Earth

I shall visit Scotland
And know that I am no visitor there.
I shall feel my hands in my native soil,
And rub it on my face,
And roll in it like a dog in fragrant garbage
Or a pig in shit.

I shall carry my native soil
Back to my nowadays home,
My unreal estate--
Not in great, oblong boxes,
Like some Transylvanian noble
Of peculiar appetites--

But in small crescents
At the ends of my fingers and toes,
Behind my ears (Don't you ever wash?),
In the corners of my eyes

Where it will mix with salt tears every day for joy
Of knowing that here I am
And there I am
A Scotsman,
And an indigenous person.

And the grit will so irritate
That the tears in each eye
Will make a pearl of it,
And through that eyeball-pearl
I shall see this world for what it is,
And I shall tell you.

Remember the drowned Phoenician Sailor.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Tramps

(with thanks to Gary Ferguson and to Marley Shebala)

"Tramps," the Paiute call us.
The Zuni say "visitors" —
A more gracious term, I suppose.
But the meaning is the same:
We are the rootless ones.

We are the ones who buy houses
And call them homes,
Who later sell and leave them behind.
Who feel the heartache and the tug,
But leave just the same.
As if we could take our land,
Our memories, our groundedness—
The graves of our grandfathers—
And toss it all on a potlatch pile,
Abandoning our very place in this world,
There with a heap of household goods.

We have powerful words in law:
Deeds and rights, liens and easements;
We exchange money and tell ourselves
That we have found our homes.
But we do not own that ground
Any more than it owns us.
The ones who own it are the ones who stay.

In time, like us, our deeds will be undone,
Our homes made insubstantial, liquidated,
And their proceeds disbursed
Among our displaced legatees.

Laughing, She Said

She came to me in the dark of night.
A friend and I sat
Making quiet music when it was late
And we should have been still.

She came to me in the dark of night,
She, dark as night,
And eager to share--

For there on her one hand
Was a letter-sized notepad,
And on that a leaflet,
And on that a card,
And on that, confined in a circle of card
Defined by the rim of an upturned glass held firmly there by her other hand
Was a scorpion.

"It was in the bathtub," she said.
"Bathtub?" I thought.
I didn't get a bathtub.
Neither did I get a scorpion, though.
And at least she was sharing that.

I shined a flashlight, admired
The scorpion's curl, like the curl
Of stars in the sky.
Not far away, like they, but still,
Under its glass,
Safe to view.

Beneath it, layers of paper, cardboard, ink.
To slow its progress,
Should it try to dig its way out.

With flashlight and scorpion
We walked downhill,
Away from the buildings,
Away from the sleeping dreamers,
And there she released her captive --
Flipping it past a split-rail fence.

Laughing, she said:
"Do you think that will keep it out?"