Places I’ve Been

To shut our eyes is Travel — EMILY DICKINSON

I go so many places. I can understand why you might be jealous.

Just last week I was in Berlin, this perfect little third-floor apartment off Alexanderplatz, writing late into the mornings, fueled by bottomless cups of fragrant black coffee. Sunrises spilling over rooftops and updrafts of diesel fumes from below were my cream and sugar. I go there often.

A while before that, I was in, of all places, the Australian desert, following the straight-as-a-plumb-line highway north from Sydney in a rental car. Road trains whipped past like giant mythological pachyderms, their two- and three-trailer tails roaring terribly. My father was there. He drove. We passed the time in silence, mostly, but there’d be occasional moments of mild excitement when one of us would spot a bend on the faraway horizon — a shift of a few meager degrees in the road’s direction — and say something with mock-delight about the sudden variety. The trip was an echo of the one we took when I was eleven and we came to Oz for Christmas: we drove to visit the Great Barrier Reef, just he and I, and besides the accident that burned my hand and took us to the emergency room, it was perfect.

I’ve trekked through the forests of Hokkaido, communing with the spirit of the Japanese wild. I’ve flown over the Mongolian steppes with my mother, thousands of feet above where hordes once led their hard, nomadic lives under the Golden King. I’ve stalked the midnight streets of London, ascended narrow footpaths to secluded Alpine retreats, and watched ghost crabs scuttle along moonlit beachfront while cool Caribbean breezes treated my skin.

I’ve done these things, and so much else, without leaving my prison cell. Although the scenery here sucks, my mind encompasses a number of universes, each more enticing than the last. It’d be wasteful to sit dwelling on reality.

Another Too-Personal Poem from the Vaults

Modern Love

Scarcely a shiver when I went down
on the girl from Ann Arbor, having spirited
by afternoon flight from Kansas City.
Three February-gray days in the state
shaped, I observed, like a mitten.
No meet cute, this. No Catfish, either.
“The Upper Peninsula,” she said, “isn’t
shaped like anything.” Her dreams were
equally tempered. Without Wi-Fi we stayed in,
posing for each other’s digital camera
in my ground-floor room at the Holiday Inn.

There, with the blanket kicked to a staticky
heap, I discovered, in addition to the post-shower
heat lamp in the bathroom ceiling and
the vicissitude that is a two-cup coffee maker, that
I was nurturing something very much akin to
love for the black-haired truck-stop waitress as I
stroked her scarified thigh, a young man with ideas
about the aesthetics of misery — how,
up close, damages dizen like starlight:
tattoos, secret subcutaneous metal glints,
and her fierce desire to leave
her glasses on and keep a razor-edged view
of our slow midwinter curling into one another.
A specially curated MP3 playlist for this.
She caressed my ear and called me beautiful, almost
letting go. I ventured, “And you’re
magnificent.” A potential litany of meanings to tweet about.
The excuse she needed to see me off from Detroit.

Back to Beaujolais by candlelight, books
scattered across my familiar empty bed,
and chat sessions in the dark. The power of discorporate
text, intoning things to make the blinkered heart grow fonder:
her tragic mother smoking to stage four on the floral-print sofa
downstairs, her younger brother missing after another late-night
“date.” The girl lit a Marlboro Light and typed,
i’m fine. can we go to voice tho?
Paltry fifty-six kay to my broadband. Our connection
stuttered, the catch in her faraway voice nearly mechanical.
“The fucking snow is brown.”
Does it matter how we lost each other?

* * * * *

“Poetry,” writes Charles Simic, “is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.” When I wrote this poem, “Modern Love,” I was struck by the conflicting desires to tell an emotional story and to write a good poem. (Good poetry insinuates, bad poetry insists. At least that’s my oversimplified take on the matter.) I’m not entirely sure if I succeeded on either count, let alone both, but here, nevertheless, is the result.

