At the border between the past and the future
No sign on a post warns you that your passport
Won’t let you return to your native land
As a citizen, just as a tourist
Who won’t be allowed to fraternize with the locals.

No guard steps out of a booth to explain
You can’t bring gifts back, however modest,
Can’t even pass a note to a few friends

That suggests what worries of theirs are misguided,
What expectations too ambitious.

Are you sure you’re ready to leave,
To cross the bridge that begins
Under a clear sky and ends in fog?
But look, you’ve started across already
And it’s one-lane wide, with no room for U-turns.

No time even to pause as drivers behind you
Lean on their horns, those who’ve convinced themselves
Their home awaits them on the other side.

It was during the siege of Lucera
     that Petrus Peregrinus (Peter
the Pilgrim), builder of catapults, layer
of mines, chief engineer and servant
     to Charles the servant of God,
conducted in his leisure hours behind
     the fortifications whose
erection he himself had lately overseen
     experiments on the lodestone.
From his letter "On the Magnet" (August
     8, 1269), a world
of usefulness and chiefly as to method, only
     later named and codified. "My dearest
friend," he wrote. The scorching wind.
     The city not yet fallen. Soon.