Yellow Book ('98?)

The house’s previous owner
have left her books behind, and a travel diary.
They've eaten their dinner and look up to pose.
Then there is the snapshot of a campesino.
The rim of his sombrero shadowing him, he leans
against the telegraph building in Mexico City,
the serape draped around his shoulders.
He looks at the ground and carries a staff.


The diarist, the wife, comments how thankful they are
for the rule of Diaz -- how quiet he keeps things!
Glossy photographs buckle above the dry paper
breaking into dusty triangles where the pages brown.
Suddenly there’s Egypt, the pyramids of Cheops
and a Nile ferryman, turbaned, background figure
leaning on a barge pole, water grey as sheets of desert

in the pyramidal scenes, with men proceeding on camels
you imagine slowly, in heat that withers all it touches,
until an entry comes: George has done a watercolor
of canals and an oasis, with palms that frame a sphinx--

We are thankful for the king. How quiet he has kept the place!
Our daughter has announced her engagement. We are winding up
our tour, and plan to catch the Hamburg line.
We'll be rowed on the barge to Alexandria, then
ride a gondola for the first time. On we'll sail,
George will sketch places, canals and barges mostly ...

fronds of palm to frame all. The ruler will quiet the mob,
the country sedate where men will glide on rafts all day,
their faces in the shadows of their headgear
and when they don't ride rafts, their donkeys plod
the newly swept back- street of the hamlet, placid too,

as a canal where the ferryman rafts to destinations
impossible to foretell because he moves so slowly ...
When our daughter weds she will spend her honeymoon
on a barge like this, and a man whose face she can't see

will be rowing. Heat prevents you from seeing him.
They will stop to dine and be photographed at the table
and mail us postcards stamped at several destinations.
But the postcards will not get to us for months, watercolors
of a scene that is placid because the king has kept it so

and the marauders have been kept at a distance, and barges
can float on canals without a thought of destinations ...
and affairs move so slowly, and we can eat a late supper...

The rest of the library, Infernos, Sonnets to the Portugese,
was tossed in the trash. And after her stroke,
the previous owner couldn’t fill the blanks in
about her predecessor, who also left the book--

only stone canals like corridors and pink water
lorded over by stilled green bursts of the date palm,
mother and daughter murmuring gibberish as father
paints water-scenes water also bleeds through or bonds,

pink sunsets, pale yellows that bleed into vellum
until the log becomes a single word, becomes yellow.