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