Air flecked with blue and gold and green, one soft
grey strip of cloud against which a plane’s silhouette
moves toward a distant airfield. We’re all going
somewhere, aren’t we? Even if we’re huddled
in these rooms in rows of vinyl chairs, or later
packed three deep in an elevator car ascending
or descending through a windowless shaft.
Who could hear the faint hush of crickets
from inside this womb? Who could hear
the chant of cicadas or the rumbling in
the bowels of the earth? The woman pressed
against the wall has earrings in the shape of
coffee cups. All I can think of is you,
and where you are at this moment. The man
in the blue-and-white seersucker suit
presses buttons for all our floors:
nine, eight, seven, six; five,
four, three, two, one.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Acompañamiento
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
GOING SOMEWHERE?
It is familiar hallo, a hail-fellow-well-met nod
we cannot stifle or swallow when we come
across a paisan aimlessly window-shopping
at an endless mall: Where are you going?
A donde vas, mi amor?* Same query, another
tone, or yet another lilt, if it were not a plea.
Why is it anyone’s business to ask where
indeed, anyone is going? Whither blows
the wind? Am I my brother’s keeper? Like boats,
we find ourselves sailing without coordinates,
no grids plotted or shackling charters. Free,
we are free to walk the planks, on or maybe off.
Where are we going with all these memories?
Down, all the way down. We cannot fly back up.
—Albert B. Casuga
08-24-11
*Where are you going, my love?
“Going Somewhere?” is also posted in:
http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/08/going-somewhere.html