as branches burn

the folded flesh remembers
the hard dead stratosphere

hours erupt
out of sudden familiar aromas

weeks limp their way through
old cluttered towers of dirty hands

the strange husk of a soul slowly lifts
above the raw public village

like a leaf
that winds never abandon

want

he wants the slow easing motion
of a dry standing woman
quieting her watery hair

she holds the carved edge
of this gentleman’s glance
as he lifts her from her sleeves

together they fall
forgetting everything else but down

now that your nails are polished

let your woman spill dark
         your nostrils flare

               let fingers erupt
                        stream silver

        let your lady’s aroma
flow sweet into              longing

stone susan stood still

her speech hidden
where  unfired  the blind reside

the light sat brilliant beside her
but lonely

involving visage after visage
easing his long shadows beneath her blouse

his whispers were laden with pollen
were stems calling sun back to the earth

there are some women

for whom age
                 has become
beauty

living east of town

living east of town
   the sun is always behind me

i go to work in the morning
   the sun is behind me

i return in the evening
  the sun behind me

nearly everywhere i go
   sun behind me

but sometimes

i travel east
   in the morning to greet the sun

or west in the evening
   i linger


        just to say so long

the heavens

what was beautiful in the sunshine
turns cruel at night
what dies in the west
on the last day of spring
will be reborn in the east
on the first day of fall

time continually eviscerates itself
and thus we feed
love is nothing more than ruse
a desperation to reproduce
but why survive
it is so we can betray
so we can slaughter
the skies are full of these
the archer and the scorpion
the hunters and the prey
we are the ones
who carved these myths
across the cold vast void
and call it heaven

dusk

i have not sodden my body with you
you have not earned that destruction
the taste of your sundering
long ago shaped in the back of my throat
it is only our bodies that long to exist
what we have been does not need to endure
take this day for instance
how the sun has been given back
to the wool of grey sky
that circle of wind that plumments a bough
your arms are also limbs
if i can’t gather them unto myself
(i have not claimed them)
whose are they
what we lay claim to destroys us
the day is at its end
that gatherer of light
the moon
is already dragging our shadows
across a field

abandoned my dead

I have my grandfather’s pocket watch,
                                                               but where?

Which box,
                                                               inside which drawer?

                                                               i’ve abandoned my dead,
i cannot hear                                                the hours of their unwound clocks.

afternoon now

nothing but sun
that yellow weight of warmth
winter had pilfered
without my knowing what it took
whatever was stolen
the sun returns
full measure
all that's required
is the holding out of hands

she never calls me anymore

i imagine

               feeding a few ruffled sparrows—

                      greyish little creatures
                      with their pointed wings

i lose myself
              in their fork-like prints
                      where scrapping for tid-bits of bread
                      some had lost small feathers
                                                                buried now

                                                                            as the day grows blind with snow

morning

branches of oaks
like fractures
in a pale of perfect sky

the stillness broken
by a tracing of geese—
their imperfect lines of cruxes
echoes of their distant calls

and here i am
among the flurries
world weighed down with dew

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