Specimens, Days

  We spill across landscape, don’t we Tahany? In the accidents of our birth Geographies are conferred. I rise from Topological thumbprint, fine green Circles, you from flat land hemmed  By water. The constitution Of your soil is changing, dear girl. Earth Swallowing rubble, root filtering blood.  Where are you from now? What place Is there beneath the fracture & torsion Of what was? We sing songs  About home, the ache in us of its loss– Now the songs invert– the ache Of a home instead keening for its people.  Accident casts itself as purposeful, Armored in notions of destiny, driven Like sharp blade through a heart, Faith written across the blade & Wresting each name from each body, The rote sustenance of divinity. Your Name gets used this way, in service of  Tide & time, liquidities of power. Your Name a fulcrum now in its procession &  Not instead signifier of your little body Broken beneath its burden. But you As you were briefl...

  Mine is a different tongue, hears Constellation in your name, your Family’s many bodies in sudden Tableau against an inkblot sky.  To the stars, I hear, trying to Eulogize through linguistic theft.  & what are your many names, Lingering seriph, unuttered phoneme?  88 of you, Al-Astals, a felled tree, Brash in chaotic profusion, milled To scroll gone blank, gone White, gone missing. They practice Erasure, the wolves. They try it  Here too, tentatively. We wonder Who will do the accounting. I Wonder, Salam, at what account Might bear value, might imagine All of the living gone quiet. The Beehive of the family room at Holiday, erumpent joy lighting  Your face at a gift, your slow  Growth into humanness. Who  Accounts for those private freedoms In living now reft from you? Running Through a forest in the rain? Toes At a water’s edge? Fugitive bursts Of want & glee? Instead, this Cadastral, this ministerial din, reduction Unto figure, disappe...

  Scripture in shrapnel, hailstorm Of jagged, clustered platitude. Read The verse concerning drone strike , the Chapter on dismemberment . What begets These deaths, these fissures & eruptions In dailiness? & what permits their retreat Into something to ignore? Zein, there Is too little country to engulf in flame, Slivers of tinder, remnants in the helical Warp & weft of living to shine bright Under glare of bomb. As if holding The weapon demands its use. As if Spelling a god’s name with bullet Is itself some piety. Here, it started In infancy– a culture conjuring  A god & a country as cosigners To mortal debt. Out of their belly  Barbarians spill, swords dripping blood. A ventriloquist’s act setting hook & barb In tendons of fear & yanking hard.  What god wouldn’t coddle you & keep you? Your fractional animus.  Your empty lexicon. Your tuft of  Swirling black hair. & the world you saw Before it burst. We are a vile species, Z...

  The rain delicate over the eaves, On broad leaves of fireweed & nettle. Like a child Tiptoeing the dawn hallway, Columnar light balustrading Floorboards. Clouds build up Come late afternoon, roiling bulbous Blooms balanced along the ridge.  The glacier melts, river rises, Footprints & shabby, hurried tipis Of driftwood borne along. They Are our dailiness– the things we cannot change, Misk. We are embedded in them, Of them, grasping past to feign An agency we cannot possess. Our Eurydice worlds. We march meanwhile To songs we’ve tooled into allegiances. Looking b ack, the worlds slip from us & into t he light we spill, all battlefield &  Barbarism. All life is forfeit. I Am ashamed, Misk. I sing your name  Into the maw of brutalities & let its tender syllable resound.

  Water will collect in the nasturtiums’ Cup, broad leaves swaying top-heavy In mounting breeze. Funneled to center, It forms one clear round jewel, refracted light, Prismatic, seeming solid. Only The wind to spur its spilling or sun To spell its end.  On a ridgeline behind Panguingue Creek years ago we awakened with five wolves Surrounding us. A moose limped in a furrowed  Creek & we were the accident in the circumference of  The hunt.    Years prior we saw them, the wolves, Braiding between each other on the East Fork, accelerating toward a goal we could Not see. The banks lined with cottonwood & nursed by fallen log, current-riven bone & shell. Theropod footprints in the washes.  Sun, rain, clip of moon. & again.  The world Entire born of explosion. & yours ended Abruptly in the same cacophonies. There are whims Carving out their import, calling for carriage.  We forget we are histories.  ...

  I think of grief, Alma, in rooms Of grief. Quartered. Almost an eruption Of disfigured freedom. There is air To it, a calm to pierce. It is allowed.  & then imagine myself Bloodying my hands to overturn the rubble  Separating us. Quick jagged wall.  Your small bones. Eyes rheumy with plea.  A parent strung to a child’s heart Such that any distance, even those we Can traverse, keens with near panic.  To think of it: you there, flesh & tender & then that sudden tomb, flotsam & shattered architecture. You gone.  A parent’s fingers over concrete, over Glass, dust, rebar twisting like tree branch.  Someone dug for you, Alma. Little Soul, someone tried grief when a bomb Dropped. Someone carved to find You broken & they wept under whistle Of bullet, animal rumble of plane.  In all the wide world there was only That grief & no space for it to root.  I sing your name. Alma. Alma. Alma.