from the wave, the way

In green water I saw your eye and in it I saw that Arabian palace

filled with birds and broken glass.

I copy an address into my right hand

and fill myself with memories of psalms.

A green fish emerges from seaweed as seaweed from a wave

that rises like the wailing wall.

My sun-baked body at the edge,

wind in my lungs, its whistle,

my torn world, my grief,

my soggy passport, my shell with no pearl,

you lift them, delicate cloud, into a liquid world.

Last night I dreamed of my father's flabby body and of my blue

resolve to run away, to find a way, I dreamed of your eye

and for an instant I found the vertex of the road,

the imaginary line that falls across the earth:

that meridian where the sun on a tiger's back meets the shade at its belly.

Waking up, we are swallowed by wakefulness.

The house swallows us in its terrible thirst. The routine of taking our children

to school swallows us

and so does the if only I could.

There was something to that dream. You know it. A direction. A way.

A forest as green as you and your roots.

Give me your premonitions, give me your book, give me your prodigious memory,

give me the blue gaze from your dark eye, give me the devotion of your sleeping birds.

Sometimes the way is a fire

through which the circus tiger

leaps, a perfect circle

returning to me with its stripes intact

and with the endless continuity of this ineluctably feral world.

Source: Rain of the Future (Action Books, 2013)