Adagio
Beginning is like tracing lamplit ellipses. The wall against your finger
tells of fresh heat settled over a room we do not own and don’t care to.
The processional sweat of night makes this bed the bottom of a body of water.
Behind your head, the seawall—static, insomniac—maintains against what erodes.
Crumbling quiet is the measure of your voice, your immortal torso,
the mercy of your legs around me. We’ve made something of our selves.
Extending at the elbows until all that is left is extension. Euphony
bends without angle: this nameless part of your throat. We have left behind theme:
air, a dance of vengeance, a quiet city, an old man’s collected songs where every verse
is grief in the tempest of a stolen bucket. And you can arrange to forget my face.
Lips might be nothing more than shadow waiting for day, bodiless as song.
The human mouth fills with foam. I will make something of you.
For your body, a slow stretch of bow across beauty bedded down in sound.
Your body, like a long vowel held in the composition of my breath.
Lexicon
In Arabic, all love songs sung
by men are sung to men. And hung
too many times from the rafters,
the word for towel: بشكير —never
quite short enough for the disarray
of the body’s mistakes. To say
dreaming in
American Sign Language,
put your index to your temple
and curl, not so hard to manage
the repeated tendons of the hand.
The mandarin poet with official words
of love, skin lit like black woods,
official, absolute space renounced
in the heart, makes space with poem
in mind. Let’s play this new game.
Hysteria, hysterectomy.
Not his, not
his but hers. And having said this
I take you as you are. Forever and far
in this difficult language of the
world.
