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Earth took of earth, earth with woe, Earth other earth to the earth added; Earth laid earth in an earthen grave. Then had earth of earth enough earth.

Can you imagine waking up every morning on a different planet, each with its own gravity? Slogging, wobbling, wavering. Atilt and out-of-sync with all that moves and doesn’t. Through years of trial and mostly error did I study this unsteady way — changing pills, adjusting the dosage, never settling. A long time we were separate, O Earth, but now you have returned to me.

The Afterlife 1 Spring, and the first full crop of dandelions gone to smoke, the lawn lumpish with goldfinches, hunched in their fluffs, fattened by seed, alight in the wind-bared peduncular forest. Little bells, they loop and dive, bend the delicate birch branches down. I would enter the sky through the soil myself, sing up the snail bowers and go on the lam with the roots. Licked by filaments, I would lie, a billion love-mouths to suckle and feed. Where the river will be next week, a puddle two trout go savagely dying in. Notice the bland, Darwinian sand: bone wrack and tree skin, the ground down moon bowls of mussels, viral stones dividing like mold. At twelve, I buried the frog because it was dead and dug it up because I'd been dreaming— a fish belly light, a lowly chirruped chorus of amens. I thought my nights might smell of hell. Bland, hum-drum, quotidian guilt— if I've killed one frog, I've killed two. Saint Rot and the sacraments of maggots: knowing is humus and sustenance is sex. It accrues and accrues, it stews tumorous with delight. Tomorrow's a shovelful, the spit of the cosmos, one day the baby's breath is no longer a rose.

In the earthquake days I could not hear you over the din or it might have been the dinner bell but that’s odd because I’m usually the one cooking if not dinner then a plan to build new fault lines through the dangerous valley. I can’t give you an answer right now because I’m late for my 
resurrection, the one where I step into my angel offices and fuck the sun senseless. That eclipse last week? Because of me. You’re welcome. The postman rattles up with your counter offer and I’m off to a yoga class avoiding your call yes like the plague because son you can read in the dark and I have no hiding place left. You know me too well and you know it. We walk hand in hand down the hill into the Castro avoiding the nudist protest not because we are afraid but because we already know all about this city, its engineered 
foundations, the earthquake-proofed buildings, the sea walls. No tempest will catch us unaware while we claim our share of the province of penumbral affections. You have no reason to trust me but I swear I lie down in this metal box as it thunders and looks inside my brain. I am terrified nothing is wrong because otherwise how will I rewrite the maps unmoored a deep sea a moor a cosmonaut Who needs saving more than the one who forgot how the lazy cartographer mislabeled his birthplace as Loss? Riding the bus out to the end of the lines and back I collect trash for art, oil spill, spent forest, the mind is at work and everything is at stake. I demand statehood for my states of mind, senators for my failure, my disappointment, the slander and my brain unmapped reveals no explanation for danger the ground untamed. I make paintings of nothing and stand before them like mirrors. I recently became a man but I do not want to let go of my weakness, instead want to meet God in heaven and in long psychotropic odes have Him send me again digging in the dirt to unleash tantric animal governors to lay down the orgasmic law twice skewered and miserable in the old photographs, miserable in my body, huddled next to my mother, recently permed and aglow so unaware of what is about to hit her. I am the answer to Bhanu’s question: “Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?” and so sick I considered that sickness could bring us closer and Shahid and Allen in heaven slap me silly because they want me to know that this world is worth its trembling. At the next table over a mother tries to reconcile her bickering sons. I have no brother but the one I invent has always got my back, he drowns out the mullahs so my mother can hear me finally. In a different book Jesus never suffered, never was flogged or died went whole into heaven without passion. Shall I then deny myself passport through the stark places unsalvageable, imagine it, the Mother of Sorrows did never grieve in the new season trees smell of semen and the tectonic plates make their latest explosive move: to transubstantiate my claim by unveiling this city down to its stone. Everyone I know wants to douse the hungry flames, flee the endless aftershocks, unravel every vexing question. You owe me this witness. I owe you the fire.

Let the relentless fist be kissed. The salt cannot be cooked; the past is overlooked. Full once they nibble, fleas quibble. Teeth in a hyena’s face always slide into place. No donkey can cart what weighs down your heart. Outside a man is respected; at home that man is neglected. The strangers weep and leave; family members grieve. Even half-blind men hope to see again. True words end; lies extend. Translated from the Oromo

About twilight we came to the whitewashed pub On a knuckle of land above the bay Where a log was riding and the slow Bird-winged breakers cast up spray. One of the drinkers round packing cases had The worn face of a kumara god, Or so it struck me. Later on Lying awake in the veranda bedroom In great dryness of mind I heard the voice of the sea Reverberating, and thought: As a man Grows older he does not want beer, bread, or the prancing flesh, But the arms of the eater of life, Hine-nui-te-po, With teeth of obsidian and hair like kelp Flashing and glimmering at the edge of the horizon.

