squeezebox shapes a Scottish tune; by the time you go down, to find out who's playing, the musician has gone. You hum the tune as you walk, your thoughts tide-tossed, piecing themselves together as you trace your own way through the music. Underneath the fern arch of a streetlight, its lamp bronze-cast into a mermaid holding a shell of light in her outstretched arms, you stop short at the remembrance: you heard that song when you were eight years old; you can even remember the way the sunlight parted the air as you listened, as you sang. You begin to laugh. Maybe you should be mortified; if passers-by look at you, their smiles share your amazement, nothing more, nor less. Still laughing a little, shaking your head, you begin to follow the shifting wind through the streets, patching the alien into the always known, taking your first steps into unexpected country: you are your own guide.
III.
I never found the embassy. An old woman
called to me from underneath an awning
in a little side street, beside a bookstore
where I'd stopped to look for a map
or a traveler's guidebook; I stepped
out of dusty, lettered shadow into afternoon
to see her face, like a princess of Meroë
in polished jasper, the deep setting of her eyes
like my grandmother's in old photographs.
From the stall's wooden brackets, brightness
dangled. Glass bottles glittered sunlight
from blown, handled shapes: riverbed blue,
salt-green, medicinal brown in the angled
light; unstoppered, spiraling in the breeze.
What's in those? I asked, pointing. Secrets,
she said, sand-sugar sidestep of her voice
that caught me where I breathed. What kind?
Find out, she answered, and would not take
my money. Instead, a long-stemmed bottle
the color of sinking summer's twilight
cool between my hands, I told her about
my grandmother, immigrants' daughter
in college at sixteen, actress, sculptor,
psychologist but for her dissertation
researched and left unwritten; she spoke
five languages that I remember. Slowly
memory gathered: crisp hair she let grow out
white as I grew older, deep voice husky
with years of cigarette smoke, strong
broad-fleshed face tactile as warm earth,
hands to urge form and story out of inked
or pencilled paper, watercolors, welded
metal . . . Under a sky like lavender glass,
between the backswept wind and the sea
folding to foam on the shore, I filled
the bottle with sand, cloudy sea-glass,
nautilus shells coiled hollow and smaller
than my littlest fingernail. Keep it,
she said, when I tried to hand back her gift
weighted with tide-cast and memory. It holds
your secrets now. Together we ate dinner
in her unwalled garden, watching
constellations scatter themselves into sight,
milk-spill over storied space; I forgot to look
for a hotel and slept the night beneath her
roof, beside her red-haired granddaughter.
IV.
He asks for a flag to send home to his son, young and intent collector of arbitrary, international keepsakes: stamps carefully parted from their envelopes, coins to clink in the hand and stack by continent, bills bright with commemorated strangers, even hotel soaps, and once a towel that should have stayed in Spain. Handfuls of countries lie slid and strewn in the top drawer of his dresser. He no longer has a place to keep his socks.
He looked for the visitor center, found instead a woman waiting on a dust-warm corner: for the bus, for a roofed shadow to cross her feet with the morning and tell her the time. She wears no watch. At his shy question, she unslings her backpack, answers readily. The colors of our flag are red and black. You can get one anywhere. The uncompromising, unexpected colors startle him, even as he thanks her; overhead, clouds sift the sun and a wind blows up the streets sideways out of somewhere as he turns to go, as she says, Also blue and green. He blinks. And yellow, honey-color. Sometimes purple, almost indigo. White. The color of slate. The color of a freckle. It depends . . . What day is it? The bus comes, trailing exhaust and the smoky sideslip of saxophone music, before he can check his watch and tell her.
Near the bus terminal, where he walked as the morning lengthened, he finds a store selling hand-high Ganeshas alongside first editions of James Joyce, blue and white candles, hand-copied playscripts, drachmai and denarii, and a scarf striped like a kindergarten rainbow, which he buys. For payment, he shares how he spent one summer in a maple tree, dreaming he would die like a fallen leaf if ever he touched the ground. For receipt, the proprietor recounts a childhood, lifelong hunger: to grow up into Wonder Woman, or maybe Tarzan.
