Bordeaux Sestina

I secretly wrote down all the things you mouthed,
Saved them for leaner days when bread
Was wanting and they'd fished the river
Dry and the economy was propped on wine,
The frightening drop of the curve's arch,
Productivity set against hunger like a stone.

Criminals were roundly stoned,
Oil-drenched cloths shoved in their mouths
And lit on fire under the Victory arch
While the mob seethed with wanting for bread
Almost enough to drink the wine-
Colored blood flowing like rivers

In the whip-lines on the slaves' backs: rivers
Of dominance in flesh permanent as stone.
Oh, in the old days we drank wine
By the liter! Poured it into our callow mouths
During meals topped off with cheese and bread
And later, in bed, how my back arched

In pleasure meeting your body's arch
And I would flow like rivers,
I flowed, before the shortages, before bread
Was gold and gold was stone,
Our bodies reduced to stomachs and mouths,
Forgetting the taste of wine,

Forgetting the reasons for drinking wine,
Forgetting even the people tortured under the Arch,
The people pleading with one mouth
For the golden old days or the mercy of the river,
And the governor's voice like stone,
Like a sentence: Let them eat bread.

Exile: What We Forgot

At each solstice we gather in the town square and sing songs of rejoicing. We sing of exile and the long march that leads to the homeland. We sing the joy of two feet to carry us along the solid ground, of arms strong enough to carry our children into the future. We sing thanks for the bounty of our cultivated corner of earth. We sing thanks for our safe arrival here.

But when I am apart from the crowd, a bit in shadow, working at a solitary task, I sing a soft song that came to me many years ago, which begins Oh, if only I had wings I would fly back to you, and people must have overheard it over the years, because sometimes when I come upon someone, old or young, a little apart or at a distance, I hear that person singing it, and sometimes they raise their eyes and look upward, longing for something they cannot name.

You Asked Me to Mark You But I Was the One Marked

I knew you planned to be gone a long time when you asked for a stamp in your passport, even though it wasn't required any more. It was like the other typical souvenirs you took: postcards and a cheap mug, a few digital photos of your face in close-up, smiling, with me in the background. You didn't stay long enough to learn the customs of my country, you were scared to taste the regional delicacies and too timid to try out the language. And lest I choose the wrong words to describe your visit, lest I make a mistake in the photo captions, I won't say what it was you were looking for when you crossed the border into my uncertain nights, but I will say I knew you were only passing the time until a flight was leaving for some other enticing land. Our parting kiss was too brief; the cab was waiting downstairs; you were impatient to be going. I touched your skin with the brand and your flesh yielded like a belt to the notching knife; I was sore for weeks afterwards.

Returning to France Thinking About Rockets

Land of cigarettes and humidity, smells not smelled in the New World, men and women with sullen faces. A certain reserve after the open-faced illusion of trust in Americans, something more hermetic, contained and fermenting, reprocessed: smoke collecting in enclosed spaces. The determined tones of speech after the open drawl of California with its avoidances of commitments, its reluctance to come down on one side or the other of any given line, all that space left for error, margins of probability we are unwilling to narrow.

You've come too far in your love of this direction to be either of here or of there (which is here and which is there?), hovering between the one and the zero at the apex of a trajectory. This is the metaphorical space where imagination lives, the true space of possibility, between two points or states which we are taught are the two sides of an indivisible line or border - but the French word for border is frontière, which in the language of the New World became the infinity of destiny, the vastest of open spaces and the breeding ground of dreams - mythic discoveries of gold or lawlessness, a future undetermined. The country of your ancestors on a journey from which there was no return, in a covered wagon with thirteen children.

Now technology offers you a way to shoot yourself into the sky between two points, the frontier that became the homeland to your family and this Old World, El Dorado because unknown. You shoot yourself back and forth until you are neither of one place nor the other, stuck in the sky somewhere exactly at your trajectory's midpoint, and you're thinking that this was the goal all along, ever since the adolescent yearning for elsewhere, for landscapes which you know now were landscapes of the imagination. Not to leave one place for another, but to attain the state in which all places are possible.

Then the moment passes, and gravity determines you.