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Goats mewling
in the Muslim village.
Leafy footpath
into the bodiless acre
of graves. Pass.
Animals:
goats
chickens (a fury, a pack)
one pig (Salma)
Instructors measure our fervor.
Your machine must cover
the kill zone 100% Notate this fever Carry
the lure of the apple.
Where are you Salma? Little ache
of sky. Killing
Field inside, branches latched. Arbor, what is beyond
this wood?
Anthropologists practice at the circling
pinwheels of faces; those at war are matchless.
Laith has skulls and flags flesh graven. In the war, L
worked with the Americans So did O. / so did H. / so did
_____.
We split and cast away
salt seeds over the needles.
Get more at the gas station a mile outside. Outside,
there are bursting cotton bolls,
molecule to sepal
sepal to stalk
blowing their little snow over
the red clay. Out there,
a gas station breathing roads
Even you, dear you; you
have been waiting a long time
for me, haven’t you?
Take this road into the body / return it
as a love
letter. Body
a simmering lake
of code, nutrient,
wishing. In Arabic,
there is a word that means the cleaving
from dormancy or sorrow
into first joy.
Or, the arriving
mouth of the messenger.
It is right on the other side of this wood.
Soldiers collect & number: pigment, hair, jade, roasted meat, timber, cum. The enemy’s flute; the face of an enemy as he holds his young; the enemy’s face the moment it’s harmed. The woods are a class in what they can take. The country is fat. We eat from its side.
Dog knows when friend will come home
because each hour friend’s smell pales,
air paring down the good smell
with its little diamond. It means I miss you
O I miss you, how hard it is to wait
for my happiness, and how good when
it arrives. Here we are in our bodies,
ripe as avocados, softer, brightening
with latencies like a hot, blue core
of electricity: our ankles knotted to our
calves by a thread, womb sparking
with watermelon seeds we swallowed
as children, the heart again badly hurt, trying
and failing. But it is almost five says
the dog. It is almost five.
What I meant is that when the child shook the branch,
the beetles, quiet, somnolent, darkly, fell and again fell
like plums. Once woken, they bzzzed towards
the street lamps, loving each light well, thwacking
against them until they landed face down or face
up, trying to find their feet, reminding me of Eve’s face
as a baby when she tried to lift her head on her stem
of a neck before yet she could. Upon the child’s shoulders,
beetles landed, kinging him. The dusk’s gray mute
unfolded its scrolls, while his mother made toast
with boysenberry jam, his father played solitaire,
and think of his sister doing her biology homework.
But they are under the tree, he is, the bright ones falling
upon him like stars, and as they fall, he names them:
some doctors, some cooks, depending on the size
of their antennae. His face was a diary of leaves: dark,
lit, risen with laughter, then suddenly at rest. This
was one way to be inside the world rather than outside
looking into a bright window.