No Where Travelers by Matthew H. Diaz

No Where Travelers

He asked how to get his boxes to Boston

and his bags to San Anton

 

I told him some things

are too heavy to travel,

and my home

is a desert thunderstorm

 

The tall gray clouds,

my hopes,

the lightning

is my fleeting flesh,

here for only a moment,

the thunder is my dreams,

louder than light

when close by,

and the rain is my worries,

my exhaustion from struggling

with the glorious blue mountains

 

He said he thinks about too many things,

like where do people go when their

desires are shattered by a random

hammer,

and how do babies end up crying

in empty arms

He said he doesn’t have a home,

he moves with a sense of abandonment,

and all his things in a bag;

now he wishes to pack up

all the static and clutter

of his random thoughts

and send them far away

 

I told him I just try to think about nothingness

as a destination

Josephine and Howard

For my paternal Grandmother and my maternal Grandfather:

 

Grandma, I sensed your resurrection today;

something pulled at that mysterious rock,

that hardness we keep inside,

and my eyes began to water

 

Erin named your great granddaughter after you

and now I can see the ripples returning

from a not so distant shore

 

They’ve traveled through that darkness

where decay, emptiness and seeds

yearn to find one another

on a humid, buzzing border night

filled with the aroma of masa

and hibiscus

 

I’ve just spent a week with Grandpa,

I know he’s not your husband,

he’s come from the other side of the fence,

but you’ve both given me so many lines to trace

 

Following the two of you takes a patience this now crackling

and fractured world tries to short circuit

with a hard jolt like someone

struck by lightning

 

Jittery, charred and frazzled it’s hard to notice

the stories written in your wrinkled flesh

and slouching shoulders;

time makes these impressions on you,

yielding tales to search out

like reading the bark and deciphering

the hidden rings of a tree

 

He tells us about the country he’s seen,

unfolding years easily,

and tearing down the cities

with these tales

 

A whole world has been built

in a single lifetime,

and he’s watched the cranes go up

heard the computers hum to life;

hands reaching across a skyline

placing perfectly fabricated blocks

here and there,

like toddler gods playing with a new set of legos

 

They move quickly and the walls close in,

the horizons shrink;

new machines, new ways of thinking

fill all of our spaces;

there is a constant prattle of voices

in the background

speaking in tongues while the congregation

rolls around in the dirty, asphalt streets;

lost souls confused by all the petty deities

 

We’ve all been carried out by this heavy tide,

where has the silence receded to?

 

So I just ask questions of him,

sensing the quiet of fields ready for harvest,

the patient miles it took to get there,

and watching the breeze move across the tops of things,

and I try to remember you, Grandma

Bicycle Ride Down Orange Avenue

I can hear the old blues man on the corner

as I ride through this city of desire

listening for a heartbeat

 

He’s got no instruments,

only his rough voice

keeping time with the rush of buses

and cars

 

I spend hours listening to him,

trying to get a hold of his jagged

and mysterious words,

coated with exhaust

like the red bricks of the building

he’s leaning against

 

 

Then I see a lonely muralist

down a long, trashed filled alley;

he’s scratching out

the image of a godhead

on a forgotten wall;

a deity with a Mayan’s forehead, pixie’s lips

and Buddha’s gaze into the distant,

the near,

the silence

and me;

he says the title is Axis Mundi

 

I’m buzzing now, so I travel through the painting’s center

and pick up a traveling companion;

we quickly head east, into the rising sun,

searching for a new city

 

We follow a roaming gull

through the piercing sirens

of shattered streets,

past the storefronts locked

to keep the Vietnamese gangs out

 

As we rush by I tell the scared owners,

trapped in a cage of their own goods,

maybe these ghetto rebels

are the destroyers we’re all looking for,

those who’ll turn this 7/11

society to ash

 

The wandering bird

comes to rest atop a light pole,

staring into the horizon

and we find some respite for our weary legs

on a bed of long, uncut grass

and try to gather our breath

 

The two of us talk over the nature of mountains

and clouds and I recall

how I tried to tie

her watery soul to my solid and jagged

slopes,

discovering it’s impossible to lasso

evaporation;

we decide we’re lucky

if we can dwell in the fog for awhile

 

Rested, we leave the tired bird behind

and begin to move towards the sound

of drums booming from a skyline

cluttered with construction cranes;

immense insects building nests,

twig by twig,

for the coming storm

 

High up in a window of one of the towers

we spot a girl’s face

and know it’s her voice

we’ve been seeking

 

She’s trapped in the scripture of her mind,

but I can still hear her shouting down at us:

 

“There’s a place for your home nearby

where money’s useless;

so call in all your hopeless missionaries,

they’re working in all the wrong places”

 

She tells us she’s been trying to climb down for a lifetime,

so she can walk through these streets,

how she wants to carry water to the sick

and bring her footsteps to the aimless,

but she’s lost her map

down a dark hallway

generations long

 

I guide her, with words which bend around corners,

to our avenue;

upon touching the asphalt

her brown eyes shudder

and she flutters away

to perch alongside the weary gull we left behind

 

Then we realize we’ve gotta be outta here before sundown

and the shadows are getting long;

turning to flee quickly,

we leave our machines behind

as I lose my partner

in a flurry of cascading green, digital numbers

and feel the air turn cold

against my sweaty flesh

 

I’ve exhausted everything;

tripping, stumbling down a steep hill of paved concrete

and I spot a patch of broken windshield glass ahead;

I fall into this smashed pile

of a thousand jagged, green jewels,

and each little mirror of yesterday pierces my flesh

 

Landing somewhere near to home,

I walk out into a night damp

with the memories we ignore,

and the scent of my own blood in the air

 

I find I’m beginning to remember how these songs

fit together,

so I reach down,

dig my hands into the cool dirt

and dream of the village to come

Neighbors

Sleeping wolves on cool, shaded cement

shedding their white and gray hair in the summer;

ashy puffs gliding away in the breeze

 

Small innocent children, dancing around in the warm sunlight,

stroke these dreaming beasts,

while grungy street prophets speak apocalyptic verses

in fiery tongues;

as they shout out lists of our given sins,

their grimy and bearded faces

hide a wisdom years of sleeping with the stars

has burned into their flesh

 

An old woman wearing a green hat passes by;

she walks towards the cathedral on the corner,

with hopes the glowing, wrinkled man in the cassock

will pry the nails from her palms

and guide her to Eden

 

Silent in the center, a stunted tree grows through the cracks

in the sidewalk, “Thou” carved into its skin

and cigarette butts seeping into its roots;

all these participants in oblivion pine for

holiness and the ability of osmosis to let gritty miracles

become nutrients for their resurrection

 

But tattoo shops are more prominent than bus stops;

we talk only through ink and attire

rather than leaning towards our lonely neighbor

in the seat next to us,

close enough to smell her morning coffee and nicotine,

and listen to her story from the night her husband died