I shouldn’t have to explain that even the most personal poem isn’t strictly autobiographical. Twitter, for instance, didn’t exist when the affair described in the poem was taking place, nor did the film (or, still later, the television series) Catfish, yet the two make good shorthand for describing a relationship born and killed via Internet. Other details aren’t precisely true to life, either, but if you’re the kind of person who expects accuracy from a poem, you’ve got little business reading one.

Invitation to the Ball — er, Conference

Not even imprisonment keeps invitations to shindigs from being sent my way. To wit: the full-color glossy brochure that shouted at me, from today's mail, to register for yet another writers conference. This time, it's the 2011 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Chicago. So many literary luminaries will be present! Philip Levine! Margaret Attwood! Edward Hirsch! Hundreds of panels and readings! Dozens of receptions, dances, and unofficial off-site events.

Yes, dancing. My envisioning of a writers' dance is a grown-up analog to the fifth grade end-of-year school formal I once endured, only with crowds of other rigid, pallid killjoys jockeying with me for elbow room at the sidelines. I wouldn't expect rug-cutting prowess to be common among my writerly peers, but, then again, I lack a posteriori knowledge in the matter. What I do know is that Chicago would make for a nice shake-up.

I adore Chicago. Oh, look. The brochure says accomodations are to be had at the Hilton Chicago, on Michigan Avenue, where I stayed on that last deleriously fun trip to the Windy City. It was an unremarkable room, a great view of downtown. Can you hear me sighing wistfully?

I'd love to phone up and register, to again visit my favorite US metropolis, to network with others whose passion is the written word, to eat pizza with a fork, to be wooed by agents wanting to broker my book deal, to stay out in the Loop impractiaclly late, to court editors from literary journals left and right, to ride the El around until my backside ached. Alas, someone at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs must have missed the memorandum — I have a previous engagement. Maybe next year I'll be able to think about it... even if it's not Chicago. Keep me on that list.

An HO-Gauge Meditation

There was a model train expo in Kansas City recently. I wouldn't have known except that a glimpse of an H-gauge coal locomotive as I was channel surfing sent me back-tracking to the footage KMBC, the local news channel, was airing of the event. The video showed several clips of miniature trains emerging from tunnels and traveling through tiny scenery. Interspersed were shots of little boys watching with their eyes wide, their mouths agape. One was absently gnawing on his own finger. As a boy, I was fascinated with trains of all sizes myself, and there are some childhood loves whose vestiges stay with us our entire lives. Suffice it to say I know precisely how they felt.

My own model train set was relatively basic: a four-by-eight tableau with grass and a mountainous tunnel, and an oval track that featured a couple of switches for offloading cars. It was a much more elaborate setup than most kids that age probably have, but nothing compared to the detailed vistas of the serious hobbyist I dreamt of becoming. So earnest were my intentions that, at seven or eight years of age, I drew out a three-phase plan for urban development, beginning with the addition of paved streets and some commercial buildings, and culminating in an art-deco skyscraper and the replacement of my red-and-yellow Santa Fe diesel with a streamlined 1920s steam engine, preferably in dark blue. That, I figured, or maybe a contemporary foreign express, like the TGV.

At the time of my second trip to France, the TGV — an acronym for Train à Grande Vitesse — held the record for being the fastest train in the world. I was ecstatic for the opportunity to say I'd ridden it before the Japanese reclaimed the title with their own bullet train, which was more or less the sole reason my mother and I were in Paris at all. The day trip we planned was to take us from Paris to Dijon, where we would stop for lunch, then continue on, via regular train, into Switzerland. On our way to the boarding platform, something caught my eye.

A shop within the station had in its window display an HO-gauge TGV — one locomotive, two passenger cars, and a rearward-facing faux locomotive (sans motor, and made to resemble the powered locomotive at the front). It was cheaply made — I could tell by the look of the box through the store window — and priced especially for tourists, but it was still the TGV, and hence my opportunity to jump straight to that pièce de résistance I'd been fantasizing about. I could even say I bought it in Paris. "Tres apropos, n'est-ce pas?" So I did some rapid calculation. By sacrificing two thirds of my spending allowance for the trip (my mother and I would be in Europe for another two weeks), I could afford it. Visions played through my head of the little orange blur whipping around my track like its full-size counterpart tore across the French countryside. To my nine-year-old sensibilities it was alluring, but I ultimately decided it wasn't worth the extortionist asking price. Whatever misgivings I might have had as I trudged away from the shop were obliterated upon reaching the platform, where the fastest train in the world awaited.