1. Look here, Marcus Aurelius, we’ve come to see your temple, deluded the guards, crawled through a hole in the fence. Why your descendent, my guide and friend has opted for secrecy, I don’t know. But I do know what to call the Africans, passport-less, yellow-eyed who will ride the boat before me for Naples, they hope. Here the sea curls its granite lip at them and flings a winter storm like a cough, or the seadog drops them at Hannibal’s shores, where they’ll stand stupefied like his elephants. What dimension of time will they cross at the Hours loop tight plastic ropes round their ankles and wrists? What siren song will the trucks shipping them back to Ouagadougou drone into their ears? I look at them loitering, waiting for the second act of their darkness to fall. I look at the sky shake her dicey fists. One can be thankful, I suppose, for not being one of them, and wrap the fabric of that thought around oneself to keep the cold wind at bay. But what world is this that makes our lives sufficient even as the horizon’s rope is about to snap, while the sea and sky ache to become an open-ended road? That’s what we’re all waiting for, a moment to peel itself like skin off fruit, and let us in on its sweetness as we wait, smoking, or fondling provisions, listening the engine’s invocational purr. In an hour that will dawn and dusk at once, one that will stretch into days strung like beads on the horizon’s throat, they will ride their tormented ship as the dog star begins to float on the water, so bright and still, you’d want to scoop it out in the palm of your hand. 2. A pair of Roman fists robbed of spear and shield; the tiles of the tapestries mixed in with popcorn that slipped from the buttery hands, aluminum wrappers smudged with processed cheese; countless cigarette butts surround the fallen columns and beams with a fringe of tarnished foam; pairs of panties still hot with forbidden passion… The ruins are not ruined. Without all this garbage packed, stratified, how else to name our age? 3. Earlier, I had walked the market of Sabratha, changed to its people, but like my old city brought me back to me. The petty merchants, all selling the same goods, shouted out jokes to each other. A Sudanese waiter carried a tray with a giant pot of green tea with mint. Among the older men, their heads capped with crimson shennas, I kept seeking my father’s face. An old lust wafted past me when the abaya-clad women, scented with knock-off Chanel, sashayed by. The sawdust floors of the shawarma and falafel eateries, the sandwich maker dabbing insides of loaves with spoons of searing harissa, my mouth watering to a childhood burn. Pyramids of local oranges, late season pomegranates, radish and turnip bulbs stacked like billiard balls, and the half carcasses of lambs as if made of wax and about to melt off their hooks, the trays of hearts, kidneys, brains and testicles arrayed in slick arabesques. The hand-woven rugs where the extinct mouflon thrives, mincers, hairdryers, and toasters, their cords tentacles drooping from rusty shelves. It was as if my eyes were painting, not seeing, what I saw, my memory slowly building the scene until it assembled whole. What face did my face put on in the midst of transfiguration? I know what the eyes of the men my age said, settled now in comfortable middle age, about the life I left behind. True, I did envy them the asceticism of their grace, where a given horizon becomes a birthright—to drive or walk past the same hills all your life, to eat from the same tree and drink from the well that gave you your name. 4. Though for centuries the locals broke the statues’ limbs and ground them to make primitive pottery, enough remains to echo all that has disappeared: you and the woman leave the towpath, and you brace her against the trunk of an oak. It’s not the moonlight, but refractions from suburban homes trapped under cloud-cover that make her bronze skin glow among glistening trees. First, God made love: the canopy like the inside of an emerald, her lips a rush of cochineal. Then a route of evanescence brought her from Carthage into these living arms, here. 5. “A nice time, “ he tells us, how he and four cousins crossed the desert heading home on top of three-years’ worth of meager pay (the tarp ballooning, a giant dough) roped to a truck. Wearing the goggles of the welder he'd hoped to become, he looked at the sky and wondered “what those flying, smoke on their tails, thought of us.” Later, deported in a cargo plane, he handed the Tuareg soldiers one of his fake passports, and they like “space aliens” (in shabby uniforms, sunglasses, tribal veils) poured into his face. As the propellers’ hammering calmed to a shuddering hum, he saw the stars, “hundreds of them like gnats” swarm Mt. Akakous’ peak. “My next road is the water,” he says serving us tonight, and we promise, if the coffee is good, to put him on the next boat to the moon shining over Syracuse. 6. Suddenly, I find your descendant’s hands leafing through my chapters, scribbling a note in the margin of my thoughts: “How is it,” he asks, “that starlight announces the hour: how can a song divide desire in two?” “My flame,” I must have written or said, “coated her body like silk, one kiss spreading threads of lightening into her pores, until she became a sob, barely lifted by the wind, and I became mist, the shadow of a statue at the break of dawn.” To that he responds, “a Platonic echo;” and “What will come of such a plasticine love?” Marcus Aurelius, your descendent knows I’ll leave as I arrive, so empty he gets lost in me. 7. Two centuries ago, one of my ancestors sat on one of the communal latrines in mid-morning and listened to Apuleius’s defense. Across from him on that marble hexagon, sat two other men. On normal days they’d have talked about the olive harvest, the feast of Venus coming soon. But today they listen to the Madaurian’s high eloquence studded with jokes, cracking their own one-liners, shaking their heads in delight. Away from the hot midday sun and the throngs, you could say, they had the best seats in the house, and so they lingered and heard as much as they could then went about their business. So what if a man maries an older woman for her money, what impoverished young Roman in his right mind wouldn’t do that? And sure too, if some man comes to take your inheritance, even if he’s your best friend, even if he takes good care of your mother, you’d be a fool not to sue him to the Council, even if you’d have to accuse him falsely of black magic. That’s the beauty of it, or rather, whoever is going to win will have to make us trust