Soon, when your foot treads European soil once more,

and this five weeks since your departure, weeks of sheer torture,
then subterranean electric shocks will go
throughout our Union, on up to my exile’s Oslo,
where heart and soil will shake with a volcanic explosion
that breaks the crust and melts like blood all that opposes
the scattered flowers that resurrect themselves and grow
up suddenly among the bird’s nests, fruit trees holding
their branches empty from sheer faithfulness, devoted
as no place can be save our hopeless old Europa.
Evenings we put on black, mirrors wear veils of mourning
in bedrooms, and the people here seem gauche and gross.
Since you’ve been gone, the sick have lain past hope of cure
the juvenile delinquents go more antisocial,
and, backs turned on their inspiration, most of the poets
incline to striking noncommittal, modest poses.
But tell me, did you find the deep peace of the soul
there beneath aqua skies the sun had edged with gold
with your hands clasped together in an open lotus,
did your “I” wink out there in that country that extols
the qualities of concentration and composure,
or did you take from the world’s dripping claw the flow
of wild blood down the cheeks of young men, from the sold-off
attractions of the women, from game cocks and cobras,
that blood that burns through the illusory world we know?
Or maybe, in the arms of the one you’re travelling with,
you’ve put off choosing either, gold-bronze, oiled up, glistening,
with just the inside of your navel showing snow-white still,
and chilled, refreshing drinks borne out to you, until
those of us here at home seem less and less familiar,
unreal as movements in those rice fields in the distance.
In any case, know that he, too, is loved. And this
I say by way of vindicating your suspicion
that I am an entirely lost individual.
Rather than Buddha’s calm, I choose the Crucifixion,
choose love, its fires, rather than desire extinguished,
falling in love, with all its painful probabilities
all the way up from graves’ remaining residuum
of friends from youth, little white powders that don’t fill
the urns they were poured into. They were killed,
but we’re here still.

When you return, as soon you will,

oh then at Santiago de Compostela, pilgrims
will gather, on their knees, like me, because you are immanent….
I await you like the dealer waits for his big shipment
of “snow” from dreamland, from the drug’s pure spring. Listen,
a touch is the one thing that can deliver me,
the landing gear being lowered, then the landing strip,
you disembarking, then the soft click of your flip flops
through Schönefeld or Charles de Gaule, and my one wish is
that everything might start again from the beginning,
the continent be salvageable and I with it;
decay, instead of disappearing bit by bit,
reverse and circle back into its genesis,
so that again there comes the swell of hidden rivers
beneath tree bark and feathers and the thin, pale skin.
And if that fails, well, then, if things could just continue
the way they were before, go on with the same pitiless
longing that through ranged years of creativity,
love, self-destruction, neither failed nor found fulfillment.
Europe is in your hands, come home, grant my petition.