I
They didn’t know their race had failures
or the odour of garlic that made them unclean.
Like devout Jews, they thought themselves special,
their eyes able to see many things
as yet undestroyed by fire:

feast day smiles and sugar cubes,
hopscotch that children marked with chalk,
bread and salt on snow-white tablecloths—
hospitality for strangers—
fruit describing geometry in glazed bowls,
wine warming bodies without burning them down.

II
They thought they knew their limits
for possible perfection.

But the spirits that passed over their homes
were exterminating angels

leaving spinning tops to wobble to a standstill,
milk to sour in dwindling pantries,

sepia to run like old sores
out of family photos
and new heat waves to come—
flames feeding on

what they had seen,
glistening, growing in devouring torsion.

They were forced to breathe differently
in the blowtorch melting of things.

Their memories burn in me like yellow flames.

I. To Speak His Own Love
Named Adam, he wasn’t the first-born,
yet he felt a wound in his side,
something wrenched from him
in Eden, and he was cast out
among weeds and bare stones
never to be free of wariness,
even when held by desire,
making it hard to speak his own love
from a fixed place in the world.

II. Silence and Stammer
Ash on his orphaned tongue
weight of the void

he stammered into stone, into silence
the nothingness of night

words speaking stones
stones speaking silence

dry tongue feeling around
the seams of syllables

stammer in the dryness of exile
spells the distance unforgiving

his murdered kin, the shadows looming
dark birds hammering the sky

                   I
Breathing odours foreign to them,
they are seized with intent
to blow old idioms shut.
A catalogue of harms in the insistent
abduction, playing the slave
with irresistible wounds.

New enchantment means harsh entry
that rends old families, taking a path
after the loss of graves, walking to the salt
and bread of a different closure—
time bringing the future
into an enclosed presence.
In heart song’s harsh music,
ecstasy is absent from gestures
in submission’s bond.

                   II
Woman has become a doubt
despite the prospect of fecundity
and inheritance. Their tattoos have meaning
only as functions of the body: to labour,
cook, clean, bear children, submit
to what is outside their skin, keeping within
a clamp on private configuration,
the blue wounds altering the visage,
linking arm, chest, neck, and face.
Even with food, their roots find soil bitter,
the historical rupture forbidding rapture.

Tattoos are drawn on them
like scars or yearnings.
Skin is hazard’s shroud.
Its markings hone a homily
of enactment, the body’s capacity
to turn frailty to fortuitous torsion,
endowment, dissimulation.
Without panic, they survive
the twist of surfaces, gathering
solitude and pain under the ribs,
straining to remember small realities
and cherished faces.

Memorizing water in their mouths
where rain had entered, the wind
a caress in their hair, and home
a place where feelings erupted
no matter what they willed.

Skin trammelled from the outside
can rise with the mind’s fabulation,
the will’s inexact fervour, the spine’s
shudder, leaning with the secret self
to a stillness beyond amazement—
a course of sustenance in a wounded domain,
the heart’s small crater.

One apple plus one apple make two
without dissent. The mathematics
of apples can make for certitude.
Some particles of matter
count more than bodies
where the losses are not exact, where
the lost are a loss in meaning,
indeterminate spectres flitting
across maps.

In an inventory of claim, how easy
to account for clay bowls,
for gall-nut, sugar and rice,
hemp cords and silk clothes.
The tally of torts worth gold.
But where is the precision
of headless bodies, of unmarked graves,
shreds of scarves hanging in walnut trees,
of apple-cheeked children
whose golden hair was carried
by winds to the mountains?

Everything is begging to be given voice:
empty work-sheds, rusted keyholes, deserted cafes,
the vines of orchards, blue shadows,
shrivelled shoes, abandoned flutes—

If only just to say:
To have died here
had some meaning