The Fruitful Immigrant, and: Marco Polo in the Old Hotel, and: New World

The Fruitful Immigrant

The day screamed in cicada. The planet turned and the sea shimmered bronze beyond the cliffs.

Below the terraced olives, next to a wall so overgrown it seemed a part of the land,

a mulberry tree, silk road émigré no longer polled and tended, filled the air

with berry smells, pungent fermentation thick in the suffocating heat of summer.

My landlord wanted me to cut it down– I never could see why. He was a Greek

returned from fifty years in America and something in his long, sclerotic life

had taught him love for concrete purity This land was cockeyed grass and bramble, olive

and spreading fig tree, the garden cistern-fed, the weeds too independent of his will.

I put him off. I hid the rusty axe and managed never to be findable

when his tan Volvo pulled up on the road. I was another of his disappointments,

and now that he’s long dead and I’ve gone back I’m glad to see the land so overgrown,

the shaggy immigrant untended to, still dropping berries in the briary grass.

Marco Polo in the Old Hotel

Marco . . .. . . Polo

Marco. . .. . . Polo

Pour another glass of sunlight, tasting an after-dinner hour. This is not a time for reading. Wait a while. A meteor shower may fall about your head tonight and children in a nearby pool are laughing in late summer air, happy to be free of school.

Marco . . .. . . PoloMarco . . .. . . Polo

You are the only dinner guest. The meal is finished, but the wine will last until the dark arrives. The children in the pool incline their bodies, leaping from the waves, their voices calling to each other, traveling through the evenings, years and decades of late summer weather.

Marco . . .. . . PoloMarco . . .. . . Polo

Across the parking lot a flag is flapping, thin as Chinese silk the camels caravanned through deserts. Voices fall into the dark. You breathe the last mouthful of wine and seem to float into the air as they call to eternity, the unenclosing everywhere:

Marco . . .. . . PoloMarco . . .. . . Polo

New World

Snow in the pines, spring snow, and a white cloud glowering, smoke blown from that old pacer who pauses for all day, and then moves on.

The felled trees lie in the steaming forest lit by the far coals of the world’s beginning. The fox darts over jeweled kinnikinnick—

Be quick, be quick, say the black beads of his eyes, and with any luck our eyes will follow him as far as a look can take us, darting through sleep

to a new thought, another chance at waking.