Tourist

                        Hanging like an oasis in his air of lost connections 
                                                                         —Robert Lowell


If I just had someone else to make
arrangements – lunch after the ruined medieval
Spanish church, an accordion playing Uzbek,
perfectly ordinary bowls and cooking utensils

that bore the locals every day but come
to me like a comet. Only then could I fully
be the vector I covet. Neither to nor from,
just magnitude and direction. Pity

the poor equilibrist, believing that bad
trades up to good or even a little short
of it: commodified and accountant-ruled,
we’re moral holes with public comport.

I’ve seen the push of loyalty
against the unresistant zero, as if
mere persistence in our low probability
is always much more than good enough

to make us natives, whose aftermaths confect
to fill motivation up in empty retrospect.