It’s so late I could cut my lights
and drive the next fifty miles
of empty interstate
by starlight,
flying along in a dream,
countryside alive with shapes and shadows,
but exit ramps lined
with eighteen wheelers
and truckers sleeping in their cabs
make me consider pulling into a rest stop
and closing my eyes. I’ve done it before,
parking next to a family sleeping in a Chevy,
mom and dad up front, three kids in the back,
the windows slightly misted by the sleepers’ breath.
But instead of resting, I’d smoke a cigarette,
play the radio low, and keep watch over
the wayfarers in the car next to me,
a strange paternal concern
and compassion for their well being
rising up inside me.
This was before
I had children of my own,
and had felt the sharp edge of love
and anxiety whenever I tiptoed
into darkened rooms of sleep
to study the small, peaceful faces
of my beloved darlings. Now,
the fatherly feelings are so strong
the snoring truckers are lucky
I’m not standing on the running board,
tapping on the window,
asking, Is everything okay?
But it is. Everything’s fine.
The trucks are all together, sleeping
on the gravel shoulders of exit ramps,
and the crowded rest stop I’m driving by
is a perfect oasis in the moonlight.
The way I see it, I’ve got a second wind
and on the radio an all-night country station.
Nothing for me to do on this road
but drive and give thanks:
I’ll be home by dawn.
Tag Archives: travel
Christmas at Sea, by Robert Louis Stevenson
The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where a seamen scarce could stand;
The wind was a nor’wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.
They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But ‘twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops’l, and stood by to go about.
All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.
We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide-race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So’s we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.
The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every ‘long-shore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.
The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it’s just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessed Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard’s was the house where I was born.
O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother’s silver spectacles, my father’s silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china-plates that stand upon the shelves.
And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessed Christmas Day.
They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
“All hands to loose topgallant sails,” I heard the captain call.
“By the Lord, she’ll never stand it,” our first mate Jackson, cried.
…”It’s the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,” he replied.
She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
As the winter’s day was ending, in the entry of the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.
And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.
Dead Straight, by Olive Senior
I’m traveling back home to you but it’s an omen:
my road map’s creased and torn along dead straight lines.
The hill and gully ride is over now and I’m flat out
on the dead straight highway with a toll.
Not a glimmer of the coastline as I try to make it home
to you through a forest of hotels as thick as thieves.
For the sea, the coves and beaches once seen through
seaside shacks and palm trees have been sold.
And the rest of us are herded to the verge by this new
highway while over there our beauty is extolled,
bottled and sold. And gated. In this new paradise the only
palms are greased. And somebody’s beach umbrella
has replaced the shade tree we once sat under and the
towns and settlements molder as they are bypassed.
I can no longer witness on this highway with a toll that
makes us seem as modern as elsewhere. For elsewhere
is not where I’m meant to be. And a dead straight
highway leaves no scent, no monument to the past,
no scenic beauty for the curvature of my eye to take in.
And endless empty space is not inviting. But perhaps
there’s no social meaning to this tirade after all. I’m just
feeling lost without a map as I make it home to you
and pay the toll. You could see it simply as a love song.
To the curving of your cheekbones, to the mountains
of your thighs, the hill and gully passion of your eyes, and
your hair that is not dead straight but very much otherwise.
Brooklyn Anchorage, by Lisa Jarnot
and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.
Driving out of Southern Worcester County, by Mary Fell
say goodbye to small towns
their boundaries cutting across the names
of dead indians, trees
still remembering that speech
their shelved histories leaning on
years of drought, of rain, lives
the immigrant knows nothing of
canadian, pole, latin
root their lives on rock
this earth won’t give up
their names the journey a word took
changed but familiar, unaware of footsteps
echoing years back in the forest
their lives held like a cup, thin and intricate
that could break with a sound like water falling
or the sound of an animal running for shelter
but strong with an old craft
hard, and made to be passed on
to their children
or to tourists who look out from car windows
bored, and unknowingly carry them off
The Ferry, by Katia Kapovich
I’m jotting down these lines,
having borrowed a pen from a waitress
in this roadside restaurant. Three rusty pines
prop up the sky in the windows.
My soup gets cold, which implies
I’ll eat it cold. Soon I too
will leave a tip on the table, merge
into the beehive of travelers
and board one of the ferries,
where there’s always a line to the loo
and no one knows where the captain is.
Slightly seasick, I keep on writing
of the wind-rose and lobster traps,
seagulls, if any—and there always are.
Check the air and you’ll see them
above straw hats and caps.
The sun at noon glides like a monstrous star-
fish through clouds. Others drink iced tea,
training binoculars on a tugboat.
When I finish this letter, I’ll take a gulp
from the flask you gave me for the road
in days when I was too young to care about
those on the pier who waved goodbye.
I miss them now: cousins in linen dresses,
my mother, you, boys in light summer shirts.
Life is too long. The compass needle dances.
Everything passes by. The ferry passes
by ragged yellow shores.
Horse Latitudes, by Jo Sarzotti
The past lies in the brine
Of equatorial water,
Parchment-folded,
Black ink veining where the quill paused.
Rich doldrums
Full of gold
Where Spanish sailors
Threw the Queen’s horses,
Palomino, the color of her hair.
On the Outer Banks
Each wave a breaking
Promise of the New World,
Lost colonies,
Lost ships, wild ponies
Swimming even now.
Theories of Time and Space, by Natasha Trethewey
You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:
head south on Mississippi 49, one—
by—one mile markers ticking off
another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end
at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches
in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand
dumped on a mangrove swamp—buried
terrain of the past. Bring only
what you must carry—tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock
where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:
the photograph—who you were—
will be waiting when you return
The Star, by Jane Taylor
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
When the blazing sun is set,
And the grass with dew is wet,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Then the traveler in the dark
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see where to go
If you did not twinkle so.
In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye
Till the sun is in the sky.
As your bright and tiny spark
Lights the traveler in the dark,
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
Waiting On The Reading, by Samiya Bashir
Many of my race have lived long without the touch of
these fine things which separate us from beasts. Things
I call my own now. Having served thirty-six years as needleman
for a family far more ape than we will ever be, I rode
the moonlight train to find my free. Up here it is colder than I like,
but the gentlemen admire my frock coats above all. I taught my son this trade
and hope this picture I made will help retrieve him. Come summer I leave
this coast for Philadelphia where I hear we of color can breathe yet more free.
Tonight I stitch. The breeze off the bay smells of aria. It is almost the season for cloaks.
High Yellow, by Hannah Lowe
Errol drives me to Treasure Beach It’s an old story, the terrible storm
swerving the dark country roads the ship going down, half the sailors
I think about what you will be, your mix drowned, half swimming the
white, black, Chinese, and your father’s slate waves, spat hard onto shore
Scottish-Englishness. We cross the Black River Smashed crates, bodies
where they shipped cane sugar and molasses choking on the black sand
upstream past a sign One man stands — What is this place? A woman
for Lover’s Leap. The air stinks of sulphur in the trees, one hand raised
Errol drops me at a blue gate. Be safe This is how the Scotsmen came
behind the house, the thin beach why the black people here have red hair
of black sand, the water warm and gray Or the other story, no storm
I am deep before I know it, groundless no wrecked ship. Just the miles
the swell stops the sickness of cane fields and mulatto children named
under a crooked tree, perched on sea rocks McDonald or McArthur for
two fishermen in torn denims, smoking their fathers, who owned them
I dry in the sun. They pass, turn, come close Nothing grows at Lover’s Leap
they have rust afros, gold faces splashed with freckles where two runaways
one ripped with muscle, one with eyes cornered by their master, held hands
like razors. What you want here they say and jumped down into the clouds
Flying, by Sarah Arvio
One said to me tonight or was it day
or was it the passage between the two,
“It’s hard to remember, crossing time zones,
the structure of the hours you left behind.
Are they sleeping or are they eating sweets,
and are they wanting me to phone them now?”
“In the face of technological fact,
even the most seasoned traveler feels
the baffled sense that nowhere else exists.”
“It’s the moving resistance of the air
as you hurtle too fast against the hours
that stuns the cells and tissues of the brain.”
“The dry cabin air, the cramped rows of seats,
the steward passing pillows, pouring drinks,
and the sudden ridges of turbulence. . .”
“Oh yes, the crossing is always a trial,
despite precautions: drink water, don’t smoke,
and take measured doses of midday sun,
whether an ordinary business flight
or a prayer at a pleasure altar. . .
for moments or hours the earth out of sight,
the white cumuli dreaming there below,
warm fronts and cold fronts streaming through the sky,
the mesmerizing rose-and-purple glow.”
“So did you leave your home à contrecoeur?
Did you leave a life? Did you leave a love?
Are you out here looking for another?
Some want so much to cross, to go away,
somewhere anywhere & begin again,
others can’t endure the separation. . .”
One night, the skyline as I left New York
was a garden of neon flowerbursts—
the celebration of a history.
