The Parallels, Not the Connections, Confine You

There’s a sort of pontoon boat,
A blue, rudderless dinghy,
Floating down a flooded street,

Pulled by young men in life vests
And bright bicycling helmets,
Up to their hips in brown mess.

The pontoon’s crammed with people
Looking scared, casually dressed,
Mostly clutching each other,

Behind them, a row of shops
And undistinguished buildings,
Probably rental housing,

Squats in the dirty water,
Facades linked by sagging lines
Tangling up telephone poles,

And that’s that—a flooded street
Of escaping residents
In an ordinary town.

Kathmandu. You used to dream
Of living in Kathmandu.
Guggenheim almost let you.

Typical westerner dreaming
Of an exotic escape
To a more intriguing world,

Typical youngster trying
To make life an adventure
For sheer love of daydreaming,

Despite a fragile body,
Raised in the kind of place full
Of boring rental housing,

Streets crisscrossed by power lines
And folks in casual clothes.
To dwell among great mountains!

To write poems under those eaves
That shade the roof of the world!
To become someone made new

Who dines out on anecdotes
Of that year in Kathmandu!
But the grant didn’t come through.

Forty years later, you stare
At this photo of a street,
Ordinary as any

Except for this year’s monsoon,
Just one click from a photo
Of another flooded street

In a Florida suburb,
More shops and rental housing,
Where people in shorts and tees

Are wading through the brown mess
A hurricane left their world
That parallels Kathmandu.