Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

^{—for Agha Shahid Ali}

Smiling unconsciously under the northern lights

the authority of elsewhere

sleeps in my bed.

I shamble in with my entire entourage of appetites

demanding to be fed

but her authority lies unconscious in my bed.

I want the particulars of her appearance.

I beat my claws on the empty air

because I want to live in her lively head

I want my incoherent prayer

to awaken her coherence.

The atmosphere is turning red

but she continues dreaming in my bed.

Wherever I go, she goes

one step ahead

into foreign languages

I have never understood.

She is Asia. She languishes

in some further wood

where no one knows

the meaning of what is said.

her eyes are closed. She’s in my bed.

Shall I take a photograph

to prove that she existed here

that my bed was warm enough for her

that the possibility of happiness

is never exhausted so long

as I can see it? That there is no abyss

between the astronomer and the star

nor any universal grief

that whispers we are far, far

from what it is we want in life?

But the photograph is wrong—

she illustrates a law

that postulates the heart

if the heart grows a body, the body grows a paw

the paw begins to think what part

it wants to play. Whatever it might reach,

whatever we touch

whatever is stolen constructed caressed or bought

is the fateful destination of the heart.

So any thoughts that circle in my head

are only photographs pretending to be art—

the authority of elsewhere posing in my bed.

A woman in the marketplace

in Oaxaca is picturesque.

The history of sunlight has imprinted on her face

the stark topography of a mask.

I took her picture but I’m not there.

I stare into her eyes which are placed upon my desk

and I think her life continues, or has ended, elsewhere.

Thus Mexico and Africa and Asia rise into the mist

as pyramids and history and hieroglyphs which we at best

under northern lights are qualified to dream about.

In a dream I wander out

beyond these premises to prove

that extravagant darkness is what I love.

I am searching for the ground.

I am told there is a fabulous beast

which certain populations east

of here consider sacred

or so they say or so I’ve read

or so, according to some authority, is not an unfounded

fact. The authority of elsewhere sleeps in my bed

she is undercover, she is naked

she leaves every word unsaid.

As the day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel
the people we’d loved and lost calling
like a breeze that suggests itself but never
actually awakens the trees. She told me
again about the moment she decided to let
our first child go so she could go on
living herself, and I remembered
how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself
for a day, until I was lost and came
to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning
to comfort our baby after we’d scattered
her ashes, and I remembered that the sun
had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me
with something as different from thought or song
as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey,
our lost child. And then I told her again
that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed.
Even when I stood up and gestured, there
in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away.
I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go,
so I lay down under stars so sharp
in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even
when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds
stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels,
she said then and laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.

We—Detroit girls, Daughters of Motown— 
knew before we saw the bronze casket

that Aretha would be dressed down;  
some—Non-believers, Outsiders— 

called it frivolous: two-day 
viewing; eight-hour long service;

four outfit changes, each dress  
more elaborate than the last. 

Beautiful, beautiful gowns—accessorized  
from jewels to pointed heels. I half-

expect her to break out a side eye 
belt out a hymn to remind us

who the Queen is. There is,  
of course, no such performance, 

though we all huddle like crows,  
waiting to see if she still looks 

like herself. There is a protocol to this,  
a right way to send 

someone back to the lap of God. 
Wearing their Sunday best. 

So fancy they can be  
mistaken for a bride. 

if the word for this is   Palestine
this love    this steadfastness

if this word becomes     again
unutterable    unspeakable

if this word   Palestine   disappears
if this work      of being

If a word, a life, the life
of a people      of a land

is taken    disappeared
    stolen            between 
    
the time   starved for months,
              of this poem

denied food            
   its writing      and

without   water  and the now 
    medicine
      
         of your     years 
  under siege   reading

living in rubble  
      you are reading it

a reign of bombs 
                        now    

dying in rubble
  what then

what then?
  what will we do?
           
    you 
I           who?
   
 will anyone    make it stop?
bring it  them!  back?    home?

this word  this land   this people
if the word for this is 

 Palestine   
it is          genocide