Train to Agra, by Vandana Khanna
I want to reach you—
in that city where the snow
only shimmers silver
for a few hours. It has taken
seventeen years. This trip,
these characters patterned
in black ink, curves catching
on the page like hinges,
this weave of letters fraying
like the lines on my palm,
all broken paths. Outside,
no snow. Just the slow pull
of brown on the hills, umber
dulling to a bruise until the city
is just a memory of stained teeth,
the burn of white marble
to dusk, cows standing
on the edges like a dust
cloud gaining weight
after days of no rain. Asleep
in the hot berth, my parents
sway in a dance, the silence
broken by scrape of tin, hiss
of tea, and underneath,
the constant clatter of wheels
beating steel tracks over and over:
to the city of white marble,
to the city of goats, tobacco
fields, city of dead hands,
a mantra of my grandmother’s—
her teeth eaten away
by betel leaves—the story
of how Shah Jahan had cut off
all the workers’ hands
after they built the Taj, so they
could never build again. I dreamt
of those hands for weeks before
the trip, weeks even before I
stepped off the plane, thousands
of useless dead flowers drying
to sienna, silent in their fall.
Every night, days before, I dreamt
those hands climbing over the iron
gate of my grandparents’ house, over
grate and spikes, some caught
in the groove between its sharpened
teeth, others biting where
they pinched my skin.
Furthermore, by Christina Davis
It was something to let him go.
It was a having to believe, furthermore,
in the voyage
of the other, a Ulysses
without an Ithaca,
was to speak
of the sea
without speech
of the shore—
and to have for a body
the going away of the body, to have for eyes
the going away of the eyes. And for hearing,
a silence, where once
were people.
And for comfort, a dwelling
before each
steps into that weather
of which all
strangers speak.
Rapture: Lucus, by Traci Brimhall
Posters for the missing kapok tree appear on streetlights
offering a reward for its safe return. I hate to spoil it,
but the end of every biography is death. The end of a city
in the rainforest is a legend and a lost expedition. The end
of mythology is forgetfulness, placing gifts in the hole
where the worshipped tree should be. But my memory
lengthens with each ending. I know where to find the lost
mines of Muribeca and how to cross the Pacific on a raft
made of balsa. I know the tree wasn’t stolen. She woke from
her stillness some equatorial summer evening by a dream
of being chased by an amorous faun, which was a memory,
which reminded her that in another form she had legs
and didn’t need the anxious worship of people who thought
her body was a message. She is happier than the poem tattooed
on her back says she is, but sadder than the finches nesting
in her hair believe her to be. I am more or less content to be
near her in October storms, though I can’t stop thinking that
with the right love or humility or present of silk barrettes
and licorice she might become a myth again in my arms, ardent
wordless, needing someone to bear her away from the flood.
Almost There, by Timothy Liu
Hard to imagine getting
anywhere near another semi-
nude encounter down this concrete
slab of interstate, the two of us
all thumbs—
white-throated swifts mating mid-flight
instead of buckets of
crispy wings thrown down
hoi polloi—
an army of mouths
eager to feed
left without any lasting sustenance.
Best get down on all fours.
Ease our noses past
rear-end collisions wrapped around
guardrails shaking loose their bolts
while unseen choirs jacked on
airwaves go on preaching
loud and clear to every
last pair of unrepentant ears—
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, by August Kleinzahler
The markets never rest
Always they are somewhere in agitation
Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat
Electromagnetic ether peppered with photons
Treasure spewing from Unisys A-15 J mainframes
Across the firmament
Soundlessly among the thunderheads and passenger jets
As they make their nightlong journeys
Across the oceans and steppes
Nebulae, incandescent frog spawn of information
Trembling in the claw of Scorpio
Not an instant, then shooting away
Like an enormous cloud of starlings
Garbage scows move slowly down the estuary
The lights of the airport pulse in morning darkness
Food trucks, propane, tortured hearts
The reticent epistemologist parks
Gets out, checks the curb, reparks
Thunder of jets
Peristalsis of great capitals
How pretty in her tartan scarf
Her ruminative frown
Ambiguity and Reason
Locked in a slow, ferocious tango
Of if not, why not
Drift, by Brenda Shaughnessy
I’ll go anywhere to leave you but come with me.
All the cities are like you anyway. Windows
darken when I get close enough to see.
Any place we want to stay’s polluted,
the good spots taken already by those
who ruin them. And restaurants we’d never find.
We’d rut a ditch by a river in nights
so long they must be cut by the many pairs
of wrong-handled scissors maybe god owns
and doesn’t share. I water god.
I make a haunted lake and rinse and rinse.
I take what I want, and have ever since what
I want disappeared, like anything hunted.
That’s what you said. Disappointment
isn’t tender, dried and wide instead.
The tourists snapped you crying,
and the blanket I brought was so dirty
it must have been lying around
in lice and blood that whole year we fought.
It wasn’t clear, so I forgot.
I haven’t been sleeping, next to you
twitching to bury my boring eyes.
The ship made you sad, and the ferry, and canoe.
All boats do.
Compulsively Allergic to the Truth, by Jeffrey McDaniel
I’m sorry I was late.
I was pulled over by a cop
for driving blindfolded
with a raspberry-scented candle
flickering in my mouth.
I’m sorry I was late.
I was on my way
when I felt a plot
thickening in my arm.