When he addresses the package at the post office window, he realizes that he has forgotten his zipcode. He writes instead, For my son, and hands the gift over to the woman from the bus stop. She postmarks it and smiles. I told you, she says. Anywhere.
V.
This is where you make prophecy. This is where
lies become truth told, and the truth is young
and beautiful. This is where children eat words
like bread, like salt, like that one cold winter
when you had to duck your head as you walked
for fear of bumping into a frozen word; you never
heard such a cacophony as that spring. This is
the house of double edges, the banked river
spilling into the leveled sea and its seven
layers, the fusion point of fire and water
that never keep a single shape, poised between
earth and air. This is the home of yes and no,
where maybe lies down to sleep and always
rises up in the morning: never say forever.
This is the underside of the spoken, the other
side of the seen, under the rose and the blooming
moon, under the sun and the slipping stars,
on which everything balances, against which
nothing remains the same. This is where
your bones and your fears and your children
are rooted: this is what joins all words together.
Applause scattered for the storyteller, when he
finished speaking; flowers and coins dropped
on the paving at his feet, ribbons, photographs,
one woman who stooped to place a thumbnail bit
of carved bone carefully on the curb, before
straightening to ask, So that means we're where?
Where we are, the old man responded. Why don't
you tell me? Her hands tightened on her camera.
How am I supposed to do that? I don't even
live here. The storyteller turned the carving
over in his palm—a seal—and smiled. You do now.
VI.
From a distant land, we learn our way home: hand
over hand, heart over heart, until we forget
where one skin ends and another begins. We leave
our signposts in photographs, travelers' checks,
trinkets to remind us that we have journeyed
when we are home, to remind us to return
as we journey. We write these stories
on stiff paper that crumples in the hand,
ink that smears under sweat or rain, swift
as the spoken word on the ear: no guarantee
that any letter will make it home alive
to tell the tale we have learned in telling
like every good liar, transforming it again
in the hearing: the indrawn breath, the opening
gaze that pulls the words like scarves
from our mouths, our fingers, our postcards
stamped, checked, certified worthy and legal
to carry our news and new-learned lives
across the border, to carry the border back.
VII.
Wherever we walk, we stand at the crossroads.
Whatever our choices, we tell ourselves home.
For the fun and profit of pixel-stained technopeasants everywhere, I offer my poem "Postcards from the Province of Hyphens," written in April 2002 and published in Hadrosaur Tales #21 in December 2004. I am just returned from traveling: it fits.
Postcards from the Province of Hyphens
for Luis Ellicott Yglesias
I.
No barbed wire barred our path. Where the roads met,
a turnstile stood open to the wind and faint salt
flavor of the sea beyond the hills, looking less
like a border checkpoint than the museum remnants
of some highroad preserved for eyes accustomed
to four-laned asphalt, stations and sirens,
the quiet governmental lean over the shoulder
before the bags are unzipped, the sneakers removed,
the clothes unfolded and lifted to the light
and replaced again in apologetic, tired earnesty.
When we drew our passports from our pockets,
riffling confirmed identities like a hand of chancing
cards, the man at the gate began to laugh; he shook
his head and said, put those away. Soon enough
we'll know who you think you are. And then you'll know
who you might be. We shuffled; whispered worries;
wind blew his hair back, grey as frost or desert
dust, and he shaded eyes the rich, illegible color
of butter melting over gold. We conferred. One by one
the turnstile creaked to let us through. Simpler
to go around the thing entirely; we crossed
without thinking, subway familiarity, and imagined
the sea was that much nearer for the single step.
No buses to meet us, no tour guides, no runway
and no police. When we looked back, someone's dog
was trotting away from the abandoned gate: lean,
grey, tongue between its teeth in a golden-eyed
grin. Somebody took a picture. Long after,
we looked it up. Coyotes by the sea. Who knew?
II.
No names for the streets that maze their way down to the sea; your feet know them already. Meanwhile, your head knows it's lost. Find a phone. Call to let them know you're in. From your window, your gaze travels over the crowded roofs—strange land of slates and aerials, tar-beach gravel and copper rusted green, flash of light from slanted panes and somebody's laundry jouncing colorful in the wind—to the plain of the sea pleating sunlight like shattered glass, scored with small boats that raise painted sails to the turning curve of the air. Watching the wind change, you lose track of what you're saying, you have to apologize, you hang up and forget for a moment that you don't know quite where you are. You write yourself a note, leave it for tomorrow. In the street below your window, a squeezebox shapes a Scottish tune; by the time you go down, to find out who's playing, the musician has gone. You hum the tune as you walk, your thoughts tide-tossed, piecing themselves together as you trace your own way through the music. Underneath the fern arch of a streetlight, its lamp bronze-cast into a mermaid holding a shell of light in her outstretched arms, you stop short at the remembrance: you heard that song when you were eight years old; you can even remember the way the sunlight parted the air as you listened, as you sang. You begin to laugh. Maybe you should be mortified; if passers-by look at you, their smiles share your amazement, nothing more, nor less. Still laughing a little, shaking your head, you begin to follow the shifting wind through the streets, patching the alien into the always known, taking your first steps into unexpected country: you are your own guide.
III.
I never found the embassy. An old woman
called to me from underneath an awning
in a little side street, beside a bookstore
where I'd stopped to look for a map
or a traveler's guidebook; I stepped
out of dusty, lettered shadow into afternoon
to see her face, like a princess of Meroë
in polished jasper, the deep setting of her eyes
like my grandmother's in old photographs.
From the stall's wooden brackets, brightness
dangled. Glass bottles glittered sunlight
from blown, handled shapes: riverbed blue,
salt-green, medicinal brown in the angled
light; unstoppered, spiraling in the breeze.
What's in those? I asked, pointing. Secrets,
she said, sand-sugar sidestep of her voice
that caught me where I breathed. What kind?
Find out, she answered, and would not take
my money. Instead, a long-stemmed bottle
the color of sinking summer's twilight
cool between my hands, I told her about
my grandmother, immigrants' daughter
in college at sixteen, actress, sculptor,
psychologist but for her dissertation
researched and left unwritten; she spoke
five languages that I remember. Slowly
memory gathered: crisp hair she let grow out
white as I grew older, deep voice husky
with years of cigarette smoke, strong
broad-fleshed face tactile as warm earth,
hands to urge form and story out of inked
or pencilled paper, watercolors, welded
metal . . . Under a sky like lavender glass,
between the backswept wind and the sea
folding to foam on the shore, I filled
the bottle with sand, cloudy sea-glass,
nautilus shells coiled hollow and smaller
than my littlest fingernail. Keep it,
she said, when I tried to hand back her gift
weighted with tide-cast and memory. It holds
your secrets now. Together we ate dinner
in her unwalled garden, watching
constellations scatter themselves into sight,
milk-spill over storied space; I forgot to look
for a hotel and slept the night beneath her
roof, beside her red-haired granddaughter.
IV.
He asks for a flag to send home to his son, young and intent collector of arbitrary, international keepsakes: stamps carefully parted from their envelopes, coins to clink in the hand and stack by continent, bills bright with commemorated strangers, even hotel soaps, and once a towel that should have stayed in Spain. Handfuls of countries lie slid and strewn in the top drawer of his dresser. He no longer has a place to keep his socks.
