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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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Eulogy

This one, dear reader, is long & sad & about my Pops who died. Been thinking on him lately, so here it is. I think probably I'll keep adding onto this one for as long as I'm alive-- a letter I'll keep writing. I feel like it has a filament of life in it. Anyways. Buckle up.    Eulogy I remember thinking Unsieved, maybe, a glottal Clarity in my throat. Chest Laden, a dizzied breath &  Undone. My father Leaning against the doorframe A brief music for darkness To clutch, winged, absented. Where did you go? I am Still moving, tree to tree, trading One constellation for another. I want A longer breath & so take one but am left Unchanged. The day Expands. Clumped soil, cutlass of river Says bank & cuts & says bank again & all The long while, bare & clear, river carries water & water carries refracted light, fractured light, Shard of disfigured sun. It sings your song These many miles away. Carries its broken Melodies to the Bering Sea. What m...
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Map & Shadow

What is perhaps most truly odd is the peculiar & myopic requirement that someone we love die in order for us to most fully consider the implications of dying at all. Our lives seem delineated by deaths, as all lives are, with only eventual reprieve from its immediacy permitting our days to banner & hang catenary from one obituary to the next. We pivot from immersion in all of death’s details back to our own lives & weigh them anew & wonder how best to recalibrate, to impose new bearings. My own life here a sort of waiting in tow with our compass already set, the days reduced to logistical tinkering & finger-tapping & imagining again through the landscape I so dearly miss.  We have oscillated regarding how best to position the kids in the world. We tried Montana in hopes that we could abide what sacrifices we sought in ourselves in a kind of exchange for the possibility of more cultural exposure for them. & then every weekend we fled into the mountains, a...
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