| . |
. |
The One of You
Water cuts through rock
Love cuts through sleep
Days move as water moves
As one note follows another
I am always the one of you
That imagines heat and flood of sun
The river, being the sweat of gods
Wiped from the sky
Therefore understands why
I use my hands to hold the wind
Pulled by my desire to fly
In this trust
I am carried into the opaque eye
To lay my heart on this vast shoulder
In a yawning smoke of exhaustion
Good times were burning
In a car cigarette lighter
Circles burnt in the clouds
The occasional rock working loose from the bluffs
To catapult off a ledge
In an issue of scale
Arriving big enough to crush a car
Thus the river aligned with danger
Night became bigger
Silenced the Budweiser tribes
Voices drowned by outboard motors
A river cuts like a heart
So with morning in my eyes I needed the wind
To talk with you
So you could hear water run over my ribs
While tides had their say
I leaned on changes in the colors of seasons
The light you brought to what I wanted
Before shadows toppled
Spilling into my river
~ .
A Confetti of Voices
We know the shadows
Better than we know ourselves
Feign surprise at how frail they are
How they vanish
When we step into darkness
How unfamiliar they are with memory
Or brilliant fragments
Caught in freefall by the sun
Embracing the monstrous
But we do not own peace
Just as shadows
Do not own defeat
And the metal sleeves that flipped through sunlight
Did not mean to appear so gay
As they tore away from the two great pillars
Scattered with all the strength of air
There will be no comfort
Except in small acts and daily tasks
As we stand in the shadows
Which must leave us
As others have gone
An out-of-focus memory of terra firma
Refracting in the confetti of voices
That flew from those pillars
The last free notes in a blue sky
~ .
The Call to Prayer
I
I awaken to the call to prayer
Mountain altitude, thin air
Mosques visible through the haze
Drink the juice of pomegranates
To dilute my blood
I awaken to the call to prayer
Sun pierces my skull
Voices ring
Across the heat of flat bread
Scatter down the mountain
II
If I could pray all day
What would I say
Would I say what I had to
Or would I spare God's feelings
But then, He knows
I'm just one of His little clowns
~ .
The Momentary Worship of Midnight
We travel by train to rail's end
Into the swirl of desert heat
Pretend to be brother and sister
The communal water glass
Dipped into the same water again and again
We go thirsty, dry heat villages
Waver beneath sand and sky
We travel by bus till it gets a flat
Unload for hours on the road
I play kalimba, stay calm
As desert gangs arrive
They regard the kalimba
Ask this bus of poor Afghanis
What we have
Listen to me play
At a nearby hotel, you, aged thirteen
Must sit on the other side of a curtain
Eat with men, I dine alone
~ .
My Disaster
No one wants to look at my disaster
It has become a construction site
A reconstructive center of trucks
Nodding cranes
Starving ballerinas
Dip into cooling lava
At night it is flooded with unyielding white light
Bouncing off random windows
A bathing suit dressing room, a reaper
My disaster is receding
It encompasses less and less of every block
Fewer streets know it each day
My disaster is still a disaster
But autumn is faithful and refuses winter
Its place
Protective of my disaster, I do not want to let go
Instead, would like to embrace it
As it once embodied my horror
If the pieces are swept away
How will I measure
What I know?
Distraction is a comfort to my disaster
A baby sleeps in a stroller
Welcomed with the exhilaration of new information
Your brain knows my disaster
As a science fiction of vaporizing steel
And the plans I have drawn to rebuild my disaster
|
