A Pretty Sight Read online

  across shipping lanes to another,

  the marvel of Rome raided for newer money,

  while the snail

  plods its slime trail

  twenty-seven metres each century.

  •

  For those who cite The Matrix, Rocky

  and the CGI’d prequels to Star Wars

  as good reason to hate them,

  remember the Aeneid is also a sequel.

  And remember a thousand years

  separate Homer and Virgil, only

  two thousand more between Virgil

  and us. War that follows rage, the care

  of fields and horses, some details might

  still ring so true that he seems

  near each time we hear them.

  Hungry, Virgil crosses the bridge

  to Trastevere, adjusts his toga

  beside a line of smart cars, catching

  the whiff of dinner venting through

  trattorie shutters. In a doorway,

  he watches the chef bent over

  a scratched counter, who steadies

  then chops an onion’s soft, rotten

  underside until he frees crisp layers

  lambent at its core, sauté s them

  in olive oil with garlic,

  the sizzle and smell

  so familiar the poet might forget

  Maecenas isn’t waiting to debate

  rhetoric or Aeneas’s fate

  in the gardens up the Esquiline Hill.

  •

  Where does the Danube start?

  Magris searches in his book.

  He visits Furtwangen

  with friends, finds a brook

  that drains into a tributary,

  the exact source

  an argument for centuries, inch

  by sodden inch. Near a clear spring

  on a hill, they reach a dip

  rinsed with rivulets,

  and follow a slope to a house

  where they knock

  at the threshold, squint into a window.

  Feet shuffle through half-empty rooms

  to the door

  which opens on a perturbed old woman

  not interested in questions.

  But since they’ve

  come all this way, she listens, squints

  and points to a rough ditch near

  a woodshed

  gushing cold water. ‘The water reaches

  the gutter,’ she explains,

  ‘through a basin,

  which is constantly full because of a tap

  that no one ever succeeds

  in turning off.’

  •

  I never tire of arriving.

  At Pamukkale, the wind chucked

  leaves and palm fronds as we crossed

  the main square.

  Barefoot, we ascended

  the travertine rock, its stalactites’ drip

  and slow froth of calcium

  like an overpoured pint of Guinness

  cooled to dollops of white-rimmed shelves.

  Ruins at the top,

  the once-bustling spa town of Heirapolis,

  its paving stones still rutted

  by the wear of cart wheels.

  Here you can walk past the colonnades

  of antiquity’s shops. Wealthy Romans

  took the hot springs here, retired

  and died, their sarcophagi

  accumulating to another kind

  of stop for tourists north of the baths.

  Shells of modern tourism too, lobby fragments

  from the 1970s, more evidence of

  how eras settle, retreat,

  each strata engraved as ghost structure.

  This abandoned front desk, the green

  marble floor at dusk, light like soft copper,

  haunting as any wheel rut

  crowded with weeds –

  you can find them if you follow

  these unmarked goat tracks

  further still.

  •

  ‘If I cannot bend the higher powers,

  I will move the infernal regions.’

  A favourite quote of Freud’s

  and the Secessionist painters of Vienna,

  lovers of the glimpse, the held-back, what

  beats at your insides to claw a way out.

  I wrote it down looking at Klimt’s Attersee

  in the Leopold Museum south of the Ringstrasse.

  The words are Juno’s in Virgil’s Aeneid,

  a summation of alternative options

  for those cast outside the party line.

  The ode to Plan B.

  Attersee might be landscape

  as subversive frill,

  the lake’s abstract surface

  stroked with turquoise

  over green and blue underpaint

  like the bangled skies of Van Gogh.

  Klimt’s lake

  stretches, infinitely if it could,

  to the top edge of canvas

  and the dark, heavy shape painted there,

  an island or shoreline that by limiting

  the infinite has given it value.

  •

  I thought I saw Sophie Scholl

  in a club underground

  in Warsaw

  that we found by following smokers

  down an alley and steep, concrete stairwell,

  through tobacco fog to air-sucking bass.

  She was nodding at the mosh edge,

  beer clutched in her hand

  in that post-Cold War dance hall.

  I wanted to ask how she got there –

  roaming the rebuilt

  squares of Mitteleuropa – but she looked

  too happy to bother

  with dredging up the past. Anyway, what

  would be the question?

