Although you have never seen them yourself,

there are places you still suppose to exist.

San Diego, for example,

where the man in the next cubicle

flew his family over Christmas week...

Beautiful weather, a wonderful zoo!

You imagine a sun-splashed elephant

in its glaring enclosure—San Diego.

Not for the Louvre you flew to Paris,

but the baggage handlers who came at dawn

on a grimy tram to stack big bags

in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower

yet would not lift their eyes to it.

Now if you wondered what difference

anything makes, you could go home

and live as a man who has been to France.

Another place you suppose to exist

entered your mind one afternoon

asleep underneath the Sunday papers.

In the Travel Section, in gaudy orange,

was an ancient desert habitation

and a man on his camel. Like you on your couch,

he too will go, when his god wills it so,

to a place even stranger than San Diego.

Don Barkin has published poems in Poetry, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Commonweal, Prairie Schooner, and other magazines. He is the author of three full-length books of poems, That Dark Lake (2009), Houses (2017), and The Rail Stop at Wassaic (2020).

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Published in the February 24, 2017 issue: View Contents

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