He looked for the visitor center, found instead a woman waiting on a dust-warm corner: for the bus, for a roofed shadow to cross her feet with the morning and tell her the time. She wears no watch. At his shy question, she unslings her backpack, answers readily. The colors of our flag are red and black. You can get one anywhere. The uncompromising, unexpected colors startle him, even as he thanks her; overhead, clouds sift the sun and a wind blows up the streets sideways out of somewhere as he turns to go, as she says, Also blue and green. He blinks. And yellow, honey-color. Sometimes purple, almost indigo. White. The color of slate. The color of a freckle. It depends . . . What day is it? The bus comes, trailing exhaust and the smoky sideslip of saxophone music, before he can check his watch and tell her.
Near the bus terminal, where he walked as the morning lengthened, he finds a store selling hand-high Ganeshas alongside first editions of James Joyce, blue and white candles, hand-copied playscripts, drachmai and denarii, and a scarf striped like a kindergarten rainbow, which he buys. For payment, he shares how he spent one summer in a maple tree, dreaming he would die like a fallen leaf if ever he touched the ground. For receipt, the proprietor recounts a childhood, lifelong hunger: to grow up into Wonder Woman, or maybe Tarzan.
When he addresses the package at the post office window, he realizes that he has forgotten his zipcode. He writes instead, For my son, and hands the gift over to the woman from the bus stop. She postmarks it and smiles. I told you, she says. Anywhere.
V.
This is where you make prophecy. This is where
lies become truth told, and the truth is young
and beautiful. This is where children eat words
like bread, like salt, like that one cold winter
when you had to duck your head as you walked
for fear of bumping into a frozen word; you never
heard such a cacophony as that spring. This is
the house of double edges, the banked river
spilling into the leveled sea and its seven
layers, the fusion point of fire and water
that never keep a single shape, poised between
earth and air. This is the home of yes and no,
where maybe lies down to sleep and always
rises up in the morning: never say forever.
This is the underside of the spoken, the other
side of the seen, under the rose and the blooming
moon, under the sun and the slipping stars,
on which everything balances, against which
nothing remains the same. This is where
your bones and your fears and your children
are rooted: this is what joins all words together.
Applause scattered for the storyteller, when he
finished speaking; flowers and coins dropped
on the paving at his feet, ribbons, photographs,
one woman who stooped to place a thumbnail bit
of carved bone carefully on the curb, before
straightening to ask, So that means we're where?
Where we are, the old man responded. Why don't
you tell me? Her hands tightened on her camera.
How am I supposed to do that? I don't even
live here. The storyteller turned the carving
over in his palm—a seal—and smiled. You do now.
VI.
From a distant land, we learn our way home: hand
over hand, heart over heart, until we forget
where one skin ends and another begins. We leave
our signposts in photographs, travelers' checks,
trinkets to remind us that we have journeyed
when we are home, to remind us to return
as we journey. We write these stories
on stiff paper that crumples in the hand,
ink that smears under sweat or rain, swift
as the spoken word on the ear: no guarantee
that any letter will make it home alive
to tell the tale we have learned in telling
like every good liar, transforming it again
in the hearing: the indrawn breath, the opening
gaze that pulls the words like scarves
from our mouths, our fingers, our postcards
stamped, checked, certified worthy and legal
to carry our news and new-learned lives
across the border, to carry the border back.
VII.
Wherever we walk, we stand at the crossroads.
Whatever our choices, we tell ourselves home.
no subject
And thank you for sharing such a beautiful poem--"sea pleating sunlight like shattered glass" made me feel like I was back by the ocean again.
no subject
I'm very glad!
no subject
no subject
You're a good reader.
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Thank you so much for posting this.
no subject
Thank you! I feel that I should ask if I can excerpt your comment for back-cover text sometime . . .
no subject
Once I get my hands on a copy, I'll write a proper review. *nodnods*
no subject
no subject
Thanks!
no subject
And congratulations on the sales.
no subject
Thank you! Of all my poems, "Postcards . . ." is still one of my favorites. I think I got it right.
no subject
I agree. ;-)
no subject
no subject
Thank you! Heliotrope is my first acceptance there, and Goblin Fruit is always awesome, so I am pleased.
no subject
Soon enough
we'll know who you think you are.
heh
no subject
: )