beauty, that things being already right, can be more right, which is what “beautiful” really means. And what better way, to take in all this refinement than hearing it in a latrine where only beauty shields you from the awful stuff of life. 8. Marcus Aurelius, the men at the shore follow your path into eternity, though they already see their journey as a quarrel with circumstance, their lives abscesses feeding on the universe’s hide, tumors in detention camps, in basement kitchens. Their pockets filled with drachmas, they’ll lift diffident heads and drag feet lead-heavy with shame. One of them is now driving a taxi in Thessaloniki or Perugia. With enough of the language to understand direction, he engages his late night passengers. In the light of the dashboard they’ll entrust him with their secrets. With time, he’ll become a light unto himself, his car a winged chariot of human folly, and his responses to them saplings nourished in the dark soil of philosophy. It’s the gift of seasons that stray from the earth, when soul reigns incidental to flesh, forgiving to no end, a light that has long surpassed itself. 9. The birds that drew the line to the first distance remain nameless to me— creamy white breasts, gold dust around their eyes, black/brown (dark roast) wings. The deserts they crossed, the plains east or north of here fall like sand from my hands. Um Bsisi, I want to call them, citizens of a protracted destiny, native and stranger, prodigal and peasant— admit now, they you’re none of these, that you’re not any, or even all of them combined. 10. Southwest of here is Apuleius’s hometown, his inescapable destination having spent his inheritance on travel and studies. “Lacking the poverty of the rich,” he’s splurged, a month-long trip to the Olympic games; and openhanded, he gifted his mentors their daughters’ doweries. Few return to Madaura once gone, and when heading back shamefaced like him, they’d do as he did, taking the longest route hoping the journey would never end. Here in Sabratha, the widow hooked him, or he let her reel him, and that’s how that sordid business happily ended as it began. I look out toward Madaura, my back to the theater and the latrines, Madaura birthplace of Augustine, site of his first schooling—little Augustine holding a satchel of scrolls and a  loaf of bread for the teacher, awakened by his mother, his tiny feet cold in tiny sandals, his stomach warm with a barley porridge my grandmother used to make, forced to slurp it, sweetened with honey from the Atlas, a sprinkling of cinnamon and crushed almonds from the family farm. If the world is that sweet and warm, if it is that mothering, why then this perpetual scene of separation, this turning out into the cold toward something he knew he’d love? He lets go of the neighbors’ boy’s hand warming his own. He refuses the warm porridge forever, renounces his mother’s embrace. It only lasted a month, this partial answer, because even then everyone knew that the sweet fruit they grew housed the bitterest seeds, that piety is its own reward while belief only darkens and deepens like the sea before them, a place meant for those seeking life other than on this dry earth. That’s why prophets were welcomed here, calmly, because God was like rain and they like the saplings which know only the first verse to the sky’s rainless hymn. And that’s why Africa’s tallest minaret looms unfinished, visible from the next town over, and for fifty leagues from the sea if it were turned into a lighthouse for the ships that no longer come. The merchant who’d built it, money made from smuggling subsidized goods to Carthage and used Renaults from Rotterdam, ran out of money, could not afford the mosque that was to stand next to it, leaving its gray concrete bleaching in the sun. There’s enough history here to enable anyone to finish the thought. It’s useless then to track the fate of these travelers, some, without life jackets, had never learned how to swim. Why not let them live in text as they do in life?—they’ve lived without words for so long—why not release them from the pen’s anchor and let them drift to their completion? 11. In a few weeks you’ll see pedants here with binoculars trying to catch a glimpse of the Ramadan crescent, and if these migrants stick around here time will belong to the departure of other travelers, flocks of Um Bsisi follwing the sun’s arch, Japanese and Korean trawlers sailing to Gibraltar or Suez chasing the last herring or sardine. Where is she now in her time?— her life dissolved in other people’s minutes, a sense of solitude her diligent companion even when she lets go of herself to kindness. He’ll be there when she returns from the party, he’ll lie beside her when she sleeps. He’ll say, “Time belongs to the species, but your life belongs to me.” She’ll laugh at his words, and remember what you, Marcus Aurelius, had said about losing only the moment at hand, how it circles in a ring of dead nerves, how we stand impoverished before what is to come. She’ll have her answer to your elocution; she’d always had an answer for you, one she refuses to share even with herself. 12. At last they set to sail. They slaughter a rooster, douse blood on the Dido figurehead adorning the prow. The seadog opens a canvas bag and pulls out a hookah. His Egyptian assistant fills the smoke chamber with seawater, twists the brass head into it, caking the slit with sand. He fills the clay bowl with apple-flavored tobacco, wraps it with foil, pokes it tenderly with a knife. He picks embers from the going fire, places a few on the aluminum crown, and inhales and blows until the bottom vessel fills with a pearly fog, the color of semen, I think, then hands the pipe hose to the seadog who inhales his fill and hands it over to the travelers in turn. The air smells sweet around us, the breeze blows it away and brings it back tinged with iodine. Their communion done, they embark except the one who stands, the dead rooster in his hand, as if wanting to entrust it to us, then digs a hurried hole to bury it in. The boat, barely visible, leaves a leaden lacey ribbon aiming directly for the burnt orange sun. As it reddens, for a moment, their standing silhouettes eclipse it. Then the sea restores its dominion, dark as the coffee cooling in our cups. Dangling from the vine arbor, the lights reflect a constellation on the table’s dark top. I trace my fingers among them, hoping conjecture would shine on the mind’s calculus. Between my unquiet eddies, Marcus Aurelius, and the coursing water, the travelers’ moment sails, its tentacles sewing a rupture I had nursed for too long.

