By dark the world is once again intact, Or so the mirrors, wiped clean, try to reason. . . -James Merrill

This dream of water--what does it harbor? I see Argentina and Paraguay under a curfew of glass, their colors breaking, like oil. The night in Uruguay

is black salt. I'm driving toward Utah, keeping the entire hemisphere in view-- Colombia vermilion, Brazil blue tar, some countries wiped clean of color: Peru

is titanium white. And always oceans that hide in mirrors: when beveled edges arrest tides or this world's destinations forsake ships. There's Sedona, Nogales

far behind. Once I went through a mirror-- from there too the world, so intact, resembled only itself. When I returned I tore the skin off the glass. The sea was unsealed

by dark, and I saw ships sink off the coast of a wounded republic. Now from a blur of tanks in Santiago, a white horse gallops, riderless, chased by drunk soldiers

in a jeep; they're firing into the moon. And as I keep driving in the desert, someone is running to catch the last bus, men hanging on to its sides. And he's missed it.

He is running again; crescents of steel fall from the sky. And here the rocks are under fog, the cedars a temple, Sedona carved by the wind into gods--

each shadow their worshiper. The siren empties Santiago; he watches --from a hush of windows--blindfolded men blurred in gleaming vans. The horse vanishes

into a dream. I'm passing skeletal figures carved in 700 B.C. Whoever deciphers these canyon walls remains forsaken, alone with history,

no harbor for his dream. And what else will this mirror now reason, filled with water? I see Peru without rain, Brazil without forests--and here in Utah a dagger

of sunlight: it's splitting--it's the summer solstice--the quartz center of a spiral. Did the Anasazi know the darker answer also--given now in crystal

by the mirrored continent? The solstice, but of winter? A beam stabs the window, diamonds him, a funeral in his eyes. In the lit stadium of Santiago,

this is the shortest day. He's taken there. Those about to die are looking at him, his eyes the ledger of the disappeared. What will the mirror try now? I'm driving,

still north, always followed by that country, its floors ice, its citizens so lovesick that the ground--sheer glass--of every city is torn up. They demand the republic

give back, jeweled, their every reflection. They dig till dawn but find only corpses. He has returned to this dream for his bones. The waters darken. The continent vanishes.

--from A Nostalgist's Map of America

Second one I am posting here from the same book. Shahid whom I have come to love. He recently passed away ( Dec 8 2001) in Mass from a brain tumor. He was the head of the creative writing program at U of Mass at Amerhest.

It was a year of brilliant water in Pennsylvania that final summer seven years ago, the sun's quick reprints

in my attache case: those students of mist have drenched me with dew, I'm driving away from that widow's house, my eyes open

to a dream of drowning. But even
when I pass --in Ohio-- the one exit to Calcutta, I don't know I've begun

mapping America, the city limits of Evanescence now everywhere. It was a year of brilliant water, Phil,

such a cadence of dead seas at each turn: so much refused to breathe in those painted reflections, trapped there in ripples of hills:

a woman climbed the steps to Acoma, vanished into the sky. In the ghost towns of Arizona, there were charcoal tribes

with desert voices, among their faces always the last speaker of a language. And there was always thirst: a train taking me

from Bisbee, that copper landscape with bones, into a twilight with no water. Phil, I never told you where I'd been these years,

swearing fidelity to anyone. Now there's only regret: I didn't send you my routes of Evanescence. You never wrote.

The trees were soon hushed in the resonance of darkest emerald as we rushed by on 322, that route which took us from the dead center of Pennsylvania.

(a stone marks it) to a suburb ten miles from Philadelphia. "A hummingbird," I said, after a sharp turn, then pointed to the wheel, still revolving in your hand.

I gave Emily Dickinson to you then, line after line, complete from the heart. The signs on Schuylkill Expressway fell neat behind us. I went further: "Let's pretend your city

is Evanescence—There has to be one— in Pennsylvania—And that some day— the Bird will carry—my letters—to you— from Tunis—or Casablanca—the mail

an easy night's ride—from North Africa." I'm making this up, I know, but since you were there, none of it's a lie. How did I go on? "Wings will rush by when the exit

to Evanescence is barely a mile?" The sky was dark teal, the moon was rising. "It always rains on this route," I went on, "which takes you back, back to Evanescence,

your boyhood town." You said this was summer, this final end of school, this coming home to Philadelphia, WMMR as soon as you could catch it. What song first

came on? It must have been a disco hit, one whose singer no one recalls. It's six, perhaps seven years since then, since you last wrote. And yesterday when you phoned, I said,

"I knew you'd call," even before you could say who you were. "I am in Irvine now with my lover, just an hour from Tucson, and the flights are cheap." "Then we'll meet often."

For a moment you were silent, and then, "Shahid, I'm dying." I kept speaking to you after I hung up, my voice the quickest mail, a cracked disc with many endings,

each false: One: "I live in Evanescence (I had to build it, for America was without one). All is safe here with me. Come to my street, disguised in the climate

of Southern California. Surprise me when I open the door. Unload skies of rain from your distance-drenched arms." Or this: "Here is Evanescence (which I found—though

not in Pennsylvania—after I last wrote), the eavesdropping willows write brief notes on grass, then hide them in shadows of trunks. I'd love to see you. Come as you are." And

this, the least false: "You said each month you need new blood. Please forgive me, Phil, but I thought of your pain as a formal feeling, one useful for the letting go, your transfusions

mere wings to me, the push of numerous hummingbirds, souvenirs of Evanescence seen disappearing down a route of veins in an electric rush of cochineal."

for Philip Paul Orlando

Author Notes: "This is from the central section of A Nostalgist's Map of America, which deals with the death of a friend of mine from AIDS. He was an undergraduate at Penn State when I was a graduate student, and we were very good friends. The last time I had seen him was 1979, he had graduated and left. Out of the blue, in 1985, I got a call from him in Tucson. I don't know whether he discovered my number or I had written a note to him, I don't remember the details. He told me that he and his lover were moving from Boston to California and they would be driving through Tucson and would like to come and see me, which they did."

My Notes: Beautiful poem. Ali was one of the finalists for the National Book Award for Poetry this year. He is an immigrant like I am: from India. He hails from Kashmir, what Shahjahan, a Moghul Emperor called, "Heaven On Earth" which it truely is!