We come into the canyon as particles

Rocks striated nearly vertical with color

Through hills pressed up from beneath the crust

Past a checkpoint where we refused to provide evidence of our nationality

This much desert always asks silence 

A hawk sweeping the sky

My skin torn by the recurved thorns of a silver cactus

Blood meets canyon rock stitching us together

For music only the velocity of a fly’s wings and the wind rushing 

Through the canyon as if a voice sounding

Of waves flow rock and wind and the dark water of my body

This moon seen in shards

As in history we are denied an entire picture

Appears then a figure my interlocutor interlocked

What does the shattered perhaps assemble

He wants to see my papers I will not provide

How to reconcile how two bodies fit together 

After all this time who is allowed to be alive what does it mean to be alive

Who spoke in breath to guide

In pines or stone among ghosts that chime

This time dear hand you held and

When the sun did the moon cross we cross

The river a cloud so cactus-

Pierced in a flower of blood

You were found

Should I reach through years departed

Those days with a mother recede further into the past

From my self un knowing 

Another self

A car driving the long

Drive through knowledge but how

Do we know when marked and asked

I can not explain

We void all answers because in ancient agony the body does die

One body laps at the borders of another

With no other purpose but to give pleasure

Rain grime along the floral pattern of the canyon floor

Some kind of flower marked by scrap of sky

I silver-streaked fled through rivered cant

What I left behind I cannot thank yet

Far from home one does soon learn

How to sea

A letter came an interruption

Told two coasts of time between

That is as fragments always

Sounds out of synch with history

Whine and moan of tuneless drift

The call to prayer at the Sufi dargah

Slide guitar 

Gullah holler

‍

Our time in the inside year 

Or was it a closed year or a closet year

Yet I lived into width offered by ocean by sand

Spring to spring simultaneous

A California of time not yet undone

And fever that passes in panes of light

The sky brushed in pause

Stripes of heat the Santa Ana shook

Pricked I am stitched to ground and god

Without the consonant of fate love does plunge

As light through a canopy of forest

Is this how I will stay in the world

Where wind is noticed in the shape of earth 

In icicle or branch or meander of river

Do you follow sound or light

The falt is gathered is fluid flute in felt sound out flet’s fault

Which actually touches

What is falt flet fate

Who without the written can speak

Who with only vowels can love

From ice and time I grew but why

Born across borders

I sigh my name in the language of 

Wind or crime or ruin

I in the spaces between stake my claim

Yet heard a thread said

Could there be wind that sang

Swain lain in these years filled

I heard song wollen that swell

Water what him woolen we fain

Would fill feel fail no flail

Long I have been spired spurred poor spoor poured

And lost in time time

Suspended suspiring there I swung

And swerve will you find in wind

Will you join me will you fasten

Could you then swear or say sing slang along 

Oar or ower now I am yore now moreover 

I am your rower I am your raw war ower

Your ore crying until worlds end your woe 

your aura your oar your roaring aurora a rawer rawr

‍

“the soul got to choose. Nothing else
got to but the soul
got to choose.”

     -       Brenda Hillman

I could never make you mythical 

Not Demeter who mourned that her son might live half his life in hell after tasting the bliss of the juice bursting from the seeds in his palm

Nor Niobe who wept like a stone after losing her sons to beauty and ambition

Perhaps I ought to have imagined you as a nameless mother, that of Orpheus who sang such verses to the dead they opened the very gates of hell for him

But myth does not do in the nights where it’s you who has gone from this world, flown from your shape into whatever is next

We turned the machines off at dusk and commended you to the earth the very next morning

At the graveside it was I, the Orphic son, who climbed into the ground to shake your shoulders to remind you it was time to leave this shape of earth to earth, that these forms were your home no longer

The verses sung from above were not of my making or my tongue and none from my own mouth came that day or since

Did the Greeks know something essential? That even were the soul immortal without the shape that held it close it would wander inaccessible lands forever, that it was the body left behind that would dissolve and rejoin creation

That borderless I might lose you to god, the single bright spark of you racing to rejoin some divine Whole

It had been dusk, I held your hand, we knew some part of you was gone and yet you lived and breathed

All I had were not words but gestures of body: I held your hand, rested on your shoulder, kissed your face, was that you or not you that I turned on your side in the grave, making a pillow of a chunk of earth so you could rest facing that mosque you loved on the other side of planet 

Does the soul get to choose? Did Orpheus’s mother know he relinquished women and spent his days drunk with poetry and song?

And who was she really, maybe no muse at all, but an ordinary woman, a tomboy from Hyderabad who sang and climbed trees and stole her cousin’s bike to ride around the neighborhood, laughing the whole way?

And what angel or devi who slipped a coin under her son’s tongue, cursed him with the knowledge he might reach past the screen separating the lived-in world from the dead?

He knew what happened when he looked back—he lost love forever, he was torn limb from limb by a world enraged, that even dismembered his body floated down the river singing those same syllables that moved ghosts to breathe again

If it were a myth I could nearly imagine that ragged screen of grief fluttering, somehow hearing a scrap of a voice in the wind, a flutter of wing. Could it all be more than ancient lies? Could it be perhaps now having left the shape of earth behind you are singing to me still

But it is not a myth and we are not mythical. 

You are you, both enveloped by this earth and gone

And I am I, torn asunder and cast adrift, 
no words left in my mouth with which to bewitch the king of the dead

‍

I thought you thought
The world in shapes moved

What is still the unsober world
Moves

On your last day you shopped
Drank coffee, swept the porch

You thought I thought
Unseen is better than seen

This scene appears
to disappear

All matter
matters

In music after a swell
A rest

But in the end one never gets the ending right
One stands on the porch with a broom

Thinking
Where’s my son

That faraway 
sound