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your face translates
for river and ever
translates your fate
sign her your sins
and ever forgiver
sings she your sins
pay her your pay
for debtors endeavor
to spit in the river
your sins will be
and severed forever
spat into river
unlike the river
a mirror reflecting
its framing forever
your sins will be
just spit in the river
you’ll probably live
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.