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.