There are no markers at the boundary The bus just rides Easy through the desert Brown hills loom and roll away under the cool sun Backdrop to a vanished drama Pale and wasted The bus runs smooth in a predictable blur of soundless noise This is the region where no one can live Enjoy the empty moment It will pass I never knew when everything changed Was it the moment we married? Before? I found out in a distant moment of your private pleasure When I began to try And succeeded Perhaps you didn't know Any more than I confessed But I waited so long for innocence And all that is left is worship The Baluchis got off the bus before the Iranian border Hauled their sacks from the roof with a smile Left the Pakistanis and the Iranians and the American and the Brit to go through the customary rituals while the driver smoked and the officers drank tea and counted their baksheesh And the bus rolled on Half-empty To its appointed featureless stop Where everyone piled on again No one knew where the boundary was, but the Pakistani post was fifteen kilometers away Why walk? My father is dead But we'll never know when His body wasn't found for a day or so They say it was quick He got up in the middle of the night and never went back to bed It was a good way to go At home Alone My mother died under hospital care They put an hour on it But they didn't know when either Not really She took her time about it Slipping slowly Her body failing so completely they were never really sure which part gave out and it hardly mattered Her mind fading into metaphor There was a man on a cross in the garden, beckoning her She knew We all knew It was a process and it's long since over When it began and ended really doesn't seem important any more Two of us spent a week in Zahedan in 1974 One or the other too ill to travel There's nothing much in Zahedan A bazaar, a mosque or two, shabby hotels and buses and the last spur of the old British-built Indian Railway In my mind it's like Winnemucca or somewhere even smaller in the American west, cheap restaurants and gas stations out on the periphery, fighting the desert to a dishonorable draw A week is too long to look and nowhere near enough to know All I remember are the liquor stores Strung out on the edge of town, the way they have them right outside the dry counties of Tennessee Three, as I recall, all run by Sikhs, the only Sikhs in a Muslim town The Ayatollah must have closed them down but these were the days of the Shah not the Sharia Perhaps they delivered in secret, I never spotted anyone slinking in and never checked inside, but they operated out in the open A public service, a victimless crime, a monument to creative hypocrisy A week is a long time in Zahedan And the train only runs once a week Opium sealed up the guts just fine, the bus a little softer than a brick-pillowed den, the side-effect high gentle and long Eat the evidence Maybe the law was vaguer in a border town Maybe it worked better that way Here inside you Outside myself Lost Found Are we closer than ever Or drifting apart Is this me or us Your body responds And I believe it's you You tell me later It's not Where does my environment end? At my skin? My land? My atmosphere? My universe? I carry an American passport But everyone knows I'm British Except sometimes in Britain The Baluchis carried no passports The bureaucrats in London or Karachi or Kabul or Teheran might have their opinions But the Baluchis knew where Baluchistan was They were in it and they never left So these Iranians and Pakistanis and Afghans earning their crust at the border posts were simply nuisances to be avoided The feeling was mutual and easy to sustain Just get off the bus and walk a while Not smuggling, trading Was I any less married before governments knew? If it ended, do they know when? From across the room I can feel the ice Holding you in place Further than I can imagine And I remember how close you were From eight thousand miles away In the days when the telephones worked The bus stopped again in Pakistan You could tell because the road was worse The roof filled with traders and gunnysacks The seats with strong, proud men Laughing at the farce they played Words make no sense right now Pain distance closeness love lust self Words never fit the important things All we can do is point See: anger See: hurt See: If words could tell they'd be logical 100010011001000011001 And then they wouldn't be human Give me a shin to rub up against A lap to jump into A chest to pummel with my blunted claws But I'm too numb to purr Let me bark at the absent car Run to the gate and stare Howl at the moon But it's new and I can't find it Of course I don't need you We all die alone And I don't plan on that any time soon I can buy new stuff Find a place Talk with friends Pleasure myself I learned to need you I can learn again I never chose to spot you in the street and say, hey, that's the woman I met