there was no conspirator

swaddled in a horse blanket the baby was found in a stall
it could have been a manger scene with camels
except for the whores

what’s more precious
that which is lost
or that which is found

immortality   immorality
each has its own dangers and rewards

myself
i pocket the twenty and move on

two lights

one coming slant
through leaves of trees
green and quiet
that tans the arm and shoulder
the one that comes with days
heralded by birds
the one you take nap in

the other fierce like cutting knives
or bullets perforating
the sac of skin they call the body
the one composed of rays that sear the eyes
that awful light that cauterizes

one gives birth to vines and trees
and offers fruit
it warms the pond
where fish are hatched
among the ropes of frog eggs

the other blackens with its brilliance
and disavows the flesh of man
the one we harvested and opened up
above hiroshima and nagasaki

both these lights i crave
in darkness yes
when there aren’t enough blankets
both these lights demand
both we hold beneath the tongue
that winnower of men

An entry from 2007

I cling to memories of visions of what once was.

Midnight taxi rides through Zanzibar streets, damp heat so continual I forgot it was there, ginger tea, the odor of green wood smoking in a cooking fire, the red glowing coals carried on a banana leaf in the dark of night and spilled across the hard packed earth. I remember how coals bounced across the darkness and came to rest in random patterns. I wondered if that was how the stars were scattered across the Universe. "Do you know what stars are?" I asked Nelson as we walked back to his grandmother's house.

"Ndiyo, Taa za Mungu" (Yes, the lanterns of God)

Now, nearly seven years later maybe he has a different answer. Many I knew I'm sure have died by now, many have felt forgotten by God, or were angry with Him having died unknown or unremembered, writing devil heads on letters they sent hoping, begging, pleading for medicine, some cure, some dawa, friends whom I abandoned in their hour of need.

A well gone dry.

A mountain rose in the distance outside my window. It was always there, looming in the background, always in photographs juxtaposed against the dumpy rundown streets, always there, like Zaire Music (long after Zaire was gone, long after Mobutu grew old and pitiful —just giving up— and much, much longer than Patrice Lumumba, whose body vanished, but whose name and words burned like the coal glowing in the dark on the cold earth, reminiscent of the innumerable stars that lay scattered across space and time).

I desperately cling to memories of visions of what once was.

Banana trees rattling their broad leaves in the breezes of afternoon, rich green beneath billowing white clouds set in the bluest sky. For the briefest of times came peace and rest. Yes, for the briefest of times.

The visions fade, their luminescence ebbs away at last in the midst of midnight's darkness, disturbing my sleep, and I myself uncertain if it is for good or ill.

indelibility

every evening
sunlight
warms dark wine
the corked bottle
the silence of time
abandons them all
only sound remains

i’m already gone

rivulets

i don’t know how to tell you this
the dark green shadows of leaves
the dim grey light of sky
what’s harbored in our world
a lone pale moth
how it flutters
desperate for its single moment
gone
so much washed away
in rivulets of rain
such tiny vessels
twigs and chewed off bits of leaves
one act tumbling into another
every little thing
crashes down from its own height
each toppling tower
small craters in the beaten sand
these are not tears
our labors
our wounds
all we have to offer the world
we are poured out

i swam the restless sea

beneath a red crevice of sunlight
after the sun itself had departed
and deep blue edges of clouds filled a sky
i the lone shadow
in what was left

light wavering away

into day

the first-light of dead speech
calling out to another

inhabiting shorn eyes
black hives cool and unfired

the Moon's passage

a progression whose shores rock seeds
left for lost emerging from a single shadow

where waters ease
and hope –the blue-skied– comes

evening

in a still moment of moon
an otter stood cold
laden with light from the west
where it had eyed months ago
the sealed hives of bees

The Labor of Bees

Encountering the echo of lost words,
speech made pollen,
her mouth was taken—
a honeyed turquoise
emerging from the many chambered shores.

swarm

suddenly
ten thousand creatures

crawling on every surface
every edge
trying to eat their way out

my skin is wet paper
a failed vestige
it has given way

the ravenous writhing
all insect eye and mandible

i flee this remnant
this rudiment
of hollow bone

one ugly motherfucker

-for Jim Harrison

geese call as they pass overhead
and maybe you are drifting with them
in that overweight cloud of your own weathered hide
lost in the dark river that time has etched
where wolves missing teeth circle their own tails
and you slump dead at your desk
killed by the only thing that kills a writer
death

horses come galloping
draped in headless rattlesnakes
and bearing polished stones
retrieved from the dust of riverbeds
high in the dead mountains
or are these stones from the mountains of dead rivers
whose murmurs can still be heard
between the gusts of wind

the winds of those places
are either too hot or too cold
they carry too many voices from the past
the voices speaking to you have now ceased
and you in your turn join that cadre of voices
spoken to others of your kin
or are they mine

i never knew you
but i’ve always known you
something deeper than blood entwines us
all the poets i know are suicides
some are just too frightened to realize it
but you were wise in some ways
knowing you had yet to pay your penance

and when the last coin was demanded
you –still living– were left to haunt your dead wife
until the walls of the rooms came down on your head
and toppled the cold pencil from your curled fingers

you thundered down on the floorboards
and all the wine and whiskey you ever drank
spilled from the cavity of your ursine mouth
silent now

your left eye freed from its body
healed at last and turned to glass
spun round and round
before fixing its gaze outside a window
on those starry hosts seen between a woman’s legs
wondrously dangling
from the boughs of an overgrown apple tree

a measure of time

there again
a fly on the windowsill
cleaning its wings in the sun—
this ritual of welcoming each season

age

little by little
we let go of this world.

we say to ourselves
damn, what an odd dream.

then one day

then one day
there came a door
in the middle of my living room
we were having dinner
i had to get up
there was no time
to finish my peas
everyone else was talking
on and on and on they went but
there in the doorway
my      mother
who was the last of her sisters
my uncle
who’d outlived the rest of his family
i turned back to the table
shattered my fist on a plate
trying to warn them
my wife my children
but just like always
they never listened

lust

woman
in a doorway 
the corner of her hem
a red triangle blazing in the sun

she leans against the door post
grips it gently in her hand
she gazes out across the brilliance
and holds you in her stare

she can’t be bought
there is no price
though you have paid it
a thousand times with blood

later it is dark—
you have swallowed all the sunlight
it burns inside you
nothing can extinguish it

covered by a woolen blanket
riddled with bright bullet holes
the cheap motel diminishes
over and over she stabs you

with a single ray of light 

my congregation of crumbs

“like a giant absorbed in pulling down stars and scattering nebulae” –Lorca

four crumbs
and nothing more
like stray planets
or a cluster of galaxies

with one exhalation
i send them tumbling
across the table
and onto the floor

soon they’ll be crushed
and carried into the universe
on the heel of someone’s shoe

this is the way i change the world

refund

with a great urgency
number 972 must be identified
fervently the pages of rice paper are turned
in the great annals of hell
where all the eyeballs are found
why are there so many eyeballs in hell?
like marbles spilled from duffle bags
glistening
darting this way and that
in panic
yes
because they are helpless
deprived of their eyelids
unable to blink
damned to bear so much seeing
a monotony of gore
that incessant ocean of infinite nothings

forlorn

it used to be so easy
to cross over to your side of the river

but now i’m lost
among the reeds that choke the waters

when i do arrive
i find the field abandoned

a crow there speaks of me
he has scattered himself across the years

another replies
who shall gather up the sheaves