Marseilles
Dirty building slanting in the yellow air,
streets choked with litter,
men sitting in the slum quarter,
clutching a newspaper or a cigar,
a solitary man making his way
through the debris of an alley
and pausing to pick up the gems,
a discarded shoe or matchbook.
Under the hot far horizon,
the deepening urge for jihad.
I had no idea where I was.
Rather than try to square my mind
with geography, I ignored the map
and walked until I came
to a promenade over the beach
sullen rocks on brown powder
where a German boy sat on a bench
drinking beer. In halting English
he began to share tales of
a tourist in an ancient town.
It’s cheap here, you can get
a room for a few francs a night,
in one of those dives with the shutters falling off,
you can have fun at night, he said,
but you must be careful.
You are neither on one continent or the other.
You are in that place where order fades
into yellow-dark mist of strip joints and clubs,
and you have been here many times,
have seen the slow erosion of forms
in a thousand rotting cities,
the fading of shapes that defined your world
in this epicenter to which all towns revert,
the ghetto at the bloated world’s core.
Reverie
Who will come next out of the crowds?
What shape will rise from the chasm of the past
and stare me in the face, forcing meditations
on years of force, pressure, experience that scarred with regret?
Here in this city where I have never been happy yet to which I return and return,
whom will I meet next in the public byways
where all presents flow together?