and doesn't she look good I never chose to be more myself because you were there I never chose to find another half of me I chose to phone, that's true I chose to play the happy games I chose to work on the dull bureaucratic details That's true But I never chose to need you I need you Because it is my nature to need Because it is nature to need Because need is who we are To connect with one To become complete by giving myself away To partner Like the animals we are Not a brood-mate Not a blood-line Not a stud-farm A spouse The lust is there It's good, it's good It's unimportant It's vital It's more and less than anyone pretends If I could see your picture as a stranger might I wouldn't need you If I were building a perfect beast A help-meet by design I suppose she wouldn't look like you Think like you Speak like you Make love like you And I wouldn't make love like me Speak like me Think like me Or probably look too much like me You can't spec a person Because you can't spec yourself And the person you need (For now) Is part of the person you are And the person you are Is partly the person you need (Deal with it) I need you But if you force me to I'll get over it But I'll never get over need Need is hunger Need is thirst Need is part of what holds us together One to two Two to several Several to many Many to all Tonight you stand for all And so in turn do I The sky is brown, the earth is blue I'm an animal and so are you Brown pollution, blue from space How little and badly we use this place If we're gonna flout Nature's wishes Let's give the planet back to the fishes I love you less than words can say when they try to say how much They're squirrelly, weaselly, all or nothing things Broad-brushed, rule-of-thumb, crude estimates Time will go on after my love Space will go on beyond my love The sun will rise when my love is lost and forgotten Love itself will outlast my love For love is not a thing to count Love is not a quality to define Love is not a treasure to guard and store and polish on the weekend Love is not a dream you can shovel a glimpse into Love is a process Love is life I am touched by life For now I do hold this truth to be self-evident, that all are created equal But life is not a right Life comes before rights Life is, that's all Liberty is a right, they are words from the same stock, the same set, the same dictionary, the same agreements we make with each other before we are even born As for pursuing happiness ... Happiness is not a priority, it's a by-product When are the Baluchis now? They used to slip the edges of time Medieval modern ancient Meaningless words for grand people Undocumented workers, permanent aliens, male chauvinist pigs (the women were hidden), honorable folk who prayed five times a day and knifed you if you disrespected them Only if you disrespected them Liars, thieves and robbers no doubt to the civil servants of the region, but no more than the head of any corporation and less than most I suspect The Baluchis never fit in this world we created on top of the world we found They played with it (Played with rifles, played with bombs, played with mortars and machine guns, at least some of the ones up north did) Or was that only what the traveller wanted to see? Bumping on the bus on the beat-up road to Quetta Hoping for nothing at best Finding a small solace in the sense of escape The illusion of escape The feeling that the bars of society bent just a little Cracked enough to let the sunshine in For a while Should I be ashamed I can't see like an eagle? Should I be ashamed I can't smell like a hound? Should I be ashamed I can't swim like a fish? Should I be ashamed I can't run the way Tommie Smith once could? Should I be ashamed to be an American or an alien or a Brit? Should I be ashamed to be a man? Should I be ashamed to be an animal? Should I be proud of any of those? (Except the one about Tommie Smith, of course) All of them? I remember you moaning and reaching again in greed that I longed to fulfil I remember when your pleasure came from the way I responded when you pleasured me I remember the curve of your hip as I ran my hand across And I knew it was you And I knew you were me And that was still true When it wasn't Boundaries are the way we impose meaning on reality In an effort to prove we exist Like this table This chair This almost-vacuum I sit on and write on This bundle of water that thinks This mystery we pretend to understand The pretending is as much a part of human life as the mystery The boundaries are real and important Trivial and synthetic too We can't live without making distinctions We can't live if that's all we do The desert is a fine place for a border The grand fools with their maps can pretend there is nothing there And so can the dreamer in the bus As the cold sun and the light brown hills rattle past Until the sudden understanding dawns That something ended Something else began