Home, a transitive

The persimmon tree

and my neighbor’s son — fronted

by acne — winter’s diet. Meanwhile,

caves and rocks are named in the future tense.

Stupefied gargoyles have had better luck

in history books; the nation’s monuments

are made of enduring stuff. We are obstinate

ink stain, memory, an animal whose similes lose

scale. If story is a wavelength, we could pick

a beginning, follow intention to the border,

then let custom reign. When we build a nation,

we are permanently old and always new.

Mother died a refugee, she thought the status

was a promise of return. She had a version

of nation under the bed. Never mind that her village

took a new name; the jar of water

from her childhood’s river, ten stones and five

twigs were clues that home was transitive.

2

The invasion on body holds only the heart hostage.

Armies of the past unfurl the flag of love at dawn,

there are no takers but the part of self

that privileges misery. Soon, you will fall. As the fruits

swell, the branches sag with orange sweetness. I miss you,

orange much. I want time to return to the moment before you

got off the bus and walked toward the beginning of the story

(this is a we tragedies are made of). If you’d been ten minutes late,

if geography was inconsequential to the struggle of belonging,

there would be no reason to allude to the mood of patriarchy.

Bring a different set of ears, or measuring system, something

that communicates the loss that all the words along the border

are fiction. Bring a heart that barters; that is not afraid to split.

3

Heart muscles begin their dirge during a heart attack. Oxidation

is linked to regeneration, which is also to say words build

their own web within a system. She said, All disease starts in the colon.

She knows where oxygen is stored in the building.

She knows who needs it most, sometimes it is given

to the one who will heal quickest. In time, new tissue granulates

the wound: pattern of tiny cells visible on the sun’s surface

through a telescope, or cumulus clouds, or dandelion clocks.

The edges of a wound shrink over time around a scar,

that, like maps, tell an incomplete story.

4

Drizzle morning, a color-shy palette against

which trees, brought to the forefront, are not

themselves. Elsewhere, the heater rumbles, abiding

to mechanical intuition, turning on and off. I stay cold,

I am warm. I know nothing about conduction or the secret

of a lie. The street, wearied by leaves pressing as far as stone

allows for sinking, is mottled from impositions. A crow hovers

over a chimney, buoyed by who knows what. Intimations of life

push upward in hot air. An ordinary day on an ordinary street,

where the only proof of people are lights on the porch, timid

in the brume, and images of refugees on television screens.

5

A sadness is thickening

the stomach’s heart,

it must, it cannot collapse

into self-ashes.

Fresh flowers for gods

at a discount; today no discount

for happiness. Today,

the sun hisses, eyes

date us. Split in two,

asphalt day. The heart can return

to its normal size in four months.

Things in space are produced

out of discord. The time it takes to turn

to time. We were sitting in a room fused

of desire, not for the other but for the one

from the past whose lashings

we scratch in our dreams, as salve.

This side of the river, after the pass,

we learn about boundaries when we shut

the front door. Fields of bodies on the verge

of drinking from the river. Lips opened

to freeze: that is one memory of the old country

forgotton by books in school. Mothers remember

the bodies they buried. Life after death, and death

in every breath. Belonging: a verb and

a strip of hope I fed with orchids on sale and recipes

brought from a country I now hover over in virtual maps.

I twist time as a child tightens the cap of a bottle, the right

direction a consequence of loss, the left the vocabulary

of departure. I am walking backwards hoping to reverse,

to unsee what I cannot forget. To leave something else

as trails to find a way forward.