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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
Wither me to within me:
Welt me to weal me common again:
Withdraw to wear me weary:
Over me to hover and lover again:
Before me to form and perform me:
Round me to rill me liquid incisions:
Behind me to hunt and haunt me:
Down me to drown indecision:
Bury me to seed me: bloom me
In loam me: grind me to meal me
Knead me to rise: raise me to your mouth
Rive me to river me:
End me to unmend me:
Rend me to render me:
How a Basra librarian
could haul the books each night,
load by load, into her car,
the war ticking like a clock
about to wake. Her small house
swimming in them. How, the British
now crossing the limits
of Basra, the neighbors struck
a chain to pass the bags of books
over the wall, into a restaurant,
until she could bring them all,
like sandbags, into her home,
some thirty thousand of them,
before the library, and her brain,
could finally flood into flame.
In the green beginning,
in the morning mist,
they emerge from their chrysalis
of clothes: peel off purses & cells,
slacks & Gap sweats, turtle-
necks & tanks, Tommy’s & Salvation
Army, platforms & clogs,
abandoning bras & lingerie, labels
& names, courtesies & shames,
the emperor’s rhetoric of defense,
laying it down, their child-
stretched or still-taut flesh
giddy in sudden proximity,
onto the cold earth: bodies fetal or supine,
as if come-hithering
or dead, wriggle on the grass to form
the shape of a word yet to come, almost
embarrassing to name: a word
thicker, heavier than the rolled rags
of their bodies seen from a cockpit:
they touch to make
the word they want to become:
it’s difficult to get the news
from our bodies, yet people die each day
for lack of what is found there:
here: the fifty hold, & still
to become a testament, a will,
embody something outside
themselves & themselves: the body,
the dreaming disarmed body.