Three Poems

Hymn to Food

We travel this abundant world eating
the same foods, different names, amazing
tastes from mashed chickpeas & the local spices,
with cucumber, soured milk, local grain,
vegetables preserved with heat or brine; bread
like a sponge, a rock, a diaphanous
weaving, all served hot or cold according
to local ingenuity or need.  All different,
yet all the same beyond the borders.

We travel the world but stop at borders,
where the man who says tsatziki kills
the man who calls his dinner cacık.

Collateral Vision

I see so much these days out
of the corners of my eyes,

I have to question anew
what is true.  Not the curtains

gusting in a slight thermal
from the radiator, or

the slivered sun off a side
view mirror, but the people

who aren't really there, the cats
underfoot who turn into

the boundary of curb &
rough sidewalk.  What is today's

alert level?  Who's under-
mining what I know I know

in favor of this constant
unease, unseen, still morphing

mad disequilibrium?
I argue with my Kenyan

cabbie who claims we milk-fed
Americans have always

seen the world this way; miss the
true for the phantom evil.

I swear I never have, but
for a nanosecond his

photo, in the plastic sheath
behind his seat, could be young

Mohammed Atta, pilot,
who learned only how to fly,

never to land.  I know I
am not me; I crave solid

ground underneath; being
American I demand

a pill to cease these visions,
want my old brain back.  But were

there those who once thought like me,
or are my visions their ghosts, wisps

of their consciences I see
moving in the vague margins,

like flimsy curtains catching
fire in slow thermals of hate?

Facing East from Paris

The young beggar at the corner of Saints
Germain & Michel prays, prostrate at noon,
feet firm against the bank building, legs like a
crouching sphinx, forehead scraping the dirty
pavement.  She clutches her battered, empty
plastic cup between her outstretched hands like
a votive candle, the kind lines of pilgrims
pay to light in Notre Dame, three long blocks
away.  Here, lunch hour pedestrians
circle wide to skirt her inert form, imitate
hajji around Mecca's great granite cube.

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