you see so many graveyards around these little towns— out in the open spaces & places. i guess big cities have not enough space for the living, let alone the dead. there is so much water here and back home in chicago we would call them rocks, lying all on the ground(s) lots of rocks around/but you would call them stones here. see how much smoother the world is. the farther east we go the more frequent are the stops at rich small quaint towns and the more frequent are the admonitions to “watch one’s ticket on the rack above the seat or to be very sure to take it with you if you leave your seat!” apparently, the very wealthy, steal. as i ride the train watching the many white students eating out of brown paper sacks, saving their now money so that they can be the very wealthy later on, also.

That bummy smell you meet off the escalator at Civic Center, right before you turn onto McAllister, seems to dwell there, disembodied, on a shelf above the sidewalk. The mad old lady with lizard skin bent double over her shopping cart and trailing a cloud of pigeons is nowhere in sight. A pile of rags here and there but no one underneath. An invisible shrine commemorating what? Old mattresses and dusty flesh, piss and puked-on overcoats, what? Maybe death, now there’s a smell that likes to stick around. You used to find it in downtown Sally Anns and once in a hospital cafeteria, only faintly, after a bite of poundcake. But here it lives, cheek by jowl with McDonald’s, still robust after a night of wind with its own dark little howdy-do for the drunks and cops, social workers and whores, or the elderly couple from Zurich leafing cooly through their guidebook.

Is this the river East I heard?— Where the ferries, tugs and sailboats stirred And the reaching wharves from the inner land Ourstretched, like the harmless receiving hand— And the silvery tinge that sparkles aloud Like the brilliant white demons, which a tide has towed From the rays of the morning sun Which it doth ceaselessly shine upon. But look at the depth of the drippling tide The dripples, reripples like the locusts astride; As the boat turns upon the silvery spread It leaves—strange—a shadow dead. And the very charms from the reflective river And from the stacks of the floating boat— There seemeth the quality ne’er to dissever Like the ruffles from the mystified smoke.