Return to a Village
I was not there but saw the
photograph; the market’s
bundled figs, cardamom, and
oranges covered
with plastic, mountain
prayers inscribed on stones,
henna-stained fingers, and
your face quiet like glass
windows half-open to that
light—
the sun filmed with slate
clouds and smoke
and music muffled beneath a
staircase
coiling into ears as the
silver rain arrived.
There were green-scented
hours in a café
by the sea caked with white
salt and sweat-
rimmed water. On my fingers, North African hills,
dates, and goat breath. When you touch them,
all things whiten into the
memory of stars,
dissolve into mint leaves
and water.
In the blue dawn whispers
form vapor-trails;
we coil. I imagine the porcelain-voiced woman
whispering the first words
into your left ear.
Beyond olive oil streaked
hair and concrete walls,
winds pulse through tangled
juniper: your landscape
from right to left. I trace salt fissures and sweat,
arrive as rain in the yellow
wind. We do not speak
to the day-lit moon sucking
the blood-red pomegranate.
Men till the landscape;
crows glisten: they remind us
of snow. They arrive through cold hours with blued
lips.
Shadows revolve around the
one surviving tree;
and each stone eavesdrops on
darkness.
Human Memory
These fern plant shadows and oiled windows mesh into
the tree I watched in my sleep sway into another layer of time—my nephew
approached its base and questioned with his hand on its bark the effects of
being rooted for a lifetime. I imagined
a flock of crows descend onto a gigantic yellow worm. This is inside sleep and half-sleep where paper-thin thoughts
evaporate. Below the bed: another realm—but I cannot read enough
whispers, strange and generic, to accept the night dripping off my tongue. Really the sunrise and sunset emphasize the
advancement of stars and other space-like figures. I have seen two falling stars in two nights erase an entire
minute. The wireless is connecting me
to the entire world but I cannot touch the center of my own body.
Drift
How fast is the wind on
which the dead travel
to arrive beside our beds?
The window opens a paled
light
cracked enough to hear
silence tap its fingers
against the glass face.
Hours traverse deserts.
Seconds spiral through
strands of hair, condense in stone homes
too low to stand in.
They travel without a
compass to read the proper azimuth of our sweat.
Time collaborates with a
language encased in sand,
summons snow onto cracked,
parched lips,
summits the highest dunes
and then rolls back.
This is the moment a tongue
melts.
Recite the myths of a night
blooming cereus as dusk sews shut the eyelids.
The origin of salt cannot be
measured
without knowing the taste of
a full moon.
Earth is an armless clock,
Ticking behind night’s door
locked with a deadbolt.
Footsteps dissolve into
fragments of discarded skin.
This is the proper speed:
junipers coil over eyes for
this one second—
Molecules on our tongues
attract each other’s silence.