Responses
rodhugen: Yep! (8/30/06)
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Currency
After midnight on a cruise ship stairway, a besotted man wants
to barter with me, all but asks me to sell myself, probably thinks
he’s flirting, too damn drunk to know the damn difference.
Not even a compliment, oh-so-innocently asking for a neckrub—
it’s crazy what you think about when you’re taken aback.
My massage therapist charges sixty dollars an hour. I want to banter back,
“You could pay someone by the hour, but it won’t be me,” but I clench
that thought tight in an inside pocket. “Take care,” I said, instead,
descending the staircase like a Cinderella in well-worn walking shoes—
isn’t that what glass slippers turn into?
Feeling strange but true the next day in an Ensenada coffeehouse where
the froth might be good, I ask the dark young man, “Se aceptan dólares?”
But he doesn’t understand my inflection, or maybe it’s not my accent after all,
maybe it’s the sound of the TV explosions behind me. (In front of which I’ll soon
sit sipping cappuccino, decoding the Spanish subtitles, so much easier to translate
than garbled Tom Cruise dialogue. Does Tom Cruise still speak English?)
But when I hand the mexicano a five, he understands, gives me two U.S. ones
and a shiny five-peso coin which, two weeks later, sits useless in my coin purse.
Or maybe it’s useful after all, if only to remind me of where I’ve been,
to hold on to the taste of foreign cappuccino, as familiar as any back home
or in Firenze, where I drank it so long ago. To buy one there, it cost due mila lire,
two thousand! Sounds too precious to drink until you know it’s only
a dollar and a half, so I drank one or two, two to four espresso shots every morning.
I find that sometimes what is luxury today will feel like necessity when you step
into somewhere else, if only tomorrow. And necessity seems to shapeshift, too.
But now Italian currency is no more. Where have all the lire gone?—
The girls have spent them, every one… Sometimes I feel like I’m holding
Italian bills in a world of euros. Beautifully watermarked, beautifully genuine,
beautifully obsolete. Maybe I’ll catch some collector’s eye with what’s in my hand,
rarefied by time, and some have even suggested that God’s holding on
for some reason, that he’s stuffed me and my hand under his mattress
for a rainy season.
Or maybe I’m holding good coins, but I’m on the far side of a border,
they don’t take them here, the banks only hanker for the paper.
What’s the use of a coin collection? Put it in a pretty jar,
shake it and it makes noise, maybe even musical noise, but really.
My mission impossible: to have and to hold these old coins,
these strange currencies that mean so much to me
and weigh so much bulging in my pockets
and sometimes they fall out and roll away
and still I chase after them, stumbling, sweating.
“Se aceptan…?” The longing to offer. If only I could start by holding out
what you’d want. But maybe you don’t even know. And so it goes
in the loud plaza of life, the open space where all is bantered
and bartered about, like the pasar in Jayapura where
many Indonesians teased me,“Masih nonah?”—Are you still single?
Were they captivated by me, or by the rupiahs in my pocket?
KEB, August 2006 |
