TPQ OnLine
poetry chapbook by John Samuel Tieman

Marco Polo Goes Home Evening and it's been years. This time the harbor is called home. Finally. And at this distance it's finally clear: all who wanted him dead are dead. But the ones he loved -- a prince, the priest, a servant, the woman -- lost in all the miles. A few here remember his name; fewer still remember the day he left. Since then there's been only rumors. Rumors he's been seen in Persia. Rumors he's seen burning rocks. And for all that, he now carries only a bag, two boxes and scraps of a manuscript. One box for diamonds, one for rubies. In the bag, on the Khan's own gold he carries the Khan's safe-conduct pass. The scraps are for the tales. The tales. But how can he tell them? How can he tell them that once he and he alone was asked by the very Khan himself to hold the golden stirrup as the Khan mounted then marched 200,000 to war, to die? Who will believe him? Who will believe in cities of millions? In rivers of vermilion jade? He rests. He expects much. He knows he's wealthy. Still, it's been years since Venice. Children pass playing a game he doesn't recognize. It's only now he knows he's alone, that he's forgotten how to play, that he's forgotten how to go home from here, the final harbor.

Bitter Song For Her Tonight, constellation pale as vapor, musicians from Mazatlan singing like a sorceress growing old ... They sing of love, of course, which is why I write: I brandish this planet I stole and wait for the echo of a tremolo; an incantation speaks of how the star was set by the soul of one misloved. The gypsy knows our self-imprisoned lives, her ponderous bear dancing upright at our slightest command. And like this beast, that distant land and its mendicants, I sing to you of the mute siren, the hymn of the doomed pilot's flight, song the centurion hums after he brings the vinegar

	In Winter The schoolmaster stares out his window. In the snow, the footprints lead he forgets which way, in, out. Yesterday his lover left. The kids want to know what's out there.

	And this is how I knew I loved you. Something told me you were near. And suddenly, the subtle sounds, I just knew the approach of your high heels behind me, that peculiar scratch of nyloned thigh by nyloned thigh. And I knew. I just knew.

	Engagement In February the last frost before spring snowbirds huddle near the grate near the dutch door nameless motionless birds freeze to the wire in the sky while we speak of the next season for the first time now that we have come this far we speak to the cold gray field speak to the streets that named us speak in voices the color of love the color of the next warm rain the color of the one road home

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The House Poet I pull up, pull the brake and wonder what brought me to this my chores, my laundry, my garage I never understood the word my unless it modified a periphery -- my war, my liquor, my passport and now I am here in this skin and it is true the word home modified by my and it is no mistake, the grammar perfect, each word building the next, my street, my house, my wife