What Had Once Been My City

A funerary tower halfway climbed
the Bedouin on a little motorbike always ahead at the next site
necklaces looped on his arm swinging

the teenaged executioners parading in front of bound prisoners
before two-thousand-year-old temple columns
which at that moment still rose

instructed to accept the cruelty that is wartime its ochre horizon

some believing the border wall slows down large groups
others having little faith in it

in earliest life forms the human body took shape
predator fishes with long spines thick boney arms
protostarfish like meadow grasses in a breeze accepting
what came along in the current

a land where people did everything
with little flint knives set in wooden handles
who sharpened blades rapidly against their own teeth
like monkeys who put everything in their mouths

a man chides in low tones the large dog he holds on his lap
the dog moving closer until its body is one with the master’s

I take all jurisdiction, civil as well as criminal, high as well as low
from the edge of the mountains to the stones and the sand in the rivers
and the leaves on the trees

on snow beside a mountain lake a woman’s skin spasmed
from the cold she called pure
naked body gray in the water’s dusk

years solder solid black scrolled linoleum or paper
like something saved from the flames of Alexandria’s library

remember Ahkmatova’s I can, a lightning strike
on desert sets a glass web in sand

First appeared in Verseville