The Collector of Bodies. Diane Glancy

dishes on the table of his apartment. I hugged him when I left, held my head against his chest too long. We shared a kiss delicious as the meal, and he who said no English, said, stay with me. I couldn’t, of course, you know regrets the next morning, the responsibility of responsible behavior, the diligent heart of a diligent nation.

      But I would like to have, and felt brittle as my papers when they dried after I left them on the porch in the morning rain. He still holds me against him as if our ancestors long ago had left one behind when the other started out to reach a new land, because they loved the sea, because they loved travel, because they loved most of all the nomad of the human heart, or the camel-train starting out now toward the stars, because we’re not satisfied, but striving down the ages to hold one another in that separation, that necessary departure, we’re still having to leave.

      Ebla, Syria

      You stand in a country not your own. The ruins of the oldest city in Syria. The excavations opened in a country whose cravings you begin to understand. The sky as a whole toward whose reason the birds turn as a departure from this earth. How a people stay with you. How your attempts are a varmint in the way things work. Your tactics not solid as these digs, but you feel the blue glassware as you pack the plane that lifts it from the land.

      Departure to Another Place

      You change countries on a plane with Arabic writing. Your small roll-on luggage upright by your legs without safety regulations you know in your country. But a lunch that is right.

      Sometimes I met in different places between classrooms and lunch rooms with students, each trying to say what they thought, what they wanted, asking if there was a way to take them. Later, the letters would arrive from young men with their photographs.

      The trip felt like pieces from different puzzles mixed together with pieces missing from each. I picked up desperation. Maybe my own. I felt an insurrection, a rising of impossibilities wedged into hope, though the avenues were not there that would bypass the troubles.

      It was freedom they wanted, a word so used in America its power was not as hallowed.

      At night, in my room alone, I wanted to stay beside the awful hugeness of the world.

      Bedouin Girl Reads about Transportation in Russia

      1.

      March 31st–April 2nd Jordan

      On the road, the three-wheeled trucks overloaded

      with people,

      the hexagonal side-panels of metal,

      silver, red, green,

      like strange banners in a cathedral,

      an ostrich feather on the grille.

      2.

      Above Amman, in the mountains, remote, windy, rainy,

      a barefoot girl, a Bedouin, reads a schoolbook

      the interpreter says is on Russian transportation.

      If you told her how reading all that

      she’s behind the world’s traffic

      as she’s ever been in your western thought.

      She’s reading wrong and out of date.

      Their trucks would be your junkyard,

      and you know how your country’s arrogance

      makes you smug and you unwrap it

      like a tick as if it’s simply uncontested.

      The armed soldiers stand at checkpoints on the shore

      where Russia peddles its hype to those who cannot know

      the jabals,

      wadis,

      the windy villages, concrete-walled and cold-floored.

      3.

      You’re a visitor to a country near the beginning of history.

      You’ve entered the mess of influence competing

      with interpretation.

      You fear your own heart, and clear away

      with your only hand the barefoot Bedouin girl in her village

      you pass through wanting to say you’re from a country