Walking at night, I read the house numbers
on those porches lit like vacant stairwells

hung along the mill’s lip, flights of metal
steps any type of weather might fall through,

and this gentle litany tolls the schedule
of departing ferries that take us from

island to city and back again — 1210,
1245 — ferries where the whales bloom

a black and white skirt in our wake, ferries
we drive our big cars onto because now

we can go anywhere, ferries that took
the people from the clear shore of their lives

to the internment camps on the mainland
because nothing could be more dangerous

than living among each other where voices
unnetted and rising in complaint

are a flock of birds that can make no song
but that one which we sing together.

each day I enter with open / papers & snake the coiled
wires & barbed cattle chute / Qalandia / & bunker sand

-bagged heads / to study the very ground / & watch oneself
being watched / a ticking watch / other’s hands handing over

to red-haired & fretting / Uzi itchy with questions
& half a world / from his birth / a passportless plastic bag

scuds & tumbles past border / its blue flag blessed by wind /
O to be winged / & not locked in the fate of checkpoints

outside the milk of oxygen / held up / outside the /
in /no man’s / land / to lift outside gravity’s root & float

in the matrix / the mind a stone / bones grinding themselves
like teeth / in this mouth / vacuum-locked / suspended

till he gloves back / the papers / aviators glinting back
this alien’s alien face

dear descendant
of the dis
appeared you ascend

the pillar
of your own air
spin & span

whole abysses
with lines
translating there

to here & here
to where
wind winds

in dry wadis
hoists sea
in handful

after invisible
handful
isdoud now

your e-mail address
& digital image
of branches

through windows
within school ruins
a refugee points

with his cane
to what he
only can see

you argue against
the argument
against your

self you
yourself make
& home in

kiss my blind
eyes clear
close keyholes

with opening
homeland you
cradle in vowels

what was not
never yours
I’ll hold it here

till you return

jaunse tu bhagela ii toke nighalayihe
je andar rahe tohar jahaaj ke nast karihe

The remnant of hind limbs puppets an origin
play that strings baleen to terrestrial

ancestors. Occasionally whales sport hind legs —
as in Vancouver in 1949,

a harpooned humpback bore eighteen inches
of femur breaching its body wall. Disconnected

from the spine, what is their function but to rend
the book of Genesis into two? Why regard

scripture and exegesis as legs and fluke,
sure to fall away, and not eat beef or pork? Why

do I need Hindi in Hawaii as a skeletal
structure, a myth to hook my leviathan jaw?

                                                    What you run from will swallow you,
                                                       what’s inside will splinter your boat

hathailiyan ke mehndi halki hoike gayaab
ii sarirwa mein bhala kaa tikaav

You will your house of clay and breath
a fortress. One day, ash and smoke will play fire

games in the courtyard. Remember this hovel
is of five senses —

Does wind stay trapped in a room when its windows
yawn? Without country it flows as river water,

a traceless origin. How can this structure
of earth and bone be home? Says Kabir, “However

beautiful — gold or silver — when the cage
door cracks what bird stays inside?”

                                       The palm’s mehndi lightens then disappears;
                                                        what permanence is in your body?