July Notebook: The Birds (2)

July Notebook: The Birds (cont.)
Robert Hass

In front of me six African men, each of them tall
and handsome, all of them impeccably tailored;
all six ordered Coca-Cola at dinner (Muslim,
it seems, a trade delegation? diplomats?);
the young American girl next to me
is a veterinary assistant from DC;
I asked her if she kept records
or held animals. A little of both,
she says. She's on her way to Stockholm.
The young man on the window seat, also American,
black hair not combed any time
in recent memory, expensive Italian shirt,
gold crucifix fastened to his earlobe,
scarab tattoed in the soft skin
between thumb and forefinger of his left hand,
is reading a Portuguese phrasebook.
A lover perhaps in Lisbon or Faro.
There should be a phrase for this passenger tenderness,
the flickering perceptions like the whitecaps
later on the Neva, when the wind
off the golf of Finland, roughens the surface
of the river and spills the small petals
of white lilacs on the gray stone
of the embankement. Above it two black-faced gulls,
tilted in the air, cry out sharply, and sharply.

They are built like exclamation points, wood-peckers.

Are you there? It's summer. Are you smeared with the juice of cherries?

(...)

- - -
passenger tenderness. porque é o que prefiro. basta ler cada palavra.