Reaching the end, I turn around. There’s no point

to my pilgrimage except the coming and the going.

Then I sit and listen to the woodpecker

tapping away. He works too hard.

Tonight I will go out to watch the moon rise.

If only I could move that slowly.

I have no plans. No one visits me.

No need to change my clothes.

What a blessing just to sit still—

a luxury only the lazy can afford.

Let the dusk settle on my desk.

No one needs to hear from me today.

• III •

REMEMBRANCE

To the memory of my first son

Michael Jasper Gioia

Briefest of joys, our life together.

PRAYER

Echo of the clocktower, footstep

in the alleyway, sweep

of the wind sifting the leaves.

Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur

of autumn’s opulence, blade of lightning

harvesting the sky.

Keeper of the small gate, choreographer

of entrances and exits, midnight

whisper traveling the wires.

Seducer, healer, deity or thief,

I will see you soon enough—

in the shadow of the rainfall,

in the brief violet darkening a sunset—

but until then I pray watch over him

as a mountain guards its covert ore

and the harsh falcon its flightless young.

NIGHT WATCH

For my uncle, Theodore Ortiz, U.S.M.M.

I think of you standing on the sloping deck

as the freighter pulls away from the coast of China,

the last lights of Asia disappearing in the fog,

and the engine’s drone dissolving in the old

monotony of waves slapping up against the hull.

Leaning on the rails, looking eastward to America

across the empty weeks of ocean,

how carefully you must have planned your life,

so much of it already wasted on the sea,

the vast country of your homelessness.

Macao. Vladivostok. Singapore.

Dante read by shiplamp on the bridge.

The names of fellow sailors lost in war.

These memories will die with you,

but tonight they rise up burning in your mind

interweaving like gulls crying in the wake,

like currents on a chart, like gulfweed

swirling in a star-soaked sea, and interchangeable

as all the words for night—la notte, noche, Nacht, nuit,

each sound half-foreign, half-familiar, like America.

For now you know that mainland best from dreams.

Your dead mother turning toward you slowly,

always on the edge of words, yet always

silent as the suffering Madonna of a shrine.

Or your father pounding his fist against the wall.

There are so many ways to waste a life.

Why choose between these icons of unhappiness,

when there is the undisguised illusion of the sea,

the comfort of old books and solitude to fill

the long night watch, the endless argument of waves?

Breathe in that dark and tangible air, for in a few weeks

you will be dead, burned beyond recognition,

left as a headstone in the unfamiliar earth

with no one to ask, neither wife nor children,

why your thin ashes have been buried here