The snow voids the distance of the road
and the first breath comes from the early morning
ghosts. The sparrows with their hard eyes
glisten in the difficult light. They preen
their feathers and chirp. It’ s as though they were one
voice talking to God.
Mornings are a sustained hymn
without the precision of faith. You’ ve turned the bag
filled with molding bread inside out and watch
the old crusts fall to the ice. What’ s left
So much sky
Because we canbecause we can
a new kind, our new people
this is us now
we didn't know we were here
we don't know how it happened
we flew out of their arms.
Gregarious in hunger, a flock of twenty
turn circles like whorls of barbed wire,
no spot below flown over uncanvassed.
The closer to death the closer they come,
waiting on wings with keen impatient
perseverance, dark blades lying in wake
until age or wound has turned canter
into carcass or near enough for them
to swoop scrupulous in benediction,
land hissing, hopping, tearing, gorging.
no portion, save bone, too durable
to digest. What matters cannot remain.
Particulate as ash, new year's first snow falls
upon peaked roofs, car hoods, undulant hills,
in imitation of motion that moves the way
static cascades down screens when the cable
zaps out, persistent & granular with a flicker
of legibility that dissipates before it can be
interpolated into any succession of imagery.
One hour stretches sixty minutes into a field
of white flurry: hexagonal lattices of water
In the lull, the afternoon sun warms
the linseed field. The flowers are quiet,
their bright subdued in the green
while the mind wanders
to the emerald mosque upon the hill,
built around a flowing spring,
the easy absolutions and ablutions
in that mosque where the spring water
has been let loose to meander
over marble courtyards and inner chambers,
across the geometric, green-tiled floor that
cools the heels of the faithful.
1
A bright red boat
Yellow capsicums
Blue fishing nets
Ochre fort walls
2
Sahar’ s silk blouse
gold and sheer
Her dark black
kohl-lined lashes
3
A street child’ s
brown fists
holding the rainbow
in his small grasp
4
My lost memory
white and frozen
now melts colour
ready to refract
Couched on crimson cushions,
pink bleeds gold
and red spills into one’ s heart.
Broad leather keeps time,
calibrating different hours
in different zones
unaware of the grammar
that makes sense.
Only random woofs and snores
of two distant dogs
on a very cold night
clears fog that is unresolved.
New plants wait for new heat —
to grow, to mature.
An old cane recliner contains
poetry for peace — woven
text keeping comfort in place.
But it is the impatience of want
They didn't find it in me until months later —
just like Vallejo who died on a rainy
day far from the heat rising over a garden
in silvers and reds — far away from the din
of buses, tobacco vendors, cows that overran
the streets with their holiness. Laid on the surface
of the Ganges, the thin shells reflected light, clamored
against the current. Far from the Atlantic, farther still
from the Potomac. Same color of night, dull dawn.
The fever should have churned my blood into tight
Off-season and in
the burnt forest
of my nightgown, a feral
undergrowth that marks
me as burial site —
to be still enough or
just enough.
My arms become fat arms:
hearth. I eat dirt for doubt,
a secret bleached
old as lie. I out-want
like a spindly
winged monster.
If I were a bug —
were I — then you'd hope
for reparation, and paint
more brown into the plot.
Once when I was harmless
and didn’ t know any better,
a mirror to the front of me
and an ocean behind,
I lay wedged in the middle of daylight,
paper-doll thin, dreaming,
then I vanished. I gave the day a fingerprint,
then forgot.
I sat naked on a towel
on a hot June Monday.
The sun etched the inside of my eyelids,
while a boy dozed at my side.
The smell of all oceans was around us —
steamy salt, shell, and sweat,
but I reached for the distant one.
A tide rose while I slept,
