Distortions of Renaissance Pragmatism

The world must be peopled,
Says Benedick (to himself)
Before Beatrice enters
(Act II, Scene iii).

And so I do -- without much
ado. Except, I don't
people it with people,
really. A friend called it

Slavic animism once
(it was the summer of
bare feet, long words
and short nights).

What it is, actually,
is an exercise in
exploding loneliness
into a population of animas,

protective and personalized,
sending signals and
reasserting the rightness
of this moment in this

your life, reflecting
your defragmented
you, showing it
in the light.

A comforting mirage
of external meaning
revealed in the
quotidian to the observant --


this is certainly
not what Benedick
had in mind when he
set to people the world


with Beatrice. Too
metaphysical, that.
And, ultimately,
profoundly lonely.

Black Sandals

If my mother had been Asian
She would have probably looked
Like the woman on the metro
A few weeks ago.
It was something in her
Wide temples, it was
Her short black hair,
Her small, clever hands, and
The intelligent fingers
With modestly long
Fingernails, but most of all,


It was the straps of her
Black sandals around her
Dainty pale-skin ankles
Set off nicely by medium-
High heels that spelled
My mother silently
From the floor of the
Metro car.

Kelebia-Kelebija: Entering the Country from the North

10 million years ago
this was all underwater,
this stretch of fields
was home to
fishes, shells and crabs
not dreaming of trains
carrying dreamers glued
to windows across the oceans
of wheat.


this drained sea-bottom
is endlessly the same
north and south
east and west,
gives me nothing
to go by, doesn't
translate into borders
or countries or allegiances,
it teases, rightfully,


until, a few hundred meters
down the railway line from
kelebia, two words sprayed
on the wall of a crumbling
railroad house sail slowly
in and out of my view,
fitting easily into the
landscape of stray poppies
as we dock into kelebija:


VOLIM TE.
and then i know
exactly where i am
and what i am doing.
like a fish in the water.