In this antique hotel I fill notebooks with thoughts
that were old when language was young,
with lines that start, life is or death is
with lines about shadows through light
as a bare bulb swings in parabolas above me.
I watch a woman sell oranges to taxi drivers
who throw wads of dirty paper into her shoe box.
They douse their throats with firewater and eat
like survival was simply a more difficult way to die.
They smash their horns without rage and watch
the varnish of civility erode, or creep back
into the fingers of the boy, stretched out
to catch an errant coin, the gun metal promise
of a meal, or a half hour trapdoor to love
with some girl or some queen, shuffled
from a collapsed house of cards. With the wind
I will depart this place with one little blue book
this passport from a hell that can’t be tasted or described,
because it is a cage braided with the fibers of time.
And I wonder how this man, heaving half-rotted cabbage
into his wagon thinks about the future, or the past.
About all that has passed, never existed, and yet
returns as smooth and unquestioned as sunrise.
I can almost count the hours, the days, the years
they have left, but everything shifts. Even the Bible
will one day be forgotten, as surely as stories
will evaporate from memory, and shimmer
on the page like heat blindness on the highway.
Here, on the page, or the screen, these words
travel through us, like our reflection in a window
that never stops the eye from finding the horizon.