_____________________________________________________

>

_________________________________________________________________________

Janet McAdams' collection The Island of Lost Luggage won the  American
Book

Award in 2001. Her poems have appeard in TriQuarterly, Columbia, the Women's

Review of Books, the Crab Orchard Review, the North American Review, and other

journals. She teaches at Kenyon College.





Janet McAdams, from The Island of Lost Luggage (University of Arizona, 2000).





The Grand Hotel





In those days everything was forbidden.

We traveled anyway, into the heart

of the abandoned countryside to a town

in the mountains, near the lake they now call

Lago Verde. Behind the altar of the dark cathedral,

Simon found the delicate bones of an animal,

crawled in, we imagined, out of the biting

winter wind. At the sound of our voices,

the skeleton collapsed into itself, the way

a house of cards falls when the table is jostled.

Bits of fur rose like fine mist from the animal

we could not identify, and drifted, casual

as the spurs of wild daffodils we blew away

as children, those summers near Anuncio. Sister,

do you remember?

In this first Autumn,

I am writing you in a whirl of leaves. Dark violet

and yellow, they fill me with emptiness.

And I am listening for swallows, who call

to each other just now at twilight.



The Grand Hotel overlooked Lago Verde.

Its white and blue sign appeared unchanged,

as if doors might fly open and travelers emerge,

to walk the path around the lake. The bright sun

burned our skin, but it was cold in the stone

hotel. We broke two chairs and built a fire,

warming the room a little.



That room with its impossibly high ceilings!



We talked then of how people once lived

and held each other in the musty bed, beneath two

names carved on the mahogany headboard.

I thought: I will never forget these names

and have. How little, Anna, we remember of what

we once knew. We are blessed to forget



unlike Luria's poor patient "S," the man

who remembered everything, and in no particular order.

He swam each day through a thick fog of trivia

and history: the yellow toothbrush his aunt

kept at the summerhouse, formulae for colloidal

suspensions, the weight in grams of the Faberge egg

lost when they took the Imperial Family to Tsarkoe Seloe.



What I remember is this: Simon brought almonds

and a tin of cocoa from his pack that cool evening.

We had the hard flat bread of travelers and plums

found in the tainted countryside. We ate them anyway.

They say that in March on that mountain, the butterflies

were so thick you could not walk without crushing them.

I keep this image as if it were memory.



In the Grand Hotel, we wandered through hallways,

past photographs askew on their wire hangers,

intricate rosettes carved on the overdoors, floors

of polished, hard green stone. We tried to imagine

the people who built this, then poisoned their fishes.

In that poisoned land, we slept and I tell you

I did no dreaming. Anna, will we remember our past

always? Will we ever walk the dream road

of our childhood, lined with wild rose, the scent

of cape jasmine, to waves iridescent with fishes,

fearful only of the wild cries of ravens?





______________________________

Advice to Travelers





1. When you wake, leave furtively.

    Leave everyone you want to save.



2. Don't look for gratitude

    in the huddled-down white morning light.

    You will stumble and lose your way.



3. Do not dream. Dreams sicken you

    with lies and false memories.



4. Carry a map so worn

    it is open to possibility.



5. Carry a blue flag in your left hand

    since blue is the color of flight.

    Take thread, a sharp needle, pearl buttons

    for the world is in need of mending.

  

6. Be suspicious of the songs of sparrows

    for there are no sparrows.



__________________________

The Thousand Year War





Imagine, if you will, a people sleeping.

Imagine how, when the weather changed,

we shrugged

and went about our leisure.

Then: earth, sky, water.

Everything

changed color.

We looked away, uneasy.



When next we looked, we saw the fields

grow dry and empty,

that long September into Autumn,

the Winter Years that followed.

We grow small: a people who die

faster than they are born.



We say that no one lives beyond the border,

the line that separates

where one may never live

from here, where one may live a little.

The few who left have not returned.



I am writing you this letter,

though you may never write to me.

From grief or sorrow, I doubt

I'll ever know. I try to remember you,

in a time that cannot bear remembering.

But this I know: the sunsets

grew more beautiful, not less, the rain

was gradual and warm. Fat, fat

was our final Autumn.

The fruit was rich and orange.



Now things wear down. The things

we used to love wear down.

Bit by bit, we push the clutter

beyond the fenced-in territory.

There you might find anything:

clever metal gadgets

whose use has been forgotten,

a vase of peacock feathers,

books of pictures

no one has the will to open.



Imagine a world pared down to Winter.

Imagine, if you can, a land

that sighed, turned over,

and slept another thousand years.

In the time left us,

will we speak?

Will we ever speak of it?



Janet McAdams