Haul down the ladder and you’re in
under a skylight casting a blue dream.

This is the song of the cells’
soft throb, the quivering coherences,
their shuffling the profit and loss
of life, to have and to hold.

No man can hold me.
See –
I blur the line between days . . .

In the circle
of its trees

the lochan shines
midnight silk.

      symptoms she is aggregate concrete and grit held together in a human shape lying on her side knees drawn up flesh tensing to stone and tendons in flames the weight of her body pressed into the mattress leaves a shallow hollow once she’s gone a...

glimmer blades
the field’s lightly fogged
grass green

Outside the Berber tent
the poet and I contemplate
the boundless Sahara sky.

We totem our empires with the raptor,
weave into flags, fix on coins
but what of the victims?
How come no one ever glories the fish . . .

Think what it must have been like for her
fasting from sunrise to moonrise, to wake up
 
three hours before dawn, bathe, apply sindoor
on the parting of her hair line . . .