A chapter from Edward Dorn: A World of Difference

The moon is a rough coin tonight

full but screened by lofty moisture

bright enough to make sure

of the addresses

on the letters I drop in the red pillar box

Frost is on the streets. A soft winter breeze

comes from the North Sea into my nostrils

I am at home here only in my mind

that's what heritage is.

Turning the corner, only our windows

along the ribbon of road are lit

I know that my wife has gone to bed

and that the gas is burning

and that my heart and my veins

are burning for home. Yet those abrupt times

I hear the voice of home

I am shocked, the hair on my neck

crawls.

The haunting "voice of home" that particular evening spoke in a confusing multiplicity of accents. The movie we'd seen was The Magnificent Seven. A gunslinging re-make of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai by John Sturges, a master of the cowboy-picture genre, this spectacular, romantically lyrical Western had a different look for Dom at his present remove from America and all that was most-familiar.

The magnificent seven introducing

Horst Buchholz, I'd seen it before

and had not got it that a german

played a mexican, of course!

An American foreigner is every body

navajoes play iroquois

the American myth is only "mental" a foreigner

is Anybody. Theoretically at least

an Italian could play

an English man or a London jew

if nobody knew.

Tom and Jenny were there

and Nick Sedgwick.

Tom remarked, on the evidence of

the last scene when the Mexican

Japanese said Vaya con Dios

and Yul said a simple adios,

"that was philosophical."

Then the five of us went home

singing Frijoles!

twirling our umbrellas

and walking like wooden legged men in a file

one foot in the gutter

the other-on the sidewalk.

The "I do this, I do that" occasional quality of this relaxed account shows Dorn deliberately letting down his rhetorical guard-or anyway seeming to do so. In fact the casual nonchalance of the poem is to a large extent a calculated appearance; the poet, as often before, is wandering to a purpose. The subtle weave of rhymes-streets / breeze / Sea; Dios / adios / home / Frijoles!; jew / knew / Yul-represents a vintage Dom lyrical tactic, concealing an intuitive but real formal pattern within apparent informality. Far from casual, the poem's implications of cultural displacement indirectly signal the poet's real burden, a problematic confusion of identity.