The first night you lay down your head in London
there is hawthorne between your sheets.

He emerges at nightfall, lights a solitary votive candle//
prostrates himself at her scuffed toes.

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.