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And there are Two birds In this poem A loon Hand-carved From balsa And a snakebird On the tide Of the river The oily head Of a water bird Cuts surface And glides Along by Tarred wooden Racks Ideograms Oyster farms Low on the tide Lower than The hand-carved Loon it looks Hardly buoyant A bird From two Worlds it knows The murk On the bottom And waves Crinkled by sun It swims As well As a black trevally Sleek and fast A challenge to Handcrafted birds To all things made up

given to look into    the bowl of sky for it to fill with future see it turned upside down on the grass see the ladle pass hear the god underneath calling his inside the heavenly vault    eternal how that bump reminds me    how we saw it once from the underside of Nut    a mother's belly see dissolve against her vast ground the drowned cloud of black lives    the solution's population of rain crowding the city in the belly see it now as the sea extended the drowned city     lit     in this sky see our sky the bone clouds casting African tomorrows   only an arm    black balletic cloud extends itself dark nimbic invertebrate squall I am handed rain by a portuguese man-o-war These are new skies once we absorb the seas' solution as the bodies lost the sting fire of lightning    flesh the water body air we drown together in our living to drink from this bone

1. They make such uncomfortable clank child of earth child of fire These are your tools of the trade difficult when you use them A large trunk with children darting in all directions appears slippery in its sheen adorned with thorns There comes a day in a man's life when the machete he was given early on can cut into small inheritances place them in a large calabash set them aflame spill the ashes behind him to cover his old footsteps the one's he stepped over & over trodden tongue lashing the atlas of littered women over & over every few years 2. Remember at the end of seven days a gift of hoe & machete used at times by your grandfather then again by his son At the end of the seven days remember the whipping song as you with machete & hoe in hand wrote on the earth diagrams signatures that would sprout shelter words won't lead you to obstacle's house Remember when she had a dimpled hammock on each thigh marks from birth from years lying behind diagrams written on her history

Come see the woodpile behind the cannery. Come through the wall to where the wood was chopped and the difficult wood was hewed. There is a short history of commotion here, where a sudden bonfire spat its surprise at the sky— a hundred feet or more the shavings swept through disturbed air, and made their own music, the music hands make, such a yellow crackle and such a thrashing in the morning. Come wait for the heavy trucks to arrive, the men in dusters cutting the twine, loading the long ghostly planks like ballast into iron barges. This will be packing for a transatlantic box, or paper for essays on schadenfreude, or timber for dollhouse dressers, or a twenty baht note for the Thai rubber trade. These matchsticks will burn whenever you strike them, and this, hack at it however you like, is nothing more than deadwood for the fire. Come see—now even the men are doing only what they were made to do.

Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy. —Che Guevara Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué, I have a Che t-shirt and I don’t know why. —Contemporary Argentine saying I see the red shirt at the peace rally and think of my parents who left everyone and every thing they knew and loved save for the coin forgotten in my brother’s baby jacket. Men like me in Cuba failed the test of this symbol’s manhood, were called “Western perversions” were imprisoned and made to labor. Thousands, like these assembled, were rounded up in the middle of the night driven to the far countryside to cut sugarcane for a revolution’s economic quotas. Tio Alberto’s eyes go blank when he speaks of the price he paid: three years of forced hard labor to work like a dog in the sun for the privilege of leaving his own country. I think of the chain of caudillos that promised one thing and delivered another.

1 Reverse the book in duration. What does that mean? I am writing to you. These notes now when it’s too late. 2 If the cyborg you read about in bookstores is an immigrant from Mexico crossing into the U.S. beneath a floodlit court, then mine is a Punjabi-British hitchhiker on a JI visa. This is tunneling as seen from a satellite—sort of concave warp in the dirt of the line. 3 She lives in a house with others, including animals, creating individual spaces of companionship and ardor. What happens when this domestic life grows suspect? When the grass reverts in its granular drag to the subject of architecture: the failure of a house to believe in its occupants? 4 Mate with surfaces. Okay. Hitchhike. Okay. Make a cup of Darjeeling tea and start walking down a sidewalk in America. I saw this in a film starring George Clooney; no, Natalie Wood. The last scene is her, the gamine self, kicking off her shoes as the house explodes behind her. Perpetrating, she doesn’t flinch. Sips tea. Keeps walking. I wanted to write that. Continuance. As it related to loss. The secret pleasure of refusing to live like a normal person in a dress/with a sex drive and fingers/dreamy yet stabilized in the café of languages. 5 I want to have sex with what I want to become. This is a statement related to women arriving in a country it would be regressive to leave. Then, writing, I was filled with a longing for—for what? George-in-the-flesh? George Clooney in Idaho, pretending to pick up hitchhikers as research for his next movie in which he plays a mild-mannered serial killer? No. A different series of acts. Tricky. For example, I’m embarrassed by this book. It makes my blood roar to think of you reading it. So intimate. A text. Then it is a document related to shame flooding the body to make it red. Who doesn’t want to heal a human body? Who doesn’t want a perfect human body? The body of my hitchhiker is, thus, inevitably female or Punjabi, fused to the production of secrets. There are no e-mails home from the e-mail café. Nothing. Phone calls, bullshitting. Sickening. I mean, what is this girl/my girl doing, there in a foreign heartland like a dog with a thumb? My Laloo, about to do it. Don’t do it, little one. Red dress. Don’t get into the car. 6 But then, lit up, a red wife, kind of, not really, she sets out to see things as they are. Describes a virtual countryside. Jumps a box car. Drinks domestic beer. Okay. She does it and I write it down: a damaged eye with votive filaments. (I am writing to you.) “No point in writing home.” Then what?

