america adrift

Travels, Tattoos, & Traumas

by Robert Gibbons

As if travel & imagined fixed destinations were cures for these dissatisfactions,
the World suddenly offered up
three Central American immigrant fugitives straddling railroad tracks
that run at a bad angle
through the City,
each carrying heavy green plastic bags balanced Old-World style,
talking & brave, even as the cop car rode past
at said bad angle keeping him from seeing them as I did, still
in my longing to get away,
but now, tempered by these wise guys & the soon-to-be-found Old Man hobo
vagabond down by the waterfront I haven’t seen since this Time
last year, sadder than practically All
the homeless I’ve noticed over the years because so utterly alone
with his stone-cold boldness not giving
in to Death.

Earlier, I had to go to town more than once, dissatisfied with what I’d witnessed
first Time round, what with all the working squares
in fine clothes on coffee
breaks leading into lunch hours, no,
& the only tanker visible, Overseas Shirley, a regular
in port, & nothing to write home about, so I returned later, instinctively
knowing the World would offer up tangential evidence
meaningful just in Time in order
to keep me going on
in language,
if not actual travel to all the places pictured in my longing, places outweighing
those I’ve already lived in, or visited,
all rushing swirling mixing Paris
with Madrid, Glasgow/Fez, Gloucester/Seville, Naples/Tenerife, Nice/Bergen,
Olympia/Santorini, Belgrade/Trenton, Berlin/Vancouver, Amsterdam/Barcelona,

whereupon I rendezvoused with the Politisa Lady licensed in Monrovia lifting
her white-water-wake petticoat & skirts to carry me
out of personal doldrums & overwhelming desire to travel in order
to mix movement with language, instead of at this solitary
desk, where the fish stone from the trek along the path to the cave at Pech Merle
stares, urging me on, or the one from under the foundation
of Winslow Homer’s house on Prouts Neck down the road here in Maine, no,
or postcards from friends sent from Hegefjell, wherever the Heaven or Hell,
or Alcimcao, Sao Paulo, Brazil, or
the White Cat asking, “Are you writing?”
from her own desk in the apartment on Boulevard St. Michel, or,
again, David, from Buenos Aries, or, again, Bent & Camelia, my constant
companion the collection of Goya etchings sent from Manchester, England,
of all places, like taking fellow teachers to see Hair
at the Wilbur in Boston in 1969, yes,
my life swirling round me with the reminder that so much has gone on before
than the Time left ahead, unless I continue to live in the moment

as hard as Eternity, & stop
worrying that I may not see the Whole World before I see the Other Side,
as I saw three Central American immigrant fugitives earlier today straddling
railroad tracks that run at a bad angle
through the City,
each carrying heavy green plastic bags balanced Old-World style,
talking & brave, even as the cop car rode past
at said bad angle keeping him from seeing them as I did
without now any longer needing immediately
Copenhagen, per se,
but preferring the poem Robert Hellman generously sent from there
in 1974 before I embarked on a number of cross-country journeys
suffering under eight-inch rain in the tent in the park in the center of Memphis,
then driving non-stop till we hit Elk City, Oklahoma,
of all places, where the first of a number of former Hollywood starlets

kept the knick-knack shop on the main drag.
My father prepared me well for the brutality of the World.
In Zihuatanejo that year, when Bernardo tried to strong-arm us out of our $40-
a-month-shack, I let nothing but body language
& a handshake speak, never to see him again.
Neruda called from Chile, but I failed in my quest to see him,
although Anna & her husband, Sonora, remembered him reading in Mexico City,
finding him afterward eating oysters alone.
Breaking lines is a waste of Time.
Break bread with me, fellow poets, brave enough not to gasp at having to give
a correct answer.
I’d swear if I could in a poem as much as I do in real life, but what’s the point, if
it’s to be read after one’s dead? Come in Veracruz, come in Oaxaca,
where Manuel is giving advice in the café, that if anyone betrays me,
even once, to cut them with scissors motioning two fingers
across the high air of Oaxaca, the cutting
of scissors, as if to say in body language,

not just in Spanish, take my word for this,
Robert, which I did, the shortcut
to dealing with all betrayals,
lures, & phonies.
Where can one go to school for an education
like that? Which is why Travel is such
scholarship. Shit, I’m sorry.
That’s rude, & uncalled for but for some reason can’t help it, the Travel secret
exposed made me do it: take Time out of classes, say no
to professors. I once tried to organize a boycott of Professor Barr from Alabama,
Phi Beta Kappa, & formerly of Harvard, who wanted
us to pronounce words exactly like he did in Linguistics 401, & had the gall once
to say the worst thing to happen in America
was the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown versus the Board of Education!
No shit, I heard it, & received a “D”.

