If One of Us Should Fall

Tourists #2

24 tOUrIsts #2 We keep pace and exchange verbs, ideas handsomely placed beneath the creases of a larger circumstance. But we must be going, always. Must sample local pastries and count correct change in the foreign coin. We move through other slow museum watchers. It takes patience to navigate. Thank God we love poetry! That parade of strange, proofless animals. We can absorb the vegetable silences behind the curtains of restored palaces and on wide cathedral steps. Thank God the watchers agree to agree. Some of us, ensconced in pages and concertina piano chords, some of us, in slow flannel mornings, rising with breadcrumbs in our beards and the rind of whatever moon staled within our paper wasp mouths while we searched for our brushes and nouns—some of us do not feel like our familiar selves. We are houses filled with someone else’s furniture. Sad photocopies with fuzzled edges and approximate hands. Within those first moments of wakefulness we address the sunlight in a stranger’s body, rise on sore knees, hungry for certain voices, the salt of specific skin. There are people we are born missing, their faces in a field just beyond, and fractures so compounded that we take ourselves across oceans, live off the bread and coffee, move like sleepwalkers toward the next gallery . The paintings do not look familiar, but the faces may resemble ones we used to know, those deliberate gestures and inventories, and perhaps we cross oceans to recognize them. Thank God someone told us to pay attention. To mark these locations on our maps and in notebooks. To stand with the sea writhing in all directions in a field of fiercely bright azaleas, ready, alongside everything else, to burn. ...