I have a fear of heights.
Luckily the Earth
is on the second floor
of the universe.
I am not the egg man.
I am the owl
who just witnessed
another tree fall over
in the forest of your life.
I am your father
shaking his head
at the thought of you.
I am his words dissolving
in your mind like footprints
in a rainstorm.
I am a long-legged martini.
I am feeding olives
to the bull inside you.
I am decorating
your labyrinth,
tacking up snapshots
of all the people
who’ve gotten lost
in your corridors.
If You Forget Me, by Pablo Neruda
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
Last night, by Michael Broder
I dreamt of making sense,
parts of speech caught up in sheets
and blankets, long strips of fabric
wrapped loosely around shoulders,
goblets, urns, cups with unmatched saucers.
You were there, and the past seemed important,
what was said, what was done,
feelings felt but maybe not expressed,
signs randomly connected
yet vital to what comes next,
to a coming season,
next year’s trip to Nauset Beach.
I woke up wanting to read a poem by that name,
and I found one with a lifeguard’s chair,
a broken shell, gulls watching egrets,
home an ocean away.
5 & 7 & 5, by Anselm Hollo
follow that airplane
of course I’m high this is
an emergency
§
giant Scots terrier
I thought I saw was known as
Taxicab Mountain
§
brown photo legend
“serene enjoyment” they suck
pipes bones crumbled back
§
night train whistles stars
over a nation under
mad temporal czars
§
round lumps of cells grow
up to love porridge later
become The Supremes
§
lady I lost my
subway token we must part
it’s faster by air
§
“but it’s our world”
tiny blue hands and green arms
your thought in my room
§
sweet bouzouki sound
another syntax for heads
up to the aether
§
in you the in moon
its rays entwined in my mind’s
hair hangs down right in
§
viewing the dragon
there they ride slim through my dream
Carpaccio’s pair
§
slow bloom inside you
the mnemonics of loving
incessant chatter
§
far shore Ferris wheel
turning glowing humming love
in our lit-up heads
§
switch them to sleep now
the flying foxes swarm out
great it’s flurry time
§
wind rain you and me
went looking for a new house
o the grass grows loud
Ontario, by Mark Levine
Beauty in its winter slippers
approached us by degrees
on the gravel path. We were
hitching a ride out; had been hitching.
Our suitcase freighted with a few
gardening tools lifted from the shed
while the old man, old enough,
looked away. He who
went fishing at night (so he said)
carrying in his pail
a nest of tiny flame.
We were headed, headed out, we
were going in a direction.
No tricks
or intrigue, just a noisy
ineptness.
If that’s a word. Beauty, dipped
in resin beneath its shag,
was always ready with the right
curse to recite to
our nature. It is
in us, it is,
in the smokehouse in the woods and the old man
looked away. Song of
experience.
There were treads in the snow.
We waited for our hitch.
There were train tracks which
stung with clods of this region’s
rare clay.
We were boys, boyish, almost girls.
Left alone on the roof, we would have dwindled.
Incrimination called to us
from the city and its fog-blacked lake,
called to us from the salvaged farms beyond the lake,
from the wilds beyond that.
Guilty was good.
Nothing Stays Put, by Amy Clampitt
In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985
The strange and wonderful are too much with us.
The protea of the antipodes—a great,
globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom—
for sale in the supermarket! We are in
our decadence, we are not entitled.
What have we done to deserve
all the produce of the tropics—
this fiery trove, the largesse of it
heaped up like cannonballs, these pineapples, bossed
and crested, standing like troops at attention,
these tiers, these balconies of green, festoons
grown sumptuous with stoop labor?
The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us
before there is a yen or a need for it. The green-
grocers, uptown and down, are from South Korea.
Orchids, opulence by the pailful, just slightly
fatigued by the plane trip from Hawaii, are
disposed on the sidewalks; alstroemerias, freesias
fattened a bit in translation from overseas; gladioli
likewise estranged from their piercing ancestral crimson;
as well as, less altered from the original blue cornflower
of the roadsides and railway embankments of Europe, these
bachelor’s buttons. But it isn’t the railway embankments
their featherweight wheels of cobalt remind me of, it’s
a row of them among prim colonnades of cosmos,
snapdragon, nasturtium, bloodsilk red poppies,
in my grandmother’s garden: a prairie childhood,
the grassland shorn, overlaid with a grid,
unsealed, furrowed, harrowed and sown with immigrant grasses,
their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered
here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas
on a courthouse lawn, by a love knot, a cross stitch
of living matter, sown and tended by women,
nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful,
beneath whose hands what had been alien begins,
as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous.
But at this remove what I think of as
strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan
on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom,
a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above–
is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift
of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood.
Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.
All that we know, that we’re
made of, is motion.
Once a Day Poetry 