Each time I have been to Europe, the rail system has provided the lion's share of my transportation. It's been awhile, but my understanding is that a Eurail Pass remains the most inexpensive option for backpackers and others looking to cover a great deal of ground in under a month and a half. And although such a pass will provide trips via other means of public transport within participating systems (imagine a bus pass that also works for taxis, trams, light rail — right on down the list), it's the train that I've always used and enjoyed most. Watching from the comfort of a spacious six-person cabin as scenery passes, all the while relaxing with a good book, a game of Mau Mau, a leisurely snack, or just using the time to contemplate where you've been, where you're going — it's an unparalleled travel experience.



That the United States has never really embraced passenger rail is a shame. I will be the first to extol that singular bliss known so well by Americans, the road trip. My acquaintance with the national privilege of strapping in behind a steering wheel and going is an intimate one. I know first hand that picking a destination or a meandering route, then driving for days without need of a passport or paperwork, is as near to absolute freedom — travel-wise, anyway — as the modern world can know. But there is a certain romantic quality to even the dirtiest, smokiest railway platform to which the chicest gas station cannot hope to compare, and a pleasure in subdued clacking and subtle rocking on tracks for which monotonous highway hum is no substitute.



True, America has recently tried to stoke the fire of interest in rail travel it once had, with fast inner-city lines and upgrades to its "transcontinental" service, but the flame will not catch. There are myriad reasons, as anyone who has ridden Amtrak can attest, but I believe it comes down to an unwillingness to let go of the wheel. Ours — America's — is a culture of fiercely individualized assertiveness to which leaning back and watching things happen is anathema. Everything is about control. So many crave the full agenda, the pressing deadline, the gridlocked traffic. They have either forgotten or never learned how to exist within the moment. Being still, cogitating, existing for a time, in silence —these things somehow terrify.

Control, however, is fleeting and illusory. Confinement to linearity, either metaphorically or on physical tracks, is a situation we may find ourselves in more often than we are aware. Life itself is frequently on rails in spite of our fidgety efforts at affecting change. At those times we are swept along under the power of circumstance, bound for the unknown and all points in-between. On the faces of those little boys in awe of the spectacle of a little electric toy going around and around can be witnessed the unadulterated bliss attainable through passive observation. Absorbed in the thing itself, not contemplating it nor employing it as an object of focus while their mind lingers elsewhere, they lose themselves in wonder.



The TGV, ultimately, was a letdown. Sure it was fast, but the ride was bumpy and the upholstery mismatched, and the experience lacked any of the armrest-clutching excitement I'd anticipated. There hadn't even been scenery (I managed to fall asleep en route). When my mother and I stepped down onto the platform in Dijon it was with memorable disillusionment — it was the emperor's nakedness, the nonexistence of Santa Claus, the first school dance gone horrifyingly awry. What then had been the point? But a lesson had been learned: speed has its place in the world, often quite apart from pleasure.

I venture now to stretch my lesson further by offering a corollary that to savor a thing is to take the time, and a warning, trite, obvious, and perhaps too often repeated, but heartfelt all the same: take the express, but take care. Too much speed will numb you. Unlike with those scale models, no real-world track is oval — none runs forever. Take in what scenery you can, because there's an end to every line.

