Tablets IV

1 I wanted to write an epic about suffering, but when I found a tendril of her hair among the ruins of her mud house, I found my epic there. 2 I didn’t sleep last night. As if the night were hiding in the morning coffee. 3 Her life is a game of snakes and ladders sent relentlessly back to square one, but whose life isn’t? She takes a breath and throws the dice again. 4 The city glitters below the airplane window, not because of the bones and skulls scattered under the sun, but the view through the frosted breather hole. 5 She died, and time changed for those she loved most, but her watch kept ticking. 6 A god carried the burdens until the weight persuaded him to transfer them to man — the new suffering god. 7 The map of Iraq looks like a mitten, and so does the map of Michigan — a match I made by chance. 8 If you can’t save people, at least don’t hate them. 9 Her bubbling annoys me — can’t understand a word she says. So what if I toss her from the aquarium? So what if I spill her new world with this nasty immigrant fish! 10 The city’s innumerable lights turning on and off remind us we are born to arrive, as we are born to leave. 11 The handkerchiefs are theirs, but the tears are ours. 12 Women running barefoot. Behind them, stars falling from the sky. 13 So strange, in my dream of us, you were also a dream. 14 He said to me:You are in my eyes. Now when he sleeps, his eyelids cover me. 15 Gilgamesh stopped wishing for immortality, for only in death could he be certain of seeing his friend Enkidu again. 16 Some say love means putting all your eggs in one basket. If they all break, can the basket remain intact? 17 The homeless are not afraid to miss something. What passes through their eyes is how the clouds pass over the rushing cars, the way pigeons miss some of the seeds on the road and move away. Yet only they know what it means to have a home and to return to it. 18 The wind and rain don’t discriminate in buffeting us. We are equal in the eyes of the storm. 19 When I was broken into fragments, you puzzled me back together piece by piece. I no longer fear being broken in any moment. 20 Freezing in the mountains without blankets or food, and all they heard was no news is good news. 21 Their stories didn’t kill me but I would die if I didn’t tell them to you. 22 Before killing them they collected their personal effects. Their cell phones are all ringing in the box. 23 We are not upset when the grass dies. We know it will come back in a season or two. The dead don’t come back but they appear every time in the greenness of the grass. 24 If yearning encircles us, what does it portend? That a circle has no beginning and no end?