On Disappearing

I have not disappeared.

The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is

full of my thinking. An archbishop

prays for my soul, even though

we met only once, and even then, he was

busy waving at a congregation.

The ticking clocks in Vermont sway

back and forth as though sweeping

up my eyes and my tattoos and my metaphors,

and what comes up are the great paragraphs

of dust, which also carry motes

of my existence. I have not disappeared.

My wife quivers inside a kiss.

My pulse was given to her many times,

in many countries. The chunks of bread we dip

in olive oil is communion with our ancestors,

who also have not disappeared. Their delicate songs

I wear on my eyelids. Their smiles have

given me freedom which is a crater

I keep falling in. When I bite into the two halves

of an orange whose cross-section resembles my lungs,

a delta of juices burst down my chin, and like magic,

makes me appear to those who think I've

disappeared. It's too bad war makes people

disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons

turn prisoners into movie endings. When I fade

into the mountains on a forest trail,

I still have not disappeared, even though its green façade

turns my arms and legs into branches of oak.

It is then I belong to a southerly wind,

which by now you have mistaken as me nodding back

and forth like a Hasid in prayer or a mother who has just

lost her son to gunfire in Detroit. I have not disappeared.

In my children, I see my bulging face

pressing further into the mysteries.

In a library in Tucson, on a plane above

Buenos Aires, on a field where nearby burns

a controlled fire, I am held by a professor,

a general, and a photographer.

One burns a finely wrapped cigar, then sniffs

the scented pages of my books, scouring

for the bitter smell of control.

I hold him in my mind like a chalice.

I have not disappeared. I swish the amber

hue of lager on my tongue and ponder the drilling

rigs in the Gulf of Alaska and all the oil-painted plovers.

When we talk about limits, we disappear.

In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel.

I am a life in sacred language.

Termites toil over a grave,

and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays.

At a glance from across the room, I wear

September on my face,

which is eternal, and does not disappear

even if you close your eyes once and for all

simultaneously like two coffins.

Source: Roll Deep (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2015)