  Is everything changed, or the same?

  knowing any answer won’t change

  the hour of closing time. In that basement’s low ceiling

  and sticky floor, furnished

  in the dumpster vogue

  of old fridges and mismatched chairs,

  Sophie hardly blinked, swigged

  her drink, her silence meant

  as challenge to ‘put up or shut up’

  or just ‘shut up and listen.’

  In the speakers’ blare

  I left her there.

  •

  We were returning from the north,

  an overnight train

  from Sa Pa, sharing a sleeping berth

  with two young women from Switzerland.

  It was 4 a.m. as the rubbed glow

  of the station platform settled in our window.

  We lugged backpacks

  through the puzzle of Hanoi’s Old Quarter,

  amazed at its paused frenzy, dark shops

  locked behind metal gates, a few motorbikes

  chainsawing past. A cafe opened at 5:30

  and agreed to hold our packs

  so we wandered to Hoan Kiem Lake

  to watch the tai chi groups

  balance inner tensions at sunrise.

  By then, completely transformed,

  the market and streets were stacked

  with baskets: crab, pork,

  pineapple pyramids, oysters

  and sleek trout hawked by vendors,

  attendants sweeping park paths

  with long, wiry brooms. Police brewed tea

  in their dawn kiosk, caps

  angled back

  off their foreheads

  near stereos wired to trees

  for the tai chi grannies, conjuring

  longevity with techno beats.

  Hanoi’s traffic and street life,

  no history but the deal, offers

  and banter, the good price of fish

  caught that morning

  in the Gulf of Tonkin.

  Fuck silence or permanence.

  Fu
ck elegy. Fuck time and pain.

  •

  Dawn sky, sriracha red,

  Chiang Mai lunch, khao soi and mango,

  a stockpile of sun before

  another carousel of departure level,

  the sucker-punch intake of takeoff.

  Past weightless snatches of sleep,

  the drop

  to the terminal bus, that sub-zero palanquin

  aloft over road drifts

  of Baltic night:

  watch as we hurried through snowfall

  to brew tea and read in the lamplight

  of a Helsinki hostel.

  •

  Olduvai, really Oldupai,

  named for the fronded sisal plant

  that grows here. Seen from space,

  the Rift’s a patchwork

  in algal patina, the gorge

  a grey-green collage splayed

  with evaporated rill beds,

  steep cracks tracking the landscape

  like plate sutures on a skull. Snacking

  on sandwiches, we sat under

  corrugated tin, protected

  from the sun’s hazy weight,

  rock monolith and broken scrub

  hedging the Earth’s curvature.

  Three and a half million years back,

  three apes, predate of humans,

  walked past at Laetoli through drops

  of soft rain, the shapes of their prints

  left by the ash layer, cemented

  in tuff, stable enough to last

  as the hot and grey ash fell.

  Other marks: birds, a hare,

  a three-toed horse

  and its foal turning

  in the opposite

  direction. Dimpling the site,

  rainprints too. But this trio, tracks

  tagged 61, 62 and 63,

  we know walked upright, as a habit;

  left no knuckle marks, the gait

  a ‘small-town walking speed’

  like a stroll through the agora.

  Tempting to speculate

  about the story of their travel,

  a family or hunting group

  looking for signs of a water hole

  in the wake of the volcano’s

  tremors, one set of their prints

  nested in the hollow of another,

  the way we can follow

  someone through snow

  to make the going a little easier.

  •

  On a charity box in the Hanoi airport:

  ‘For Especially Difficult Children.’

  Or ‘We Beg for Silent Behaving’ outside

  the Basilica of St. Euphemia

  in Rovinj, Croatia.

  I mention this not from smugness

  but as point of argument. If language blurs

  across cultures in the same decade,

  how will our songs and stories

  translate across ticking inches of drift?

  The challenge of Onkalo,

  ‘hiding place,’ a toxic dump

  cored through granite in Finland.

  Blasters descend through rock

  five kilometres deep,

  bore igneous strata, each layer

  another geologic age.

  So when they drive

  their pickups down and walk

  through curtains of dust, are

  they descending back through time

  in corridors designed to be resealed

  and forgotten for a thousand centuries?

  How silent it will be, down

  there, when the ventilation fans

  stop whirring,

  the new Ice Age crested

  and gone, Earth’s surface scoured

  like a child’s ribboned aggie found

  in the grass near a gravel road.