Barr came into the classroom while I tried to organize the boycott against his
bullshit. What was I supposed to do, back down? Stop talking?
Fuck, no, Man!
I spoke to the shivering chickens in class looking him straight in the dropped-jaw
face.
My father prepared me well for the brutality of the World.
He carved a wooden dagger on board ship in the port of Casablanca with all the
Time in the World during his five years in the Navy in WWII, which I now
own & treasure.
It speaks to me on occasion like Manuel Avila Camacho, known as the Bad Boy
of Mexico, friend of Orson Welles,
whose house in Paris he lived in during the summer before we met in 1974,
when as attaché to President Echeverria, they planned
to meet with Nixon in DC the middle of August,
too late!

When seeing the Old Man hobo vagabond down by the waterfront covered in his
camel hair coat,
we purposefully walked in the opposite direction, knowing
ahead of Time, & from the Past, the extent of the inextricable Sorrow in his Soul.
We carried our own misery down
to Portland Wharf, where at the end of the pier at the edge of the harbor,
we had the whole place to ourselves.
She said she loved the clouds. We distinguished the distant flight of osprey
from that of gulls simply by expanse of wingspan & rapidity of wing-beat.
Can you tell I haven’t written for days?
Easily angered, but not as bad as I used to be in the lineage of Irish Warrior Poets
followed down through father preparing me for the brutality of the World,
via his Grandfather, Edward Walshe, who wrote the book,
The Mermaid of Cape Ann, which included a photo
of him atop Whale’s Jaw in Dogtown, published in 1904.

Undeclared war Olson claimed society is. Barbarism every document of history
is, according to Benjamin, along with our duty to protect anonymous
names of the dead
from continuous-victorious-powers-that-be.
Not everything is learned on the road.
Deep, deep research & study.
Reading is experience. Writing, if it’s done well, is nothing other than exactly
that: Merci, Monsieur Proust, Thanks, Hem. When one thinks about it,
there’s little difference between reading, travel, the experience
of either, if done well.
Kristeva, whose Desire in Language I picked up at Village Voice Bookstore
in Paris in 1987 has made all the difference in life.
Merde, now that I think of it, I asked for Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
to be shipped to me from the East Coast to Long Beach
just before we crossed the border into Mexico.

Thank you, friend, it’s meant everything to me!
Why would anyone have anxiety over influence? Nothing,
but gratitude.
Sui generis? Ahhmmnn!
My desire is.
Otherwise,
don’t tell me we’re going to shape a writer in the classroom?
We’ll find out for ourselves
with a little help from our friends.
Stones, Trees, Names, our teachers. Rembrandt, deep stroke,
Goya, black depth,
Titian’s, The Flaying of Marsyas, the first painting I saw in DC,
when we moved there in 1990, where de Kooning’s Woman was
flesh made of flesh as oil paint was made for flesh.
Rothko, tomb sculpture. Francis Bacon, truncation.

Rauschenberg, all-encompassing, funneling everything into the Vortex
of the World.
Pound, not forgotten.
Celan. Li Po. Vallejo. Pavese. O’Hara, Lorca, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Ponge,
Bolaño, but where are the Brits?
I don’t know. Yeats & Synge & Lady Gregory.
Where do I go from here? If I had money, I’d be everywhere:
Aalborg, Bremen, Corpus Christi, Durban, Edinburgh, Finistère,
Galway, Helsingør, Istanbul, Jersey City, Kabul, Luvov,
again, Madrid, again, Naples, Oslo, St. Petersburg,
Quincy, Randolph, again, Salem, Toronto, Utica,
Ventura, Weymouth, Xihua, Yuma, Zagreb.
My father prepared me well for the brutality of the World.
I’m in Portland. My tattoos & traumas are my Passport
to the World.