Disfigurations

                                                                             How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
—Mahmoud Darwish, “In Jerusalem”

John 5


i

To a heap of stones broken from one stone;
to rubble, but not without shape,

arid, but not without something to say,
written in the dust, speaking, not

with words; to a cairn considered
like this, all that is immovable in us

made into an offering to when the dust
of boundary stones becomes a road,

just as hours of grief create the need
for a journey, hours absolved by tears

that soften the stones of the road;
to the order of the journey and the stations

of rest; to the pool where the five porches
weep when a stranger troubles the waters.

ii

I touch the back of my neck and feel grit.
A second skin that has no use other than

to make me a breach, and between
two separate ideas of normality I am

the tower with its embarrassment
of bells. I touch the face of rough metal

keeping it still, and then I push my luck.
It swings both ways until it finds a song

among all the other bells peeling away
the skin of the silence from the silence.
Source: Poetry (March 2020)