9/24/08
A door with a thousand locks
and ten thousand hinges
swings open effortlessly
onto the underworld.
9/25
On Mott Street four men
in red skullcaps
bang drums and cymbals
to root out the demons
infiltrating Bright Sun Imports
where the owner,
a cigarette between his lips,
his hand on the cashier’s leg,
watches a girl on rollerskates,
singing in Mandarin,
round the corner.
9/26
In a tenement
a vine climbs the pocked wall
from a window box
to the window above
where it flowers
for a woman who depends
on the stranger below
to water it.
9/27
Through a steel door
ajar on Baxter Street
a Buddhist priest
in a yellow robe
has placed a circle of candles
around a girl in a wheelchair.
9/28
A bald child
nearly transparent
in the sunlight
leaves the hospital
on crutches,
his mother guiding him
through traffic
to a bus stop.
Eight years ago today,
my own mother died in that hospital.
9/29
As the stock market crashes,
monitors in Times Square
flash numerals that the crazies
scramble on their calculators,
seeking a formula for acquiring riches
in calamitous times,
encoded by Rameses II,
deciphered by Sufis,
preserved by Freemasons.
Cults spring up
around the notion
that the formula is microscopically inscribed,
but forever unreadable,
on every coin in the world
including the ones in your pocket.
9/30
A palimpsest seven miles up,
among blue clouds,
a ghost plane
like the one I saw
from a remote island
a week before 9/11.
10/1
In what was once called
Red China
the Yellow River
carried thousands of refugees
to the Yellow Sea,
among them a girl on Pell Street
chewing Red Hots
and scooping ice cream
from dusk to dawn
beneath a poster
of Mars that glows.
10/5
A quartz wall
through which the world is distorted
and over which
no person sane or otherwise
would want to climb
even if he could.
10/9
At nightfall a chalice spills
in the ikon over the door
of the Ukranian church
and a stream of light,
like lava, pours
from a dark cloud.
10/13
Penitents in a circle
hold mirrors to the sun,
blinding one another,
while a flautist on the radio
plays an ancient Greek scale.
10/15
A black cigarette burning down
in a white ashtray.
When the music ends,
a woman who never put it to her lips
stubs it out.
10/23
Its flowers — red, pink, green,
and in Manhattan yellow —
can be dried and pestled
to flavor soup and color cheese.
Its three slow syllables
claim many derivations:
Mary-gould, Marygold, Mary gowles,
Mariguild, Marry-gold…
Mary’s flowers,
Mary mother of Jesus
golden in the sun.
10/25
Gusts knocking people off balance
on side streets.
A dog barking at the wind.
10/30
Is it easier to accept déjà vu as a moment
out of another life (the true definition)
rather than a moment in
our current life recalled unexpectedly?
How many people in this city
are asking themselves this question at 4 A.M.?
11/3
A great stillness on Election Eve.
The vast continent.
Its millions of souls
between two oceans.
And in a small room
on a television the weather report
for a single county:
cool and clear.
11/12
Flying into Madrid before dawn.
Iron pavement.
Black glass.
Statues on rooftops —
horses, swordsmen, cannon —
animated by spotlights.
Among the great buildings
the Palacio Real,
an ice palace,
home to the ghosts
of kings and queens
idle in life,
restless in death.
11/15
In the Velasquez gallery,
Las Meninas,
in which a tiny princess,
surrounded by misfits,
is bathed in golden light.
The king and queen are reflected
in a mirror misted with breath.
Whose breath?
And the painter himself,
rendering the scene from within,
gazes out at generations
of strangers not yet born —
the shadows of shadows,
as real to him as the dead.
11/17
On the Calle de Reina,
where all the cats are white,
a man is spearing sashimi with a fork,
twirling the blue seaweed like spaghetti.
He claims to be an encyclopedist
of the lost history —
aborted revolutions, quashed conspiracies,
failed assassinations —
preserved in documents
dating back eight centuries
to which he alone has access.
11/19
Streets alternately named after saints and sinners
and a single Street of Angels,
unmarked, unmapped,
with barred windows
padlocked doors
and a wall where the graffiti draws itself.
11/24
The old woman’s dream:
a violin, a thimble, half a picture frame,
and constellations in the South Seas
known only to sailors.
12/1
Icy rain.
Church bells where there is no church.
The long streets.
No one.
12/17
I crossed paths with a woman
who gave me the name
of a place where people
can only speak in short sentences.
Meet me there, she says.
5/26/2014
Tonight I found this notebook
misplaced on a high shelf
six years ago,
wedged between old editions
of Strabo’s Geography
and the Poems of Meng Chiao.
In the latter when I was twenty-two
I marked this line,
composed in the ninth century:
The traveller’s heart is a flag a hundred feet high in the wind.