In Shared Movement, the Clocks Stop
Through me exists a succulent kaleidoscopy,
Warmth through me and over me and in me,
Moments stretched with the tearing colours
Of dimming light: snowfall and a final all-knowing.
And I know, too, the fierce sidelong intimate gash
Of hardened redness, how it skins the south-face
Of poplar trees. It taught me change,
Your love, the prompt to shed flesh.
Now I, who have loved most of all skin pressed to skin,
Ructions, as tongues press, I betray my laughing peers,
Co-conspirators in shivering melodies of gasps,
Of sighs, and momentary immolation.
Now I am become solely your instrument,
Knowing the truth of your love:
You are relentless, and I,
I am your image.
The Knowledge of Loss
I see the alchemy of shame,
and shamelessness,
in the filaments of light in flight,
so much fixated on function,
that it quiets everything with time.
yet, in a comic reworking of trees,
I looked up and saw plastic bags hanging like leaves,
garlands in the branches,
and I mistook them, thought them
a resting place for the birth pangs of the stork.
and today I am bereft,
sad in the absence of my old heroic mother
and her fat gunny sack of leaves and earth-worn remedies,
which, with relish, she salved on both the doing and the dead,
her designs the only real instance of being I have known.
Woman, outside Damascus Café
She willed me to speak,
But I turned and left,
Heavy with regret,
Pregnant with the memory
Of dust embalmed streets,
And how, with every third step,
The wind spun a story of shape
Spooled from cotton and flesh.
The Navigator
I am spent,
In need of bailing
The boat out,
Yet the sails
Still hang,
And brittle I,
I navigate,
For I am
An instrument
Of the sea.