Gaza has become a funeral home, 
but there are no seats, 
no mourners, no bodies. 
In the caskets are nothing but 
what remained of the dead’s clothes, 
and on the crumbling walls are clocks 
that have not moved for fourteen months.

I've never given birth.

Please forgive me
for mistaking
long walks
for children.

I find soldiers, rattles,
teething rings.

I wear bonnets
on rainy days

when river mud
is indistinguishable
from water.

If I drown unexpectedly
send bibs
in lieu of flowers.

Please forgive me
the strays. Animals
are often the warmest
friends.

But if I had a child
I'd run with the same
wild indifference
as a boxer.

And when the children cross
with pets in their arms
I think of how quickly
we become muzzles
in this belligerent world.

Forgive my decision
to leave the swaddling
for stitched bellies,
frizzled hair.

Whenever I look
into a mirror I look
into absence, how the fullness

and brightness of a bed
or saucer necessitates
the transparency

of things that cannot
give life.

If I were a branch, I would be
mesquite without leaves.

Why is there no word
for the male equivalent
of 'spinster'?

Sometimes, fresh from the levee
they ask for water.
I remember how I bathed you
with two quaking hands.

In a way, I was doing the math
for your eventual flight.

I used to think there was nothing
more cruel
than the transposition
of parent and child.

But what of the childless?

What of baskets
filled with painted eggs?

What of funerals
where the only light
sprays from grieving mouths?

The river abandons its banks.

We become strangers
to each other or brothers
who have never shared a meal.

We are pregnant with something
but it is not life.

From space the river is loose thread.

Frayed but clearly discernible. 

A wall but not a wall. 

At county, a jailer winds it around his neck.

Surrenders to unconditional embrace.

Some will use it for a labyrinth. 

Others for escape as night dictates.

At the old Fort Brown emptied when a white woman cried

that a black battalion had committed the crime

of supposing the air could also be theirs

a room sparks as if drowned by gasoline.

Murder is too nice a word

for what was baptized in the water.

Now, at the little church overlooking despair,

a new kind of invasion replaces the old. 

Children in sisal sandals.

Old guns call new guns to scour the shore. 

In false panic

there is no such thing as empathy. 

Under Old West guitar and Jazz band trumpet,
where the riverboat steam horn blares,
you order a corn dog.

Beignets and étouffée
are down the way, cowboy,
you don’t have to put up with that.

But the sun dips into everybody’s eyes,
strollers full of screams rock by
and you

start searching, at the popcorn cart and in your life,
for something more
than everything

you’ve been settling
for.

The Ocean has its silent caves,
Deep, quiet, and alone;
Though there be fury on the waves,
Beneath them there is none.
The awful spirits of the deep
Hold their communion there;
And there are those for whom we weep,
The young, the bright, the fair.

Calmly the wearied seamen rest
Beneath their own blue sea.
The ocean solitudes are blest,
For there is purity.
The earth has guilt, the earth has care,
Unquiet are its graves;
But peaceful sleep is ever there,
Beneath the dark blue waves.

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

Such glorious faith as fills your limpid eyes,
       Dear little friend of mine, I never knew.
All-innocent are you, and yet all-wise.
       (For heaven’s sake, stop worrying that shoe!)
You look about, and all you see is fair;
       This mighty globe was made for you alone.
Of all the thunderous ages, you’re the heir.
       (Get off the pillow with that dirty bone!)

A skeptic world you face with steady gaze;
       High in young pride you hold your noble head;
Gayly you meet the rush of roaring days.
       (Must you eat puppy biscuit on the bed?)
Lancelike your courage, gleaming swift and strong,
       Yours the white rapture of a wingèd soul,
Yours is a spirit like a May-day song.
       (God help you, if you break the goldfish bowl!)

“Whatever is, is good,” your gracious creed.
       You wear your joy of living like a crown.
Love lights your simplest act, your every deed.
       (Drop it, I tell you—put that kitten down!)
You are God’s kindliest gift of all,—a friend.
       Your shining loyalty unflecked by doubt,
You ask but leave to follow to the end.
       (Couldn’t you wait until I took you out?)

I stared at mangoes piled outside
restaurants as the morning pho

steamed into the street— 
the air like a wet towel

and a taxi driver said to me, as I sat in the back seat,
“We do ancestor worship here more than Buddhism.”

I saw the day go like a fig leaf against
a smashed wall in the old quarter,

lizards snaked around the calendar
as days mark the dead.

Back home now—the dead are with me  
in my kitchen—I love them all—
they play a trombone in my heart;

they play brush sticks over the skin of a drum
they tambourine the light on the wall
they swallow a sax whole.

So I’m arranging flower pots
on the kitchen windowsill.

So what if the sun is a pale circle
and the rhododendron leaves are curled
up like scared cats in the reeds.

I stick one candle next to the white
orchid with yellow stamens.
I stick another next to the pale green orchid

with crimson speckles.
I drape the philodendron over the yellow
pitcher my aunt brought back from Paris.

What’s ghostlier than gray morning winter light?
Still the glaze shines on the winding vines
of the ceramic plates from Jerusalem.

Candle-smoke curls around my sight of
two yellow finches perched on the feeder—

The cabby said as I handed him some bills:
“return your wood to the jungle—
candles will burn all year.”

    She looked over his shoulder
       For vines and olive trees,
    Marble well-governed cities
       And ships upon untamed seas,
    But there on the shining metal
       His hands had put instead
    An artificial wilderness
       And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

    She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
    White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
    But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
    She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

    She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
    Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
    Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
    His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

    The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestos, hobbled away,
    Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
    At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
    Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
       Who would not live long.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning