Agitated Air [Branches stoop like fathers down to cheeks digressively]

Branches stoop like fathers down to cheeks digressively.
So locks, so chute of knots & pliant waves hang fluently.
Boldness trails along the floor, lies under folds alluringly.
Loveliness denied finds you accustomed & untested shyly.
Lips unlock, loose hiccups, purse & soak superdeliciously.
Stripped, expanses slide to dips, then billow incomparably.
Conversation’s witchery now stirs, now stills magnetically.
Charms to hold a faithful heart in chains surface sparingly.
Mouth pearls apart to nurse the damned & broken liquidly.
Gazes nail the coarsened killer’s heart non-metaphorically.
New moons from hollows rise & hold anti-gravitationally.
Tears enough to stuff a cloud complain meteorologically.
Skin & bone, dear as my blood, a girl gave to me readily
& made things clear & ours, hers & strange, distractingly.
Her eyes hold knives & smiling gouge out yours remotely.
Friends, let us stop here. The shelter in Hajir. (Pleadingly)
Stop. Let me ask where they turned, for I went maplessly
Through wastes, my camel chafing at roads unrelentingly
Bare, her frame concave, hump gone, my haste hungrily
Sapping her speed all the way to Hajir. There, malelessly,
Camels shadowed a dire moon. I folded my ribs uneasily
About it even as, all bared, it circled me, & I specularly
It. I looked for the traces it wiped as it went, fruitlessly.

Credit

From Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press, 2022) by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger. Copyright © 2022 by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger. Used with the permission of the authors.