Specimens, Days

  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...

  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. 

  See how it works, Bilal? I will Try salvage slivered beauty from  The extant world, find the burr  In whorl of unbroken fingerprint.  I have only the mineral world Unadorned with need of metaphor– Incapable of gyring unto balance, Harmonized calamity, or calumny Come manifest. It is yours.  Your family’s. I keen like tern Sheers over ocean but cannot Alight on any branch you see.  Do I let my stranger’s grief colonize Your dying this way, Bilal?  There is nothing in it of possession. I see capillary wave, pulse of  Torsion spilling shores. I hear Echo, ripple muted. I think  Of rhizomes humming underfoot & want our surging histories Entangled that way– not in periodic Stuttering patterns of bomb-fall & rimfire– in our thrumming instead, Our vital animal yearning. Could I clasp your hand under-soil, where Root ends & the world begins Under bannered names anew?  I sing your name this morning, My fingernails clutched beneath T...

  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...