A Life Amphibious

My father was born with gills and webbed feet, the son of a mermaid and a merchant marine. The earliest photograph of him I have seen was a grade school portrait, which suggests those features — the gills, at least — atrophied as he got older, for they were nowhere to be seen by then. For the entirety of his life, though, as with any creature born of the sea, my father would remain drawn to water and all things aquatic. At eighteen, he enlisted in the United States Navy, where whatever vestigial toe-webbing remained would have been perceived as an asset. He dove freely into untested waters, canoed down rolling river rapids, fished with nets. He collected seashells and coral. He kept tropical fish. I remember the way he'd whisper to them while sprinkling in their food, inviting them to dinner by invoking their secret names: to him they were not angelfish, gourami, or tetra but Streamer-Tail, Little Bubble-Maker, Prism-Darter. They were his piscine friends, exiles from the same kingdom, and they kept him company in his home on dry land.

Of course he owned vessels — a fifteen-foot aluminum canoe, an inflatable raft, a small sailboat. These were the only way my mother and I could accompany him on his watery communions. Creatures of terra firma is what she and I were — awed by the shadowy ubiquity of water in the world, shaky on deck, barely submersible. My father was our fearless captain, ready to brave the storms and show us landlubbers there was little to fear from the murky depths. When he would change tack to head into a squall, or paddle us towards the rocks, we had to wonder whether he hadn't momentarily forgotten our handicap. But always he brought us through, dampened by the spray, most likely, but quite alive. Being with him in the presence of water meant knowing fervency for life; his enthusiasm was contagious.

We towed the sailboat with us one year, on a family vacation to the Florida Keys, when I was a boy. Our first night at the coast, my mother and I slept in the van. Displaying uncharacteristic childlike eagerness, my father spent the night in a sleeping bag on deck, docked in the marina a few hundred feet away. Mosquitoes, of course, left him unmolested. It was blood they craved, not the clear salinity of what his veins pumped. As the sun rose from the center of the Atlantic, Mum and I stumbled salty-eyed into the morning. We found my father already unmoored, gliding aimlessly around the marina on a steady wind he'd been loath to let pass unavailed. He waved to us. There was no telling how long he'd been out. He had to have woken at least an hour before dawn, in order to have time to erect the mast and secure the rigging. Out on the blue, his sails were brimming, his smile gleamed.



The day was long and humid, and by late afternoon had given way to the slate horizon of an impending storm. Since that morning we'd been skirting the coastline. Because we had no radio, no compass, no map — indeed, no navigational equipment of any sort (what kind of an adventure would it have been, otherwise?) — we dropped anchor off a tiny, sandy island with a sliver of clear beach large enough to pitch our tent and light a cookfire. We ate thin vegetable soup with crackers and nibbled on roasted peanuts. The soup scalded my tongue as I sipped too eagerly from a battered tin cup. When the rain came, at first with uncertainty, we retreated but left the tent flaps open so we could watch the clouds tumble and the far-off waves clash. I fell asleep to the popping of fat drops on the canvas and the thick air of our gradually smoldering fire. I dreamt of wild seas.

In the small hours, the three of us awoke startled. The tide was coming in. It lapped inches from the front of the tent. Already the remains of the fire had been swallowed; now, ever hungry, the water was reaching for us. Pattering rain kept on as we hurriedly pulled stakes and carried our shelter several feet back, to the tree line. As the beach gradually disappeared, we looked on, unsure if the high ground we'd claimed would be high enough to avoid a late night escape back to our boat. I fell back asleep eventually, as did Mum, but Papa was vigilant. His silhouette at the front of the tent reassured me when I woke again, later, to the sound of his whispered supplications to the waves.



The scene at dawn was much different. By that time the tide had gone out so far that it had stranded the boat, dry and resting pitifully at an angle, on its keel. Seaweed draped the line to the shore, imparting a look of abandonment, like a ghost ship in spite of its cheerful blue hull. Not knowing when the waters would again rise, my father set to work righting her, the way people attend to a beached whale. Now pushing, now rocking, now patting her belly, he coaxed the boat back into her element.

Packed in and hungry, we set course for the mainland beyond our horizon. Arcane sailor knowledge or natant instinct guided my father at the tiller as he steered us toward the marina from which we'd put out. The wind that morning was robust and consistent. I stood aft of the small cabin, catching briny air in my nostrils. In my ears was nothing but that whooshing roar. Then Papa said something indistinct and my mother laughed. I turned, hoping to hear. They were smiling — such wide, open smiles! — and with the sun radiant on his face I watched my father draw a deep, contented breath, and surveyed his neck and jawline for the row of fishy slits I knew just had to be there.

