“An exile like a monk—where is home?”
—Su Shi, New year’s Eve (1084)
Lamps with shades
form us flowers
to reach a hand—
just as I suddenly
remembered
that in Arslanbob,
Kyrgyzstan,
with the world’s
most ancient walnuts,
where Alexander
the Great’s soldiers
became lost—
each time the sun
starts setting down,
village cows descend
from the hills
and, on their own,
know where to go
and how to get
back home—
One of the things
that in Bishkek struck me most
were those heaved old walkways
by poplars’ roots from below—
and remembering, in my old native town,
those trees, perhaps planted then,
already cut, uprooted—
no threat to trip motion
or safety of the passerby—
even though one part
(where the soccer stadium was),
the trees still stood,
and, like comrades
from distant Kyrgyzstan,
upsetting the walking order,
rumpling up the ground—
and thus, poetically messing
with prosaic, pedestrian minds—
What other ways
do a soul—or a town—
so eager to make a point
of how they want, they need,
to reconnect with us?
Every decade or so
James Bond, Agent 007,
teaches a new generation
how to fall in love
with his murderer’s face—
glamorous humping
with more glamorous models,
women as trophies on the wall,
per procuration proxies
for diddling and shagging—
that other—devil’s—side,
a sly and clever move,
dragging Heavens
into flat and drabby garbs—
