Pulse: 1

It wasn’t over a woman that war began, but it’s better

To see it this way, my myth professor loved to say, a man

From the South rumored to extort the bodies of college girls

Into higher grades. My girlfriend of the time told me so —

He was a creep, she

Got an A in the class and liked his joke about religion

As self-mutilation, it was Ramadan then and, O Helen,

I was fasting. I lie awake in a desert night east

Of the Atlantic on the verge of rain, the catapulted grains

Of sand on hot zinc roof, the rustle of leaves, the flap

Of peeling bark on trees whose names I do not know, and where

Would I find a botany guide here. Water flowed

Like a river from the Jabal once.

There were elephant pools, alligator

Streams, and a pond for the devil to speak in human tongues.

All desiccant names now after an earthquake

Shuffled the ground decades ago. It will rain soon,

I’m assured, since nothing has stopped

The birds from migration. All the look-alikes

Are already here: the stork, the heron.

The white flying flowers, the ibis, and the one

That aesthetizes you more.

Source: The Earth in the Attic (Yale University Press, 2008)