Was It

Was it worth waiting in consulates

for some clerk’s fleeting good humor

and waiting at the station for a late train,

seeing Etna in its Japanese cloak

and Paris at dawn, as Haussman’s conventional caryatids

came looming from the dark,

entering cheap restaurants

to the triumphal smell of garlic,

was it worth taking the underground

beneath I can’t recall what city

to see the shades of not my ancestors,

flying in a tiny plane over an earthquake

in Seattle like a dragonfly above a fire, but also

scarcely breathing for three months, asking anxious questions,

forgetting the mysterious ways of grace,

reading in papers about betrayal, murder,

was it worth thinking, remembering, falling

into deepest sleep, where gray hallways

stretched, buying black books,

jotting only separate images

from a kaleidoscope more glorious than the cathedral

in Seville, which I haven’t seen,

was it worth coming and going, was it—

yes no yes no

erase nothing.