ENOUGH
When my friends decide
they've had enough of America
they start longing for the odor
of fish sauce, the silky texture
of newly cooked rice, warmer weather,
the privilege of cursing
in their own tongue.
When they start talking about
cops on the take, streets
where you can't walk if you're not
black or white, or the empty hollow
you feel after the six o'clock news,
I know it's happened,
they have packed their boxes
with nostalgia, they have signed their names
in pre-Hispanic script.
And now we are talking
in different languages,
I can no longer tell them
there is nothing more beautiful than
crossing east on Tappan Zee Bridge
in the pouring rain,
or reading Walt Whitman,
or listening to Miles Davis
right after the sun has set or even
just the punctual clangor of the mailman
who moves with the sadness
of afternoons in Havana.
Lately I've been getting
strange letters in my box,
postmarked on a date
that has not yet happened,
and I open them all
as though they have always
belonged to me,
and everything I am about to say
is already being filed
in an office with no windows
by a clerk who marks an x
before my name simply because
it is his duty to do so.
Some day I'll send everyone a card
with nothing in it, only
the calligraphy
of a river, and on the back
with invisible ink I will say:
Forgive my happiness,
I have betrayed you all.
From Zero Gravity, Alice James Books, 1999.
Read other poems here and here.