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luminolous
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dapt-poems

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I cannot stop it. I cannot stop it just as in that other place
I could not keep the planes with their spiked fires from coming.
Though in this closed realm the smell of camphor is overwhelming
I have nothing but my hands to use
In ministering to the dead. Here too
My hands must suffice.
of poetry in this country and each one is still meant to be sung.
Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings they were still there.
The upper portion of their faces long ruined but you could still see
the meaning in their hands,
we talked about it. Grandfather said don’t they have a share in heaven?
Second Aunt said it was more realistic this way. God not in heaven
but in exile.
The first great poet of
the crisis the one whose
generation was left as if
firebombed though if
you look back at the
seminal work you will
see that only a handful of
footage of the
journalists hiding in the
attic the rope ladder
pulled up after them
only the one with
foreign papers left to
stand her ground down
below the journalist at
first calmly sitting on
the couch but then
huddling in a cabinet as
the soldiers enter the
apartment next door,
the cries of the mother
floating through the
wall ib’ni ib’ni the
language ancient like
something whetted on
stone the way I image
language would have
sounded in the broken
mouth of King DavidAbsalom Absalom the
man-child hanging by
the shining black noose
of his own hair in the
saw a clip of the footage
the foreign journalist
managed to smuggle out
of the country images of
the journalist herself
hiding in a space meant
for buckets and rags as
this thing I call my life
but really what is it
what is this light I hold
so dear it wants to move
imperceptibly across the
floor as the earth turns
so as not to become
the roots of the water lilies like ladders
trailing down into the marvelous.
Shagged-gold, at rest the great haunches
as if axled, fur sleeked like a butter rug.
In the Serengeti sun, the male’s harem
Dream of mastery. Dream of being wholly consumed,
freed. I am the lion and the lion is me.
Then the American pulls us out.
Literally the thing has been gutted, a ragged gash
carved under its tail to midway up its chest, eyes
like stagnant water, horns intricate as a woodwind.
Where did the viscera go? Where do the viscera ever go?
I am in a car driving to the northernmost point
on this spit. Porte de Mort. Death’s Northern Door.
Literally where my grandmother lives. Her 89-year-old cousin
has just fallen out a window but is all right, the bruises
like stained glass. Enthusiasm. To be in God.
My grandmother says it is proof, and I nod my head