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Closer to leveled Arctic and its vast tundra
than anywhere else are these cells asleep
in the corium. The last wind of summer will
not send a wave or waft a change over mindless
surfaces, such as are these in International Drive
in Rye Brook and the man-made pond over
which a dragonfly hovers, its wings flickering
invisibly like some hallucination, while artificial
geysers in the still water remain silent, not uttering
their vertical language of spouting syllables.
A brown muck sags on the surface,
floating bits of grass and leaves, finger-thin
ends of branches, surrounded by the feces
of geese clearing blade by blade with their beaks,
the only evidence of some visible occurrence.
In this minute, a bee’s precision would be most
welcomed, finer than the aim currently attempted
in which the stance is always an imitation,
sometimes even absurd, and actions can only
qualify as machines, oh the monotony!
Sidewalks, no matter where, appearing to support
the same stench, an immense field of concrete
whose angles murder all light which attempts
to erode their vulgar announcements, incinerators
being the only fountains, their freshness hovering
over an infinite repetition of images.
So I looked to the South for ancestral floods,
comfort in its wrought iron vistas and familiar soil,
ivy growing on walls, even the mosquito’s mission.
I aimed to be a prisoner of easeful flow, bold in strokes
and sibilant curves, warm and clinging to color -
those deep greens, also asphalt smells reminiscent
of Beetham Highway. But this current stretch of asphalt
is another country spreading farther away,
leaving the mind as white as that tundra,
freezing it from possessing the mandatory motion
desired, like that of littoral movements, cargo,
hulls, cranes lifting the imagination from Baltimore
flowing into Atlantic brine. The sea shapes islands,
like Monos, a fish stilted in flight, its back arched
in rocky boundary. And as close as possible
to sanguinary traditions as these acres
could allow, the free-flowing ivy, the avuncular
indulgence, even with an appearance of Tobago
in the clouds, fidelity was not in this landscape.
Too much the absence of the hibiscus cupping
its thirst. Roots are rattled underground, but unable
to fulfill their positions. Where is my citizenship?
I cannot claim any culture, nor attempt any genuine
affect. Impossible to confess the knowledge of Lord Blakey,
or a rhythm as defined in a cuatro calypso whose words
are without sham, displaying a sincere dialect.
For years now, I have resembled, more and more,
an immediate and endless shore of ice whose cracks
are ever a stammering irritation. Reach into the past
for something to instruct what occurs from this moment
for absolute direction. Instead of this disloyal lineage
whose words sometimes attract, pulling one away into
the curves of a wrought iron structure still sought after. That
is why abandonment, at times, appeals. These days, Alaska
is where my blood calls. August transforms
smoothly into September and after, our shoulders
becoming less defined shuddering beneath layers
of borrowed fleece after we have we stolen their
feathered habits, proving that nothing of our own
is original, even our migrations, and we squawk like them.
This white will appear again, violently intimate,
yet leaving one to feel divorced; then, each
state entered will become acquainted, their names all
pronounced in one word: “past.” This habitual
position is resumed, our hands imitating our
predecessors as we crouch before a god’s hearth
to escape the atmosphere petitioning for warmth,
braced with the familiarity of manners
entrenched in the sea-shaped silhouette of Monos.
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