Excerpts
from This End of the World
Travel
is only a departure…an unwillingness to arrive.
--Ken
Jennings
1. (Firenze)
You, now gone these
three years.
Still teasing me from
sightlines
with a promise of
Canada, wedding
other gals for their
likeness to buffalo.
You, my one of 30
soul mates, my Dead Sea
salinity,
my brass cingale of return.
You pass beers back on a
dusty bus
to the castle, cows
outside Braşov clacking
through streets to evening milking. You.
The last wolf
before Drumnadrochit.
The Hispaniola pirate
of Edinburgh warming me
on a night train to Sofia
with bad currency, bad
vodka & the Russian
I learned from reruns of
Sex and the City.
You, the doppelganger
for that singing, cheating
cabbie on the road to
the Bay of Napoli.
My private Masada (never again).
Poised in your golden
loincloth as the Cartagena
de las Indias before the
sea of my to-do list,
an Isla Negra of delay, a
prairie roiling
towards Pre-Cambrian
shield in your fancy
French accent: Watch for Moose.
You, disguised as the
Bedouin,
who took me for four
hundred
shekels after Aboniki
balm & tea.
My House
of Daedalus,
my unicursal maze. I
crawl without choice. I’ve chosen
you instead of the real
pilgrimage—
Mi
cielo! Mi Jerusalén!
You sing on the other
side of the Wailing Wall
words I wish I could
take back
from the Coro desert or
the post-industrial town
I am doomed to &
that promise
of milk, honey.
2. (Mompiche, Ecuador)
The quality I dislike most about you is your
absence.
--Robert
Kroetsch, Excerpts from the Real World
I see you, I see you, I
see (the residue of)
you there hiding in that Pacific sightline
off Atacames, the hat
vendors & temporary
tattoo artists, the beer
man on the beach
where I gossiped with
King David of Ottawa & Lady Karen—
she-of-the-midnight
dives, seer of ocean bedrooms,
in a carnival of
frigates & pelicans above day’s catch,
king turkey vultures
hop-skimming this beach for heads
& chunks, in landslides
to my imminent departure—
No light, no banks, no
potable water.
In the stench of those
maggots feeding on a dozen whelks
I stole from the Black
Sea, I packed you through five countries.
My home among shovels
& picks, these topological maps of the Andes
rolled up & locked
away, keeping me from knowledge: you are
here.
The worldly graffiti
artist, you splash FUCK LOVE
or Te Quiero Rocío in red or
black from Genoa to Ferrol,
hiding in the
annotations of 300 journals in a dozen milk crates
in a storage unit I pay
$113 for each month.
3. (La Floresta, Quito)
Your
heart breaks me.
--Robert
Kroetsch, Excerpts from the Real World
You, the
novice/lazy/out-of-work
diver of the thorny
oyster in the Bay
of Guayaquil, a traffic
circle in the fog
of Quito, you wait
outside a Manhattan
five-floor walk-up 25
years too late, 25
years too old, pretend
to be me to lure
the ladies. You are unsolicited poetic advice
sitting sleepless on the
ledge with a screwdriver
in a shorted kitchen
light; you whip it out a year
after it’s over, my
O’Hare Don, my Pittsburgh Greek,
my Donna, Texas
dumbass. You climb university
cubicles, declare it the new seduction.
You are the buckshot autocorrect for bullshit,
playing schmier & the spoons for 151 days,
you plait my hair, paint
my belly, call me
América in invented
languor, drop a quarter
in that Saskatchewan
jukebox when it requires $1,
play “Wasted Days and
Wasted Nights,” call it
“our song” with a wink.
You are the last days of February,
no cocktails till Friday
& even then…. You give me
your dead mother’s
bikini for Christmas, her
ruined stockings for
birthdays. You are the Boylston Ave
of any NE city, its
costume shops & car dealerships,
its R-lessness &
bupkus Keno cards. You confide
in sheep & refuse to
show me your calendar.
You wear your wedding
shoes with high-waters,
call it your Sunday
morning habit—
Lea Graham is the author of the forthcoming
chapbook, This End of the World: Notes to
Robert Kroetsch (Apt. 9 Press, 2016), the poetry book, Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No
Tell Books, 2011) and the chapbook, Calendar
Girls (above /ground press, 2006). Her poems, translations and reviews have
been published in Notre Dame Review,
Southern Humanities Review and Fifth
Wednesday. She is a contributing editor for Atticus Review’s feature,“Boo’s Hollow,” which showcases poets’ writing on place. She is an Associate Professor of English at
Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
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