after Ramsey Tawfick

That I could find myself at the end of the driveway, half-nude and giggling

That the darkness in the yard spoke by its own accord

That indeed, between me and the world, there was a horizon

There, I lived in a time of the body no longer being the body

And now an appendage of the dark trembling mountain

Instead of the old crow coming to feed on trifling things like meat  

That I too lived somewhere in the age of planes – and that sound wasn’t death but capital time

That I had forgotten how to rest, that this too was work

Though the sound of death was humming just beneath all that was poem

Which is to say beneath everything and that I’d bought a violin I did not know how to play

That I said poem and meant work, that this was where I’d forked the side of my palm

Tired of living in the tightening knot of material

That I too was used to it by now, preferring silky to glossy

That the horsehair too was tightened by the frog on the stick

That maintaining the superstructure had left me tired

That searching infinitely for a god that could be proven, I too forgot the body

That in its existence the body did not change me, and that was it

That I was mostly the body, if not the for the pesky stain of language

That between this dust and that dust lived expectation

For a sky full of paper, a scratching-blue with the sound of bells

And that whistling, it all came undone, my body, my solitude

That to look from a mountain is only to understand scale

That the mountain changes you and that I was changed by the mountain

Continuous points of failure. Nature is a dense collection of objects. I forgot to send the email. I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to finish the book. Ekolokero. My job is that of taking care of ruins. Ruins. The song in all things. My father saying he misses England and my friends. My friends. I got you a magnet. The lakeside, at night, the trees against the night sky like the ridges of an iris. Like roots. Like nerve-endings. Like trees. I don’t think it matters. My mother collecting magnets. The kid dressed in a full Santa-costume saying goodnight to everyone outside. Children &. The rubble. A full stop. The little we have to say. The liquid punch of the moon. The security guard at the airpot saying brother like it wasn’t a bullet but an invitation. Open hands that are invitations. Are you working tomorrow? The morning sun when it’s pale like a stranger. The sky an expectant blank canvas. Have you eaten? The cashier’s eyes bright like a funeral & by that I mean bright. My grandfather growing a beard to prove that he could. My hair greying at 18. Saying I take part in your sadness instead of condolences. Someone choosing North. Choosing South. Choosing. Otan osaa. Lightning without thunder. Tide-pools. The tide. Resistance. My mother saying it is snowing. Dropping cinnamon and turmeric in the glass jar to make the earth weep. To recreate, in its own image, the earth. Desire. Vapour-trails like someone zipping up the sky & flaming above the clouds. Climate. The driver wondering at the weather. The UN strategically forgetting the word environment. The co-pilot flying this time around. The wind that does not think of deserving. Two contradicting thoughts in our heads simultaneously. Death and death. Encontros & despedidas. Meaning and the bit. Amor fati and the other. The mesh. Still. The books in dollhouses are real paper and you can write on them. There’s no reason for that. This here sunset, playing the trumpet. My cousin collecting our grandmother’s poetry into a pamphlet saying I wanted to build her an autobiography. To be one person for one day, for one other person. My friends waiting outside the bus station. I would say I’ll come back, but I can’t promise that anymore than I can promise rain. The stone circle of their faces. Just their faces. Your face. Your face. Your face & the rain.

after Ada Limón

Sometimes I like to be a little dramatic,
thinking I would learn how to use these legs like
digits in a typewriter, so unlike the roots of a tree.
I haven’t forgotten that you said there are so many
stories to use, staring up from the bottom of a pool
somewhere in France. I thought about lust –
the desire of life to repeat more life, to be a seashell
to the universe’s body, the same blood forming an ocean
in the aural, looming into a past that felt mostly like
a baggage claim center, an old stolen metaphor.
And so I pick a suitcase. Carry it with me to the
end of the garden, where I try to imprint the
biotope into the poem. My birds and my bees.
And I’m twenty-five now, excited and terrified
of all the things that grow, me included.
I heard the biggest forest on the isles is in Scotland,
but I’m not sure there are any forests here at all.
Those dark living things. As a child, with my father
we visited the cashew of Pirangi, wide like a map.
I remember it was cool underneath, like a city but better.
And it means something to my father that I am here –
yet another hop, a confirmation bias for nomadic nature but
I still feel like that doesn’t explain it. Like I would
have done it anyway, if for no other reason than
to do it. Whatever happens happens. The growth no
longer hampered by sunlight or a perfect state.
Not because of, but despite.