Specimens, Days

  The sharp angles of your elbows & rounded knees, rendered In data set. We tell ourselves numbers Rather than names. Iterations Of sameness that practice the cold Clarity of something like inevitability.  A numerical plain resists interruption By dandelion, say, or by shrieking Merlin, crying child, pleas floated Unto updrafts, hopes in sonic blast.  What, Rahima, was your number?  6,547? What was the timbre of your Voice, passing syllable from cheek  To cheek like a ruby, like a candy?  Where were you when your father Loved you in sudden shock & his  Eyes shifted & stayed? There are 535 Members of Congress here, Rahima, & there are zero laws delimiting The scope of your death. It is Permissible, encouraged. My country Spent 23 billion dollars to erase you From yourself. From your father’s arms.  You are yet a human child. I pull Your name from the columns that Engineer our antiseptic distances. I sing it this morning, with love....

  October here the flint & dun Carpeting tundra, nettles dried, Devil’s club hollowed & slumped.  Winter waits but impatiently & we have watched the cranes vee  Southward to the Niobrara, to Mexico.  Flushing south, not bidden, unimpeded.  Maria, you were carried Southwards under mandate. A refuge Where you congregated. Here,  In patchwork of cloud & skein  Of sky, hung catenary between  The twisting spines of ridgelines, The air is saturated with bird. Tern, Swallow, sparrow, chickadee, thrush, Robin. Theirs are the names we  Utter from behind windows. Your  Sky clustered with aircraft. & over your Back, the surging flank of Iron  Sword. It is a paragraph now, Maria, Littered with the titles of despots & tainted men under gilded roofs.  From the rubble, I pull your name & sing it here, under harmony Of birdsong & flapping wing.

  Muslin of the swaddle, cloth Of the diaper, the thin veneer of  A sleeper shirt. The gauze of the  Bandage wrapped around your Head. Blooming the color of desiccated Rose. Tenderest thing. Fine Storm of silk-black hair, finger Nails still soft, booties knitted By an auntie. Shrapnel ripping Through your skull under hail Of quadcopter.  I remember how softly I would place my daughter  In her crib, white noise & owl Song down the creek’s spine. Shiver of cold, snow in swale Against the windowpane, her  Curled mouth comforted in sleep. We tucked her to our chests Under parkas to walk, thirty Below, under canopied starlight,  Under pluming frigid breath.  It was her only avenue to sleep.  Taking her warm & slow from my body To lay her upon her mattress & watching her eyes for proof She yet slept. Her breathing, in, Her breathing, out. Creeping the blanket Up to tiptoe away. Her soft Murmuring of the morning when The clip of sun shru...

  Rayan, dear boy, aged the absence of integer Aged the yawning mouth of infant hoisted  Upon mother’s shoulder, maw of wolves  Shadowing the clouds. Aged the circumference  Of bullet & bomb. Aged the repetend currencies Knelling each small death. Aged the wide eye Of a world seeing & sitting still. Rayan. Zero Steps taken, tenuous on toddling legs, zero words Warping themselves l ike wet wood Around syllabaries, zero arresting Tableaus, zero sudden declarations Of love, zero featherlight touches of skin, zero Shocks of plunging into cold water, teeth white & glimmering against the slate blue, ballast of cresting wave,  Zero refuges in pine-dappled shade. Zero songs tinseled Over boughs of trees in the effulgence of lilacs Or saltlines of tears latticing your cheek, naps Beside a dog. Rayan, I sing your one name this morning  & the notes marinate in bitterness For all the wide world taken from you before we pushed you headlong & wordless...

  Your name a stout treetrunk Under burden of branch. Syllables Clutching to bark, macescent. Here, A cyprus, a citrus tree. A Jerusalem  Pine in a soil rich already with bone.  Look, there are ashes upon each  Leaf. There is shrapnel in the wood’s Eye. Where it fell upon its own Desiccated bed of needles, warmed under The momentary clip of placid sky, The rhizomes waved upon its roots Like small flags. Of its heart,  Over time, humus & fallow ground. A fleshy chute plunging up, gasping For sun & sky. You could say– almost– Life. I sing your name this morning, Little girl, from the algorithms of what Remains.  

  No matter where I would Find you, the here of it always Declares itself. Would it have been That way for you? The robins Blaring unabashed, the juncos  Spread like black seed across the Pebbled path. Smell of dew Like taste of water. We travel Now to death to clarify what is yet Alive, knock upon its door.  The lily pads in the cove against The sheen of ancient cliff. Itself Divulging histories– rock slipping from  Rock, bone from bone. Three otters Skiffle to water, leaving fine tenebrous Track. The world as it was. I Bring you here, swaddled in muslin.  Your name, too, divulging histories. Ya Fatima, is it anything at all To ask you now to some peace?  Sunlight in multifurcate columns Clustered by angular cloud. Somewhere Behind all of its light, stars, moons, Galaxies, something close to infinity.  & here my dog curls & snores. Here,  A Swainson’s thrush knells & I hear Morning & morning & morning.  The dwarf birches...