Questions of Travel

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams / hurry too rapidly down to the sea, / and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops / makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, / turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. / —For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, / aren’t waterfalls yet, / in a quick age or so, as ages go here, / they probably will be. / But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, / the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled. // Think of the long trip home. / Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today? / Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theatres? / What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life / in our bodies, we are determined to rush / to see the sun the other way around? / The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? / To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, / inexplicable and impenetrable, / at any view, / instantly seen and always, always delightful? / Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them, too? / And have we room / for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? // But surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen the trees along this road, / really exaggerated in their beauty, / not to have seen them gesturing / like noble pantomimists, robed in pink. / —Not to have had to stop for gas and heard / the sad, two-noted, wooden tune / of disparate wooden clogs / carelessly clacking over / a grease-stained filling-station floor. / (In another country the clogs would all be tested. / Each pair there would have identical pitch.) / —A pity not to have heard / the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird / who sings above the broken gasoline pump / in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: / three towers, five silver crosses. / —Yes, a pity not to have pondered, / blurr’dly and inconclusively, / on what connection can exist for centuries / between the crudest wooden footwear / and, careful and finicky, / the whittled fantasies of wooden cages / —Never to have studied history in / the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages. / —And never to have had to listen to rain / so much like politicians’ speeches: / two hours of unrelenting oratory / and then a sudden golden silence / in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes: // Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay at home? / Or could Pascal have been not entirely right / about just sitting quietly in one’s room? // Continent, city, country, society: / the choice is never wide and never free. / And here, or there... No. Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?