In Skopje (02?)

1.

Either the wrong time hangs over that station
or the earthquake shattered the wrong clock
and time toppled. On three tectonic plates
grind three continents--Europe, Asia, Africa.

Geology teaches how much time we spend
on earth is superficial: we live on crust alone
(soils only ossified lava, snows coagulated steam.)
This is the background for the wrong time,

its cupola still tipped, its number stilled,
the names for snowy peaks no longer Latin.
But when they are dormant volcanoes,
how do you name their eruption, their flow

before your loss of words or proper names?

2.

Even the thinnest of veneers cannot explain
our tongues, between them and the teeth
air sculpted to syllables, exhalations from the core
deeper than any habit that can be unlearned.

Romania gave the station to the Macedons:
what did Bulgaria care about its upstart cousin
whose South Slav tongue, dialect without navy,
is the same, spelled the same Cyrillic?

The gift shattered, the train diverted,
contested regions are smudged on paper globes
that fray in classrooms, a world moving faster
than dots can be connected for its proper facsimile

or tricolor sewn--if even from glad rags.

3.

Geologic crusts may grind, but the sky is clear.
And since I’ve arrived, little or nothing has moved.
Skopje nestles in a valley like a fleet of tiny ships
with concrete hulls -- its two-tiered mosques,

apartment blocks and latticed-windowed silversmithies
tied by viaducts that leap above dry streams.
These waves of earth are snow-capped mountains
luring emigres to California to make wine and dobros,

National Steel guitars christened Pan- Slavic for good,
a word that sounds so wrong for blue notes
but where is right? Even the dead swim
in a medium of shifty earth, too busy dog-paddling

to judge a bunch of mountain bandits
who (so the natives tell) take the gold
for their dowries from the jaws of the dead
surprised at the mountain pass, beating them

into the lovely new constraints of wedding-bands.

4. Concept Art [tacked on, left off]

The gallery didn’t feature boy-meets-tractor themes:
a burlap bundle speared on a post with bailing-twine
the centerpiece, a giant makeshift body bag or bandage.
As new friends tell me: it hasn’t been ‘48 for years.

Plenty of room conceded to the objet d'art,
more than for the movement of peoples outside,
pantalooned Turkish women and Macedonian Slavs
trotting pedestrian bridges. (Genuine-article ‘41
partisans locals isolate for me as monuments moving
with hesitation at crossing lights before they topple.)

Call this a Care package the artist sent himself
to confirm his place. Who needed stamps, return addresses
when what departed returned to the same station?
The post that balanced the parcel also drove
beneath to hold the continents together. Art tried
to do what shiny stitches of rail couldn’t,
their splintered ties, their dried out creosote
an infernally hot pitch through the summer.