A Pretty Sight (4 page)

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.

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,

this will be either

the speech of his life or words

that are never uttered.

Though he's no pacer, there

he goes on Penn Ave., ditching

the ride to a deli

with the government driver,

insisting he'll take

the few last blocks on foot.

He wants the air

of a summer night and an uncluttered sense

of the quotidian.

The stars might pull at time

like taffy out there, exhaling light,

but it's reassuring to know

that in the suburbs

someone's washing dishes, a curtain

is lifted by the breeze

and surely there's a midget team

looking for a homer under bug-infested

ballpark lights.

At the meat counter, he watches

them shave a sheaf

of pastrami onto the waxed sheet, pop

bread and mini packs

of mustard into paper sacks,

provisions

for what's going to be

an all-nighter in a toe-to-toe

with the typewriter.

If only he could peel

back the top of his head

to reveal slick words laid neatly

and glistening like that

cache of silver found

when a sardine key gets twisted round.

But all he can see

are two dead astronauts

canned in welded metal,

their ingress above the module's ladder

like Jacob's climb to heaven

and everything a question of how

anyone would spend their last few hours.

Would
you
stay inside, waiting till

the oxygen goes critical, tapping

the dead switch for the ascent engine

in a lonely Morse? Or, rather,

pull an Oates, and wander out into the cold

for one last stroll,

the whirling white like tickertape.

Safire slows

at the thought of it. All night

he'll haunt his office, taunted

by shades of scenario,

the moon's milky glow

hung in its pure potential,

stalled like those satellites of paper

balled up into the waste,

the future an empty shape

still left to fill with explanation.

Berna, whose friends call her Bass Face,

looks more like a sylph with a grudge.

Her head, half-shaved and delicate, stares

and unsettles you while a fat beat drubs

through her ad hoc
PA
. She owns

this club, one of the few with decent sound

in war-scarred Pristina.

As the latest power cut ends,

ravers drift back to the dance floor

while a drum ’n’ bass rumble is laid down

over Springsteen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark.’

No pop snobs, they’ll shout and pump hands

at the first moaning notes, as the dj

digs in to beat-mix a long set

of minimal techno, dubstep and house.

He doesn’t scratch; this is
way

post-Detroit. It’s fucking Kosovo, 2008;

even the potholes have potholes.

Air strikes from
NATO
sent Slobodan

packing, but left each street

with a trail of bomb damage, blackouts

and overtaxed hospitals. Call that history;

I’m sure the kids would love to give

a shit, but just now they’re too busy dancing,

each beat a real rush, every move a one-fingered

salute to the past. The trance scene’s across town,

but all the
DJ
s mix with a shared set of decks.

There’s Legoff, Toton, Goya and Likatek.

And Berna, whose friends call her Bass Face.

Your massive metallic sports watch

bristled like a gunship,

so wearing it was your mutinous raspberry

to the elegant dress, necklace

and ring they were burying you in.

Your brother confided you’d set the alarm

but hadn’t said for when.

It was perfectly grand and inappropriate,

an antidote to the bathetic pageant

we’d kitted ourselves into with awkward suits

across the solemn tones

of the parlour’s coloured carpet.

This morning I’ve been listening

to some Buffalo Tom and ‘the Man in Black,’

calling back the summer

we hung in hope for you,

the autumn, the winter, the spring ...

I housesat all your things, most in boxes

for the move to Winnipeg you never made,

a lease you had to break, those vacant rooms

still waiting like Virgil’s version

of the Cumaean Sibyl’s cave,

her prophecies writ on oak leaves

and kept in order, unless some mortal

should open the door and scatter them.

From Christmas through the end of March

I’d been trying to find some clever way to start

a poem called ‘The Tennis Courts in Winter.’

I passed them every day on my snowbound lurch

up Delaware and Cartier, the east-side court

still posting rules of play, the stiffened board off-kilter

where the zip ties snapped. But every chance

I’d get to jot the title down was stopped by white below.

My unwritten poem had become the tennis courts,

frozen to a stop inside a chain-link fence,

blocked and blank, the obliterating snow

like revelation in reverse, which, of course,

is just forgetting. But I don’t forget, and don’t know why

the title haunts me; it might have something to do

with potential. Yesterday I thought of it again,

though it’s been years since I moved away

to this other neighbourhood and the snow

has come and gone at least a hundred times since then.

All those selfies I posted

look really great. So spontaneous. Arm

tentacled through bad light past the frame,

an umbilical toward my ego.

Freud, meet Descartes. Intentions,

like airports, look deceptively the same,

then you get a security pass

for the doors just off the escalators.

Inside my mind, there’s another mind,

like a prop warehouse,

dramatically cluttered at times.

I go there, for the wind machine

and free-standing door

I just slam and slam.

There was little time left to be young

and stupid, so I hitched due west

on the 17, cold thumb to autumn.

Outside Sault Ste. Marie, ground mist

and the turned-up collar.

I slept in a ditch.

A man from Provence waved

me toward a camper van; we traded

goals of getting to the coast,

though he talked of Fresno,

Oaxaca, and the way south to Chile.

North of Superior, the going

was rough on gear and brake, flashes

of lake between terraces of the Seven’s

granite and pine. Past dark,

we found a side road, parked, ate

sandwiches, bet almonds on cards,

talked origins of Mad Hatter

and Winnie the Pooh. Inside

my sleeping bag, with no bleed

from the usual streetlights,

it was an inkwell cave.

It was medieval night

and I ceased feeling any links

to what was real, just a stinging

trust at being in the middle of nothing

but my life. It was like that for days,

until I was dropped off near Golden,

the boot knife velcroed to my ankle,

symbol of how luck and stupidity

ride the same edge.

No one knows what’s going on

in your head; we just watch

the slow stir behind your eyes

like granola through yogourt.

Outside the clubs we spilled from, taxis

ushered us from our shame

to fraught mornings we’ll have to own

for all the good they do.

And I still haven’t heard from you.

You’re not nowhere. You’ve eaten

the crumbs of some trail.

Odd jobs and broken homes

deflate us. The air isn’t all gone,

though we sag with our lies

like used mattresses. And anything

improves but not without effort.

Horseshit doesn’t just turn into pizza.

You’ve stopped answering doors,

disappear further behind
DVD
s

and baseball stats. Like you,

I’m no natural, but I hold on with

dumb hope I might poke one

out of the infield on a funny bounce.

Our trust is more than shaken,

though we’ve been through the wars,

the nights, the birthdays.

I’m grateful, it’s true,

and no one can speak for you.