The Brooklyn Rail

                    [ . ]

A country is a
thrush you can touch but—
& I mean this— rarely ever twice.
All that blue
glimpsed then taken in from an
airplane window.
His suitcase is
the weight of unroofed & 
weathered walls—reed-bricks,
quarried cobbles. Ovid lugs it across
blunt & well-worn
tarmac. His thoughts traverse
the old routes again & again: the wrecked boat, belly up
beside the breakwaters
hollowed out like a storm-stunted
chapel; the oarsmen still latched
to their craft, nailing together the insufferable
planks. But that was
many miles away, many months ago.
Behind him now, American airbuses
alight, take off
from the crowded vestibule
but each one
from & to where? At the
immigration counter,
he tilts his body
like an empty
bottle of arrack.
The amber-eyed
officers & their
panther dogs rummage
carefully inside
his name.

                 [ . ]

Startled awake inside the ICE
detention center—his
mind roiled in its bone pod,
then thawed
unevenly.
Morning careened
in like a jalopy.
Ovid padded his inaugural words
with yesterday’s slime,
with ten-years-
worth of traveler’s fatigue,
with gossamer thread:
i / mere body/
you/ American/
Sunlight flooded
the room’s threshold
like a rush of
orange urine.
Bird shrieks—
maybe the cry of children
in the immediate vicinity?
Once more, he was
passed through
the metal detectors.
Nothing came up
—nothing. Still the
adamant screen
sputtered & blinked, cameras
in their static burr.
Ciphering wires, they coiled
like centipedes
out of the third
& fourth walls.