Interested Only in Getting You Lost (98)

My varsity jacket made me ghost-meat
to the gypsies, who resented my fortune,
which was to travel free from compulsion,
a song in my wallet--travel advisory unrequired--
(assuming I was careful and avoided airports),
uncompelled to squat in some abandoned building
I could only leave to con or entertain the gajo.

What’s the secret circle in a plaza, square curved
by traffic, leaping asphalt islands? Lanes
no one thought were there appear instead, among
the huddled masses, circling strangeiros. In Italy
Fiats leapt on lips of fountains, which may violate
the letter of the law, or from force alone make new ones.

This place, however, is not the Mediterranean.
Here the exterior tiles of the smallest church
are splashed with pale blue figurines
from loaded brushes--willows, harps, fountains
that weep their cobalt blues to finer strands
to be aquatic mist before the white enamel’s flash
while the coolest echoes circulate in the padre’s chamber.

And how this westernmost of European longitudes
accesses choke-holds to waterways and natural ports
from which their sailors could purchase half the globe
until an earthquake came between them and the prize:
ruin made these little rebuilt churches really possible.

Otherwise borders are such artificial impositions:
e.g., Gallego’s the same language, but it’s Spain,
where they play the bagpipe to the three-step
(or to Caesar, tripodium). Subtract one, it’s Texas,
where longhorns stumble through the heat waves
until they reach the Algarve, then disperse.

The cobbled plaza, on the other hand, is their turf
where echoes spik English. They don’t want to know me
with their circle so perfect, especially by nightfall,
the decorous officers with shoulder-brushes gone
as certain flowers in the cold will close to fists.

Upon the whole perpetuum mobileof the globe
how can you find your point of departure,
let alone point of return? Must you move
to the end of the line, or to the start of it?