Avoid adjectives of scale. Dandelion broth instead of duck soup. Don’t even think you’ve seen a meadow, ever. The minor adjustments in our equations still indicate the universe is insane, when it laughs a silk dress comes out its mouth but we never put it on. Put it on. Cry often and while asleep. If it’s raw, forge it in fire. That’s not a mountain, that’s crumble. If it’s fire, swallow. The heart of a scarecrow isn’t geometrical. That’s not a diamond, it’s salt. That’s not the sky but it’s not your fault. My dragon may be your neurotoxin. Your electrocardiogram may be my fortune cookie. Once an angel has made an annunciation, it’s impossible to tell him he has the wrong address. Moonlight has its own befuddlements. The rest of us can wear the wolf mask if we want or look like reflections wandered off. Eventually armor, eventually sunk. You wanted love and expected what? A parachute? Morphine? A gold sticker star? The moment you were born— you have to trust others because you weren’t there. Ditto death. The strongest gift I was ever given was made of twigs. It didn’t matter which way it broke.

I am fourteen and my skin has betrayed me the boy I cannot live without still sucks his thumb in secret how come my knees are always so ashy what if I die before morning and momma's in the bedroom with the door closed. I have to learn how to dance in time for the next party my room is too small for me suppose I die before graduation they will sing sad melodies but finally tell the truth about me There is nothing I want to do and too much that has to be done and momma's in the bedroom with the door closed. Nobody even stops to think about my side of it I should have been on Math Team my marks were better than his why do I have to be the one wearing braces I have nothing to wear tomorrow will I live long enough to grow up and momma's in the bedroom with the door closed.

There are stones even here worn into a malevolence by time gritting the teeth and tearing the eyes with the memory. Out in the desert, the wind is a sculptor working the ephemera of sand. Desperately editing steles to write the names of thousands of slaves who died to make Pharaoh great. It is a fool’s game. And we are like the blind musician at the hotel who tells us with a smile: I’ll see you later. The guard at the pyramid eyes me. Are you Egyptian? he demands, then searches my bag for a bomb. At the hotel they speak Arabic to me, don’t treat me like the white guests, and I guess, even here, with all the hindsight of history we haven’t learned to love ourselves. I cannot crawl into the tombs, and cannot explain why. How do you say: In my country they buried me alive for six months? And so you lie and tell yourself this is love. I am protecting the world from my rage. Rabab tells me: We know how to build graves here. I nod. I know. It is the same all over Africa. Do you have a knife? Do you have one? the guards at the museum ask Breyten and me, searching us. We call this on ourselves. We are clearly political criminals. I trace the glyphs chipped into stone. As a writer I am drawn to this. If I could I too would carve myself into eternity. Breyten watching me says: Don’t tell me you’ve found a spelling mistake in it! A line of miniature statues is placed into the tomb to serve the pharaoh. One for each day of the year. Four hundred. The overseers are a plus. I think even death will not ease the lot of the poor here. Statues: it seems the more I search the world for differences the more I find it all the same. Perhaps the Buddha was a jaded traveler too when he said we are all one. Mona argues about who should pay to see the mummies. It isn’t often I can treat a girl to a dead body, Breyten insists. A woman nearby tells her husand she can see dead bodies at work. Why pay? Do you think she works in a hospital? I ask. That or the U.S. State Department, Breyten agrees. From the top of Bab Zwelia, flat rooftops spread out like a conference of coffee tables. Broken walls, furniture, pots, litter the roofs like family secrets sunning themselves. Two white goats on a roof chew their way through the debris. On the Nile, Rabab sings in Arabic, tells me she wants to be Celine Dion. She is my sister calling me home to Egypt. Perhaps one day I will be ready. For now it is enough to know I can be at home here.

“In warm sunlight jade engenders smoke”; poetry, like indigo mountain, keeps its distance; the light plays words and figures, stone’s edge edged with air, green haze growing. Amused by butterflies, Chuang Tsu dreaming, the emperor’s heart in spring, thoroughly transformed. Still, in pieces, the words rest so much apart. Risking my life I lean on dangerous railings. When the dream wakes to its own particulars, the strands scattered, loose hair on muslin, broken characters the reeds make, unmake— vague    no reason bright    again    dark—