Ghazal No. 4
Sunk into our planet’s center, a lead weight spins into nowhere.
Human minds simmer like diesel, ready to explode out of nowhere.
I love breathing heat from open flames. I can’t take being shut
up or forced underground, as if vultures didn’t swarm everywhere.
Also, it was a lie: Anaximander thinking the sun was a wheel of fire.
His math actually showed the sun’s the patron saint of nowhere.
In Rome, wasps shone under cornices like jewels—Cleopatra’s stung,
but never died. Imagine her as the Emperor of anywhere.
Sometimes, at night, I wake, as if hearing smashed fountains
brim over in Al-Andalus. Where are those gardens now, if not nowhere?
Who, as a matter of fact, is allowed to return to the forests, to their
ancient homelands? Even trees are absent in the middle-of-nowhere.
As usual, my protests rise past ozone to the clutter of low orbit.
Meltwater always runs bright, stings, then disappears nowhere.
Lady Godiva Device
Yes, Lysenko declared Siberia transformed into a land of orchards and gardens, but we physicists were left to continue our fissile calculus. Remember that time we raised our glasses at the confluence of two imagined rivers, their throats pouring into one another? Pretended we were standing among ruined temples and gates? Los Alamos is a hanging garden, we said, whispering behind our hands. Having survived, I now keep my face half-turned. Not because Eden first belonged to creatures with wings and swords—maybe that’s a part of it—but someone told us a lie, when everything looked fine, and fallout felt like snow. How we believed we loved the atom so much we could learn to live with the bomb. In the hospital ward’s locked room, there was a faded print of a woman on horseback traveling through emptied streets. The cheap brass frame rattled on the wall each time our doctors unlocked the door. By then, our skin, too, was melting—the sheets blotted red and the pale-faced nurse consoling, You did it to save others from worse.
I Like Her Hot
—Henry VIII, on meeting Anne of Cleves in 1540
The ladies like gossiping
in the mornings, as they pull my stays
tight, teaching me the English words they believe
a queen ought to know. Today’s phrase
is shit list, as in Cromwell’s on the shit list.
I don’t ask how bad; they do things
differently here. So I practice pronouncing
shit and list, which together sound a bit
like inconvenient in German. The women have
moved on; yesterday, the royal master
of horse put down three new stallions
that arrived lame. Someone’s going to be
in trouble. I think about those big equine
bodies, how they must’ve disposed
of the flesh. Every sunrise, my husband
still says, Farewell, my darling. I pretend
I don’t understand the whispers
that he’s complaining. My breasts.
My thighs. Evil
smells. When a king demands everything
to perfection, who will first suggest looking
at the possibilities in a shining blade? Or,
to put it another way, what is least
inconvenient, when you turn
an animal into its opposite?
