Just remember that everything east of you has already happened. —Advice on a time-zone chart
I ascend over Paris with a planeload of pilgrims,
none under seventy, all clutching
their illustrated texts of the Holy Land
in which clouds shaped like sheep float
through the Patriarch’s sky. Next to me
a little leathery woman takes out her teeth
and mines their crevices with a handkerchief.
Two nuns across the way wrap up
the dear little salt and pepper as memento.
Pas loin, one tells me, fingering her rosary
and pointing up, when
lulled by motion or distance here you come
leaping out of the coffin again,
flapping around the funeral home
crying Surprise! I was only fooling!
while your lovesick dog chases a car
the twin of yours and lies dead
years back in a clump of goldenrod.
Later, in Rome, in St. Peter’s Square
when the pope comes to the window
leaning out over his faded prayer rug
to bless the multitude, cannons are fired.
Many fall to their knees.
I have seen this before, in the rotogravure,
but not how weary the Holy Father looks
nor how frail he is, crackling into the microphone.
I am eating an orange in the static shower
of Latin when, as coolly as Pascal,
you turn up arranging to receive
extreme unction from an obliging priest
to keep from inhaling his germs. Pigeons
swoop past, altering the light.
I put my hand in your death
as into the carcass of a stripped turkey.
Next, on the lip of the Red Sea
in a settlement as raw as any frontier town
I meet a man from Omaha who has been detained
for nine hours at the border. They tore
the linings out of his suitcases,
they shredded his toilet kit. Tell me, he asks
from under his immense melancholy mustache,
Do I look like a terrorist? We set
out for Solomon’s mines together.
In the ancient desert I stumble through mirages.
The rough red hills arouse armies of slaves,
men wasting away digging and lifting,
dying of thirst in their loincloths.
My feet weep blisters, sand enters the sores,
I bit on sand. On the floor of your closet
smolder a jumble of shoes, stiletto heels,
fleece-lined slippers, your favorite sneakers
gritty from Cape Cod, all my size.
Year pass, as they say in storybooks.
It is true that I dream of you less.
Still, when the phone rings in my sleep
and I answer, a dream-cigarette in my hand,
it is always the same. We are back at our posts,
hanging around the boxers in
our old flannel bathrobes. You haven’t changed.
I, on the other hand, am forced to grow older.
Now I am almost your mother’s age.
Imagine it! Did you think you could escape?
Eventually I’ll arrive in her
abhorrent marabou negligee
trailing her scarves like broken promises
crying you-hoo! Anybody home?
from Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief,, Viking/Penguin, 1982
Leave a Reply