We spoke about folds in speaking,
fissures lifting in the paths of breath
because we stood in the winds of the world,
rocking and listening
whether perhaps a song was starting up in us,
something strong enough to stop us swaying.
But wavering in doubt we knew for
sure: it wasn’t beneath us it was shivering
where our ears were nailed
to the ground, but in another
continent that rumbled deep inside us.
Words that we had not spoken
took over from our invitation to the dance.
Outside people are shouting at windows
and we, cautiously shuffling
each on their own globe, we
don’t say anything at all but stare
our mouths wide open at the breakers
of all those outstretched hands
innumerable, floating gently in the gloaming.
Adultery of Glasses
We drank time out of the bowl
of our hands, until
from our pedestals we clenched
the tall and slender stems,
hand on hand, glass on glass,
and tinkling set out
on the longed-for free fall,
breaking without splinters
on a bottomless ground.
Gave each other that special thing
that ran out in the day’s last light,
the taste of bitter promises.
We named the past
while we were living it,
we wrote it to each other
in rings of ruby red,
we drank ourselves a deeper present
till the bottom raised us up.
[The bridge of Mostar arches]
The bridge of Mostar arches,
like the back of a spitting cat,
with steps like vertebrae at dusk
that make each other gleam with
shivering immunity.
Blow upon blow the mountain
ridge thunders in the night
the hissing of hand grenades
in the golden morning,
light between old houses
that shore up songs.
Neretva bleeds, an
Ottoman old girl,
the rising of the ground
like dough in the memory,
under a heaven of brass.
The women die standing,
children marching on,
the rubble whirls round in water
welling up as futile
crumbs for later,
the stelae in the ancient garden
wear turbans of stone,
the song that’s never heard
that no one sings and yet:
the roaring of the waters
the rising of the ground
like dough in my memory.