Jamaica, 1987

[This post originally appeared on my MySpace blog, which no longer exists. The date of the original posting has been lost.]

My father and I entered the warm water of midafternoon from the beach equipped only with his flippers, goggles and snorkel, and an inflatable pool raft with a slender bit of rope knotted to it. He was still in his thirties, still of average build, and wore the green trunks that were old then, yet would make an appearance, ten years later, on our final canoe trip. My trunks were red and, because I was only seven — too young for real adventure stories — devoid of such provenance. Both of us, as well as my mother, bore the darkened skin and sun-bleached hair of Yankees gradually succumbing to the siren song of the Caribbean: glorious scenery, welcoming people, the casual ethos, the culinary pleasures. I still get cravings for authentic jerk pork and an icy bottle of Ting.

Our mission that particular day was primal hunter-gatherer stuff. We would swim out in search of conchs to gather up, return to the beach, beat them from their shells in an exhausting and somewhat foolish-looking procedure involving tossing the shells against the sand over and over again, then present them to a local woman whose restaurant turned them into a hearty, mouthwatering stew. The stew we'd pay for in extra conchs.

The family spent that month in Negril, in a tent, surrounded by a small grove of thin trees at the edge of the beach. The sand, perhaps, had worked its way under our skin as we slept, or too much ocean air had filled our lungs and veins with a yearning to remain — to leave responsibilities and become a family of expat beach bums, browning and crinkling into human handbags.

My parents had gone so far as to ask about schools. Outside of the cities, everywhere you turned was lush and beautifully saturated with color, and the ocean was never more than a few miles away, wide and blue and welcoming. Some may find it unfathomable, but to go and not be so moved would have been the unthinkable thing.

We waded out until the water was deep enough to swim — my father pulling the raft by its rope, and me alternately swimming alongside him and hanging from its edge. After a time, the sandy floor disappeared completely beneath us, rendering the water a mysterious shade of teal. My father swam on. Teal eventually transitioned into darkness, and this was where he chose to stop. It seemed like hours he'd been pulling. Looking back at the island, my field of vision encompassed a wide swath of glistening shoreline; in front of me lay nothing but the undisturbed sea and a horizon of vivid blues. My father pulled himself partially onto the raft. His large mustache drooped with wetness. He looked something like a walrus.

Taking in the surroundings above water, he said, simply, "This is good."

We waited.

When he'd sufficiently regained his strength, he again donned the goggles and, taking with him nothing more than two lungfuls of air, plopped out of sight with the briefest of splashes. Adrift in the Caribbean, my father beyond reach or sight, I should have been frightened. The serenity of the waning sunlight on calm waters, however, was pervasive, and I was too much in awe of my father's aquatic prowess. How he searched at those depths, without light or fear of barracuda (and for so long!), I did not know or think to ask, but each time, without fail, up he would rise with a conch in each hand. Then, several breaths taken, bearings gathered, he would dive again, often without a word of warning, leaving me to mind those large shells and ensure the gentle sway and flex of the raft didn't cause them to tumble away.

As I sat there, corralling those great, horned seashells with my matchstick legs, I looked out to the open sea, at its bold immensity, and contemplated the distance between us and home. It seemed vast — worlds away from our campsite, the friends I'd made, the frigid waterfalls, the misty mountains. How could I return to Kansas City after all this? Certainly I'd visited Jamaica before — twice — and for every day as long, but in that instant on the open water it all seemed different. I was older; experiences like this held more meaning for me.

Literally, then, out of the blue popped my father with three more conchs.

"How many does that give us?" he asked, spitting saltwater away from his lips and breathing deeply.

I counted. "Eleven."

"All right, Kiddo," my father beamed, white teeth, no tusks, but still so lovably walrus-y. "Looks like we've got dinner".

And I forgot all about leaving.