[An Arrival]
Tomorrow I will meet Pierre, a Swiss. I will be the other obvious pilgrim eating by himself. He will gesture for me to join him. I am here to walk and admire God alone but we must not be silly about it, he’ll say when I sit down. Married with two sons. Fell off a horse at sixteen, crippled his whole life until a recent surgery allowed him to walk freely. I’ll decide that’s why he’s out here, to uncoil the life’s-worth of walking wound inside him. I will never see or speak to him again for the rest of my life. But first Pierre will refuse not to treat me to lunch. While he pays the bill will tell me I was supposed to be in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 but missed two subway trains so I just stayed uptown to try your American pancakes. Very good —————
* * * * *
No Words But Awarenesses of Rescuings
If you see them Mother please tell them I’m a poor mourning pilgrim
bound for Canaan land.
—Sacred Harp 417
A toddler in a father’s arms
thinking it’s wise to pretend to be asleep
because if he knows I am awake
he will make me walk upstairs by myself.
A child asking are we there yet
in a voice farther and farther from my own
trying to last with no good answer
like a moving target all the theres along the way.
An adult walking by myself thinking I’m wise
thinking about the desires on earth
how they are all desires to survive the wreckage
mouths intact enough to drink peace straight from a famous river.
* * * * *
An Unorganized Response
I have traded an old bridge a song
and drawn the beautiful spire.
I laughed in the rain
and held reverent silence up to constellations.
But now I try to floss my teeth in windows
across from more basilicas.
Wait until the Pyrenees loom to apply cream
where it is sure to burn cold.
To a dying bean field’s orange invitation to live up to my own life
I drain blisters, depending on the hue.
And on the flight home I’ll pass gas over lakes
of Newfoundland sunlight.
I have no idea how to pair magnitudes.
* * * * *
We asked Nick Maione to tell us about his work in progress. He writes, “These poems are selected from a full-length manuscript titled Songs Without Plan, based in the experience of walking the pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago, from Arles, France to Santiago de Compostella, Spain, a distance of 1,100 miles. The poems began as a way to traverse a pilgrimage landscape which is both vertical (as in devotional; creature to Creator) and horizontal (as in pilgrimage and place; creature to creature), and ended up plotting a lyrical subject where these axes cross, a self that exists alongside other selves on the journey: friends & strangers, saints & sinners, antagonists & loved ones, and where Vincent Van Gogh makes an appearance (or four).”