I had the fortune or misfortune to be traveling
in Central America when the Jonestown Massacre took place
in the airport.
Actually in Merida, Mexico.
Trying to get out.
This is basically.
This poem is built around that.
It's called Anywhere Out Of The World.
And then there are places no one ever expects to arrive.
From San Francisco once, a man led hundreds of followers
to Guyana, uncharted cargo ships.
Though later, he would instruct them
to swallow sugar water laced with strychnine.
It was a clearing of simply carpentered houses,
of covetous mongrels, nicknames, clean laundry, and off
key singing.
Kool-Aid, a communal settlement in the jungle, a town that
after an accretion of re-enactments
on television and in the pitying words of various commentators
became a mind collapsing in on itself, finally dense enough.
And isn't each of us rich enough with losses, with disasters?
When I first heard the name Jonestown,
the news was handed me with Mexican shock and skepticism
by a janitor sweeping the airport lounge in Merida.
Should I say I felt remorse, or disgust, rancor,
or just a little shaky?
November in the Yucatan, short of cash.
I had slept the night in a stony field outside the terminal,
barely nodding off, sweating ferociously
in a down mummy bag as inappropriate
for the lowland heat as the shirt I'd been wearing,
a heavy, ornately woven cloth dyed violet purple
by Mayan mestizos.
It had cost me a week of haggling in an Atitlan mercado.
That morning in the men's room after stripping off the shirt,
I found my chest and arms tinted a translucent purple, red paper
towels.
And liquid soap couldn't scrub off.
So that the words the janitor spoke
seemed then to have made my body glow like a particle shot
scraping through dense air.
One of the brief phosphor red sparks thrown off
by an emery wheel while someone sharpens a blade.
I have no idea actually where Jonestown
is on the cultural geography of our times,
whether it's been absolutely forgotten about.
It is absolutely strange incident.
It's part of the background noise.
It seems to me, of the culture that we
live in incidents like this seem to simply not disappear so much.
But they vanish into the white noise of media information that
constantly surrounds us.
And in a way that poem is about that experience.