1989: Death on the Nile

,

.

Shot from a helicopter over Cairo

our hotel pool would be a turquoise drop.

I’ve learned to see like that, imagining

each place we travel through from somewhere else.

Right now, my mother and her journalist

boyfriend glisten beneath their sunscreen.

Their life together is a giddiness

they surface from (like coming through the door

between hotel rooms) to attend to me

and my brother. Here with us they need to click

we’re guests of the Egyptian government.

Portraits of Hosni Mubarak follow us.

But earlier, as the cool Mercedes inched

into the souq (the smell of cigarettes

then sewage and saffron) why did I register

the river of faces only as phantoms?

Even my body seemed to freeze away

the present, as my shallow breathing trickled

its supplies to its distant client states.

Right now, the pool sends sunlight crumpling

across the pages of my mystery.

But in the sentences, Hercule Poirot

in his labyrinth of death and art deco

seems more real. Even slapping the book down

and sharp Chanel) I can almost replace

the present. Fantasia of passageways.

A gun barrel peeking from palm fronds.

Blood leaking down the palatial staircase.

And then the make believe dissolves.

The elevator’s polished gold distorts

my face to glops of biomorphic syrup.

So many years before the words arrive.

Quavering through the doorway, I collapse

on the bed to wish my rage away as nausea

washes in waves through the open blue.

Invisible to me, the Nile

gathers all surfaces in its reflections.

The ancient neon Coca Cola sign.

Goats bleating from the mud-brick roofs. A whiff

of spearmint tea and kef. My mother dipping

toes then calves in the turquoise. The agent

sent here from Langley haunting his beach umbrella.

Info he zapped from beneath the electrodes.

Right now, right now, right now . . . as the dry heaves

leave me wet and cool on the bathroom tiles:

how inescapable the present feels.

Right now, right now, right now. . . . Not like a novel

hiding me in its chambered structure. No:

the day is here. It is the single thing

I need to make my life inside: its forward

spiral, constant and rapid as the river

charging from Aswan to Alexandria.