from an untitled mural (after Darwish)

Alone, my last hour and I
wave to each other from across the emptiness
I’ve yet to fill.
And we converse in silence,
in the dry summer of the high-desert town
I’ve landed in, where I speak
to no one for days
and see myself reflected in only the trees that shade
the churches and tourist shops.
My hour tells me to shadow absence
and to not rush into a struggle
my fears didn’t first dream.
It tells me to follow it
to a village it has yet to build.
Tells me it waits patiently there
with the last of my images.

Today is Tuesday
and the weather is clear
and the asphalt shimmers with noon.
And as I walk I think perhaps
something in me won’t let me speak.
Or maybe I am not my words,
too enamored of their meanings,
but am the one who stayed up all night with strangers
in sleepless seasons, in houses that changed breezes
and walls.

Today is Tuesday.
The girls’ dresses decorate the plaza
and the night is warm
and no one but me
waits for me in my hour.

But who exactly is it that waits?

My self? You are a bounded mess.
A rabble of wants that avail themselves of a mind
moving in two tongues.
With words
I made you in this animal body
and with words
you are changed as the day
weaves through you.
And you made me and made
what I’ll become.

So paint me
with your astonishment
and your ignorance.
Show me in your afternoons.
Be faithful to the trash fields of our childhood,
the decrepit buses full of peddlers and workers
that you rode every week to the art school.
And be faithful to the grid your species
grafted to the soil.

On the asphalt, our drives are free.
They can roam through any glass display
and build for their lust and anxiety
a city of dolls.

Who else could sing here but you, Dionysus?
You who laughs at Narcissus with kindness.
You whose stomach this world can’t turn.
So sing!
Maybe the journalists will find
the elephant’s residency papers under a Humvee’s tire.
Maybe the whales we are sending to No One
will engrave their music in membrane-glows the earth
has yet to invent. Maybe the plastic
in the oceans will melt and complete its destiny
and maybe the mosquitoes in summer
will make peace with my nights.
Sing and say:
I am the smoke-filled air and the lung.
I am a music full of melodies that dart
and bait each other like last thoughts before sleep.
I am the temple and the vandal.

And Darwish whispers:
“I own nothing for anything to own me.”
He whispers in his pages
to us dwellers of this day that floats
outside of time.
A womanly day, flexible,
in which all things plunge
beyond their past and transform
with a diamond fluidity.
A day generous with its victories and disconnections.
And more days like this will come.
Oceanic in gesture. Days whose air and birds
will ignore the names we gave them in our efforts
to make the sky dance. No one will feel
like committing suicide or leaving.
There will be time for that later, time enough
to grow old, as if today time
were asleep on vacation.

I own nothing for anything to own me.
The past vanishes like breath
into the storm of this day.
It’s as if conditions for the existence
of breathing, thinking things
were too narrow for aimless, love-obsessed lyricists:
minds formed by visions that found them young
and kept them so.
Hopelessly hopeful, when they see a beautiful thing,
immediately they try
to coach silence a song.

I own nothing for anything to hold me to its center.
People walk through the park next to the government offices
in a patch of summer that greets every man, woman,
ignition key, every leaf and soaring pigeon with equanimity.
A day generous with its festivals and plagues,
a day un-cleaved from the hours.

Life is everywhere here.

A flood to swim and drown in
and a date in the sand with one of the defeats.
And what about the ancient stories we survived?
How do we proceed in the cities they erected?
Do we redecorate the windows? Spend our time
crisscrossing moons and empty stations?
How do we walk above the history of plot?
Do we begin from zero? “No dead ever came back
to tell us the truth.”