American Poets Abroad

Time Traveler

You grew and you grew until you stopped growing
And there they planted a tree to mark your height;
Existence was measured in feet and inches,
Infancy meted out with a yardstick..

When you were tall enough, you walked away forever
Returning occasionally for holidays or a wedding
But soon not even those. You lost track of the tree
Standing alone in the yard, an orchard of one.

Then everyone else walked away, too. House and porch
Belong to others now. The cemetery
Is still there at the end of the road, beyond the curve
near the communal gardens, cramped and overgrown.
The dead don’t walk away so easily.

Occasionally, you still pass by. Between the tall pines
Your father planted, you spy on other lives
Unfolding as yours once did. You wave politely. Smiling 
They wave back, welcoming you: stranger, time traveler.

(Time Traveler was first published in BigCityLit.)

Travels with Lady Day 

(From the diaries of Thane Dimatims…)

I’ve never smoked opium, but I’ve traveled
To the Far East in my dreams, aboard ships
Manned with prostitutes and hustlers dressed in white
Each running with his head cut off, in the grip

Of fevers various. The evening wind
Touseled the hair of Lady Day, who lay
In a daze on a blanket by my bed.
The huge Pacific blue lay overhead

Like an ocean upturned into the sieve
of sky (a magnolia in her hair
as always), drenching us in azure light.
These dreams always left me like a siezure

Spent, abandoned to fantastic musings,
Able to pass days at a time in a trance
Of cloak-and-dagger. Like Tom Sawyer, I
Balanced footsteps of my friend’s vitus-dance

Searching out treasure in the sierra
Of my obliterated consciousness.
Nights vanished in the drunkenness of time,
Mothwings evaporated into dust.

Into this doomed cradle my mother bore
Her only child who, by the age of ten
Dictator and diplomat interfamilias
Extraordinaire. Such sorrows from a pen!

The world, the world…who can speak of such things
as “the world”? Who knows the world? Who has lived
enough to have the right to write such words
as “the world”? No, I’ve never seen the world,

only the bright lights beyond the harbor
twisting along the shoreline of my dreams.
These I’ve called “the world”. And Lady Day?
She’s thrown herself overboard…what more can I say?

Packing Up My Library 

Condemned by books I haven’t read
To read forever. Life is fear
Of never having enough time
To grasp it, hold it, keep it near.

The books I’ve read I’ve stashed away
In storage boxes in my mind;
I’ll save them for a rainy day
When I am old, infirm and blind.

The continents I’ve mapped today
You will not find on any map;
I am their king and sovereign lord,
The starving infant in their lap.

The box lies open on the floor,
My nostrils swollen from the dust
Of a lifetime bound and glued, compact
Yet boundless as my wanderlust

It Always Starts This Way

It always starts this way: a poem
buried deep in the pages of a book
by an unknown hand. Then, love.

Love of books, love of poems, love of the unknown.

Everything begins in this way. Everything ends
in an accident we blame on God.

But poetry won’t save us from the end.
One day the pages of the book
will stick together, and to pry them apart
we’ll need a lifetime of nimble fingers.

By then it will already be too late.