The Checklist

Natalie Tam

Waiting for the Great Geyser to hurl the boiling water,
they bend and gape in the cool tense air.
Counting second by second, they are expecting amazement,
of the violence of nature.
Eruption, and exclamation.

Beside ‘witnessing something majestic’,
they can proudly put a tick.



Imagine lying on the Salar De Uyuni in Bolivia,
the world’s largest mirror made of crystal,
You are stunned by the spectacular reflection.
I wonder what’s behind the astonishment though.

Beside ‘seeing a true reflection of yourself’
Can you proudly put a tick?
(2010)



This poem was inspired by Questions of Travel when I started contemplating the true meaning of travelling.

Advice to the Good Traveler

Victor Segalen

A town at the end of the road & a road extending
a town: do not choose one or the other, but
one & the other by turns.

A mountain encircling your gaze confines &
contains it, as a round plain frees it. Love to
leap rocks & steps; but caress the flagstones
where the foot lands squarely.

Retreat from sound in silence, &, from silence,
deign to return to sound. Alone, if you can,
if you know how to be alone, pour yourself
sometimes into the crowd.

Beware of choosing a refuge. Do not believe in
the virtue of a virtue that lasts: break it
with some strong spice that burns & bites
& gives a taste even to blandness.

Thus, without stopping or stumbling, without
halter & without stable, without rewards
or punishments, you will attain, friend, not
the marsh of immortal joys,

But the intoxicating eddies of the great river
Diversity.

Questions of Travel

Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

This poem describes the wonderful things that one can see and hear along a Brazilian highway. She brings up a lot of questions that travelers in an alien landscape will probably ask in the second stanza. The poem then ends with speculations about the decisions we make to explore nature and the world.