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For Abdul Rahim Ahmed Abdul Rahim Awad, Age 0

  Often there is bone-trill in me When birds of prey near. Their wings Displacing air, the sound dopplered & trailing. Yesterday an eagle eight feet Over trail, apparition in heavy Cloud appertaining to pinnacle & peak. Briefly, a bolt of fear, shock Of my smallness. A landscape redolent With varied lives reduces yours Unto pinpoint, unto what I’d thought Of as almost disappearance. But That is the province of man. What is cyclical, Spurred by fecundity & churn, what Bears out the elemental, is beyond us.  Our deaths at each other’s hands A mockery of the world’s need & hunger.  We craft lives in which your name Erases with your small body. In which The elemental cedes to flimsy  Inventories of meaning. Maybe yours Is a name iterative of its import, Abdul. Maybe repeated in its repeating The intransigence of life coupled  With world, with world-awe, meaning Preceding all naming. May it, wordless,  Sing your name this morning. 
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Dogs First

On the trail to our cabin, the wind shifts & sculpts the landscape at whim, hurling blankets of sustained 30 mph gusts across the tundra & depositing snow in undulating moguls that cover over our precious tracks. We see gales of up to 75 mph fairly routinely. I have skied home ten feet behind my wife on many occasions & been unable to discern her tracks. Say a word & the wind will carry it aloft & away. Drop a liner glove or a hat & you wait until spring to retrieve it. In the places I’ve lived prior to Alaska, I’ve known snow to behave in any number of ways. Here, for whatever diaphanous splendor it may reveal in the structure of the flake, it is always, always dry. When it drifts, the sugary weight of it transforms into the consistency of concrete. People use chainsaws to dig out trail. & when the wind & the snow conspire, people here know precisely what to expect & what to do. No matter the temperature, our community knows to check routinely o...
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For Mohammed Nidal Hisham Atallah, Age 0

  I repeat myself, Mohammed, but there is In repetition pulse of encounter– language Shored between borderlines of meaning, Dehiscing, almost, repulsed at notions of Fixedness. Syllabary of caul– to speak Into it is to emerge from it, anew. How many Births in you Mohammed? How many trailing Narratives ribboning time, riverine histories Carved of rock & rubble? Your midwives  Percussive blow & encroaching eruption.  Your attendants soot & black ash, rifle Report & mother’s wailing. You were born On a cemetery, headstones rubble of blasted Buildings, concrete & rebar, shattered wood, Glass like silver light off tremored water.  The dirt beneath century-deep, yet unsettled.  This is your history now– hiding the voluminous Dead under pavement & parking lot— Mohammed, we emerge from ourselves  Under the quick of our speaking. Our rooting Chutes & tunnels through the fragmented Syllables of names we’ve buried– Mohammed Nidal Hisham Ata...
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