  We’ll have no language

  to warn of what we built, no marker

  left to explain the world

  wiped clear of any signs of us.

  ‘My bones would rest much easier,’

  Virgil wrote, ‘if I knew your songs

  would tell my story in days to come.’

  •

  Let me be quieter. Go

  slow and listen.

  Near Lake Manyara,

  the unhurried swish

  of elephants

  gnashing through branches

  as we sat for an hour

  just watching. Ibises rested

  in the umbrella acacias,

  velvet monkeys

  in the grass. Remember

  the Ngorongoro Crater?

  We stood on its rim

  past dusk; uninterrupted herds

  of wildebeest and zebra

  migrating below

  the distant lightning storm.

  Go slow, I thought. Listen.

  That morning, as we left

  Arusha, our truck passed

  a group of Masai

  headed to town.

  ‘How do they get around?’

  ‘They walk. They’ll walk

  to Nairobi. You can’t

  walk like the Masai.’

  The warriors leaned

  on their spears, waiting

  to cross the red dirt

  of the Serengeti road.

  Easy to imagine

  their indifferent looks

  as pre-Homeric,

  outwaiting time

  with a cubist view,

  so looking out

  is always looking in,

  so wherever you turn,

  you arrive just

  as you’re leaving,

  though I knew

  a likely goal in town

  might be the internet,

  or to change

  from dyed shuka

  to tailored suits

  and a government posting.

  •

  At the check-in counter at Heathrow,

  I took a snap of our backpacks.

  Who knows what we really need?

  Baggage for some estate lawyer

  to inventory, and meanwhile we’re carried

  like stowaway snails on shipped marble

  through Earth’s shallow atmosphere,

  that dark shape near the edge of the canvas.

  •

  Virgil, don’t be our guide; you wouldn’t

  know the way around now.

  Wandering below the Palatine

  in hopes of a dinner invitation,

  you’d need to pause at every turn

  between fountains, churches,

  papal scavenging

  or Domitian’s renos further on.

  The Christ thing? Long story;

  born nineteen years after you died,

  he changed the architecture, to put

  it mildly. That’s just the start.

  Since I’m buying lunch, let’s stop at one

  of these pizza counters that line

  the tourist route and I’ll explain

  coffee, tomatoes and pasta to you.

  Here’s the Pantheon, its columns and porch

  propped on the sudden rotunda.

  You know the site as Agrippa’s temple,

  gone now, yes, but step inside,

  they’ve done wonders.

  Marvel at the symmetric swirl

  of its ceiling tiles, the open dome

  tipping light and rain across the stone.

  Hey, I know a good fish place

  not far from here, just down

  from the Campo de’ Fiori, that serves

  battered cod and antipasti

  with a decent jug of vino sfuso.

  Nothing fancy. A lino floor, white linen

  thrown across a few rough tables; the waiters

  Old World Romans who rush

  to shake your hand at the exit.

  It’s around here, I swear, somewhere,

  though it’s been a couple of years

  and you never knowr />
  how business will go, I don’t need

  to tell you. All that’s fallen or torn down

  evades our partial gaze

  yet ruins still wait to brush against us

  from the afternoons they were raised.

  If you’ve asked us to wait

  by this intersection, it must be the feel

  of something familiar, a turn

  in the street where the plastered

  porticoes of insulae once stood.

  You could close your eyes, cued by pigeon trills,

  and hear the cart wheels on basalt,

  or smell the reek of garum

  before engines interrupt, and cellphones.

  Contrails rib the sky.

  ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’

  – William Safire (July 1969)

  After Borman,

  NASA’s liaison, calls

  and urges ‘some alternative posture’

  should things go south – unforeseen glitch,

  miscalculation,

  technical whatever – leaving

  Armstrong and Aldrin

  stranded on the moon,

  does Safire walk or run

  to the Oval Office?

  The president’s aides rustle

  around the furniture, their minds

  touchy and tentative

  like bees

  in a cactus patch.

  You can imagine Dick’s face

  when advised: cut all

  communication, commend

  their souls to ‘the deepest

  of the deep,’ like a burial at sea.

  Then call their wives.

  As for text, it’s left

  to Safire

  to get the spirit right. Christ,