watching a play that

for eternity will last.

Swap Meet

Swap Meet

Stingrays black as bats,

hoods forked open flashing piston heads, Lincolns

with suicide doors,

throat-red interiors, steering wheels

spoked like spiderwebs —

we admired the catch, cowl induction

scoops spit-ragged clean, Mustangs with

cherry-red drive shafts, VWs small and tidy,

an unwrapped child’s toy, then home in silence,

backs stuck to the vinyl mesh, the glow of beauty polluting

the present with an afterwash that should have cast

scale to our shabby Chevy with its

watered-down V-6 and hole in the floor.

We stopped at Orange Julius

until our backs were dry, a lesson

in possession, sweat drying

on my father’s beard.

Bomb Shelters of the Oligarchs

Bomb Shelters of the Oligarchs

Five hundred feet below the park

tunnels stretch for miles.

Blast-proof titanium corridors

lit by low-voltage Bruck pendants.

Mario the guardsman crawled

to freedom to escape Tiso’s

Slovakia. Ten years he’s

put on a blue Caraceni suit

and plunged into the earth’s

inner hush, cutting a motion-

sensor’d wedge of light

into the vault’s violet dark.

He’s never had a visitor, unless

you count the butcher

who weekly restocks the Kobe

steaks, the sommelier who tests

the humidity of the cellar, the

mechanic who runs the 1969

Bentley, never driven, for

six minutes each day, and the

veterinarian who feeds the

Bornean elephant seven hundred

pounds of cabbage,

acacia leaves, and carrots

dropped into its cell

by a dumbwaiter secreted into

Holland Park’s wading pool.

Twice an hour Mario

passes the first-edition library,

the room of jewels, the

warehouse of art, as big and cool

as St. Paul’s Cathedral,

the hidden harem,

TV turned up high, reality

programs in Russian. Midday,

he kneels on the settee

by his post and unwraps a butter

sandwich and chews slowly,

drawing out the time before he

must adjust his blink rate and

return to his post, and wait for

the call, the one that never comes.

Maps

Maps

The retired consul general

lately sailed to Algiers.

He lived there in the ’70s,

his wife would find body parts

in the trash some mornings,

and their baby, born white

in a hospital room choked by

flies, doctors terrified —

a child wrenched into the

world without hair, the lone

French nurse begging them

to leave: I cannot guarantee

the safety of your child here.

But now the child is grown,

married to an Iranian, living

in Dubai, building

wealth for a multinational bank,

while the other child — the one

the retired consul general

jokes was not a pied-noir —

finds in the tiny aperture

of Stockholm’s daylight

ways to protect the foodstuffs

of Europe from infectious

diseases. It is safe there now

in Algiers, the retired consul general

says, allowing

the word’s opposite to grow

in our imagination as we pick at

artichoke ravioli and swirl

the wine, an excellent wine

from Ancona, aged

in the dark for years