TRAVELOGUE

First we were somewhat Italian, and we sipped espressos on the plazas and watched the pigeons make loops and lunges like thoughts, then we were mostly French, eating hot chocolate with a spoon and reading Nadja, then we were more Greek, sipping Nescafés, riding boats to dry and beautiful islands. Soon we were a little bit British, though we knew nothing about it, yet said shove a bum on English couches. We were never Chinese or German but then we read Celan & Goethe & Hölderlin & we were a tiny bit Japanese and took to taking the waters in the mountains outside of small towns in Idaho or having sex with the ex-principals of public junior high schools in the suburbs of Cincinnati, or waking amidst goose poop on islands in the Detroit River, not knowing which way was Canadian nor daylight, next we were driving a Chrysler through Kansas and it was summertime, the air conditioning blown out, the long fields of high grasses.

* credit: from The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Coffee House Press, 2013.